Last week, Autodesk, one of the most popular software packages for electronic design automation and PCB layout. Eagle has been around for nearly thirty years, and has evolved to become the standard PCB design package for electronic hobbyists, students, and engineering firms lead by someone who learned PCB design with Eagle. The reason for this is simple: it’s good enough for most simple designs, and there is a free version of Eagle. The only comparable Open Source alternative is KiCad, which doesn’t have nearly as many dedicated followers as Eagle. Eagle, for better or worse, is a standard, and Open Source companies from to use it religiously and have created high-quality libraries of parts and multiple tutorials I had the chance to talk with [Matt Berggren], former Hackaday overlord who is currently serving as the Director of Autodesk Circuits. He is the person ultimately responsible for all of Autodesk’s electronic design products, from,,, and project Wire, the engine behind, Autodesk’s 3D printer that also prints electronics. [Matt] is now the master of Eagle, and ultimately will decide what will change, what stays the same, and the development path for Eagle.

EAGLE is a scriptable electronic design automation (EDA) application with schematic capture, printed circuit board (PCB) layout, auto-router and computer-aided manufacturing (CAM) features. EAGLE stands for Easily Applicable Graphical Layout Editor and is developed by CadSoft Computer GmbH. The company was.

Eagle Licenses Eagle is famous for the free version of its software. 20 years ago, in the days of Protel and other expensive EDA and electronic design packages, Eagle always had a limited freeware version. Arguably, this is the reason for Eagle’s popularity; a free educational version means schools can use it, and those students will enter the workforce with a desire to use what they already know. A freeware version of Eagle means electronics hobbyists can design their own PCBs at home, using the same tools used by professionals. The freeware version is not going away. Aside from a freeware version, buying the correct license for Eagle was not easy.

Last week,, with different combinations of add ons like the Schematic, Layout, and Autorouter. Each version had limitations on the number of schematic sheets, signal layers, and routing area. For a single user license, there were almost fifty different options, all with different prices. Now there are only six Eagle products. The commercial licenses range from one schematic sheet, two signal layers, and a 100x80mm routing area to the Ultimate license with 16 signals and a four meter square routing area.

For non-commercial licenses, the free educational edition features 99 schematic sheets, six signal layers, and a 160x100mm routing area. This is Eagle getting with the times; a freshly minted engineer must know how to lay antennas on the board, impedance controlled feed lines, DDR routing, how to break out huge BGAs, and everything else a multi-layer board enables. The big question when it comes to Autodesk licenses is an auspicious cloud looming on the horizon. The Internet is a thing, and now software phones home., and locks your designs up in an online vault. Will the same be true of Autodesk’s Eagle? Eagle will, of course, be integrated with other Autodesk products – the entire point of Autodesk buying Eagle is for full-stack hardware development, from mechanical design to electronic. Whether this means Eagle will become a subscription-only model is still up in the air, but from the casual observer’s position it’s doubtful; there are still perpetual licenses of Eagle out there, and right now that’s what Autodesk is selling. The most common (and dreaded) error in EAGLE New Features Despite being a near-standard when it comes to PCB design, there are a ton of features Eagle doesn’t have. To do a design or electrical rule check on a project, you have to press a button – it doesn’t happen automatically.

There’s going to be a long, hard look at live DRC and ERC. Autodesk is also “Definitely going to take a close look at routing.” Whether this means push and shove routing, dragging traces around, or anything else the newest version of is up in the air, but it must be noted Eagle is now Autodesk’s premier EDA suite. What does [Matt] have planned that he can say to the press? Eagle’s core, mostly – hierarchy, modularity, mechanical integration (in keeping with integration with other Autodesk products), and revision management. Whether this means the dreaded F/B Annotation has been severed! Notification will finally disappear is still up in the air, but one can only hope. With a new direction comes possible changes to the UI. A decade and a half ago, installing Autocad on a machine would quickly wear off the lettering on your escape key.

More modern CAD packages, such as Autodesk Fusion and Inventor are much simpler. Interfaces, even for the most complex pieces of software, have gotten simpler, and there’s no reason Eagle’s baroque UI couldn’t use a few updates. That said, there is a lot of history in the Eagle UI. It has been around since before Windows 3.1. Some people love it, and any changes to the UI of a beloved program will be met with bricks through windows.

A few slight tweaks wouldn’t hurt, though, and keyboard shortcuts are an obvious addition. Autodesk’s Play For The Future Of Design Autodesk’s acquisition of Eagle didn’t happen in a vacuum. In 2014, Autodesk bought, an electronic design software that, like Fritzing, is based around the solderless breadboard paradigm. Despite being easily compared to Fritzing, Circuits.io has some fairly advanced capabilities including simulation of breadboarded circuits. It’s not a SPICE simulation, but you can’t look at and not see the future of electronic design. Circuits.io, Tinkercad, and Autodesk’s series of 123D apps are their play at the Maker market.

Yes, you can design a simple circuit and have it do real work, but you’re not going to implement an FPGA or anything designed for EMC compliance with these tools. When it comes to Serious Business™, Autodesk’s portfolio of electronic design software has been severely lacking. There’s a reason for this: Altium has been working on the problem for several decades, it’s still not perfect. KiCad is old enough to vote, and there are still problems. Eagle, too, is almost thirty years old.

Building EDA suites and PCB design software is hard, and possibly the hardest single domain of software development. Autodesk simply can’t spin their own electronic design software and expect it to be good. Eagle was already there, Premier Farnell was selling stuff off, and Autodesk’s purchase of Eagle should come as no surprise. What this purchase does mean is integration into the rest of Autodesk’s offerings. Already, you can use Autodesk products to build a six-speed transmission, a house, and a spaceship. The addition of Eagle means you can also build a credit card sized ARM dev board. The path forward is to integrate all these capabilities under one roof; you’ll be able to design the electronics for a portable video game console, and take that board file and build an enclosure around it.

On a personal note I’ve been using Eagle for years now. I’ve known it was a fairly limited tool, and I’ve known about KiCad. I know I need a better electronic design tool. The question I ask myself is, “do I want to spend the time and effort to learn KiCad, when all I really need to do right now is design a simple board that would take an hour in Eagle?” This is the reason people don’t use better software packages: I know Eagle, and in the time it would take to learn KiCad, I could finish the project I’m working on, make a sandwich, take a nap, and get my boards in the mail. Yes, it’s lazy, but Eagle is good enough. With the new direction for Eagle, I believe I will never have to learn KiCad. Eagle is about to get good – really good – and I can’t wait to see the first Eagle release under the Autodesk banner.

Posted in,, Tagged,,, Post navigation. I’m inclined to agree. After learning the tools basics (Altium), I found the workflow in altium designer much more conducive to medium to large designs. I was a religious Eagle user for about 4 years, and I can still use it for little one off designs, but the ease of use for clearly defining your board and visualizing in altium makes it a clear winner in my book, its just much more productive.

I am still waiting for an excuse to use KiCad in earnest, since it has many of the same features and a similar workflow, but at this point altium is too damn nice! Almost the same here, however Windows 10 was the reason I installed Debian on my main computer. Just got tired of fighting those auto upgrade thingies. So I finally made the switch to KiCad and after about 5 designs, I got used to it. It’s actually a very fluent transition from Altium to KiCad. The only program I haven’t found a good replacement for is Inventor.

Damn Autodesk and their free software for students, they really do their best to get you hooked. Soulja Boy Kiss Me Through The Phone Download Song. From a marketing perspective that’s really impressive.

@Martin: KiCad is definitely not something lesser. You just have to get used to the workflow. Since I had previous experience with Altium, the learning curve was definitely not as steep as the one from Eagle to Altium.

To me, Altium and KiCad feel very similar in a lot of ways. @John: Thanks for your comment. I took another look at FreeCad and found out that I’d just have to install the plugin assembly2 to get the functionality I was missing the last time I looked at it. So it seems that once I get used to the workflow, it might actually be the solution to my problem. I’ve turned to KiCad a year and half or so ago, when I had to make a commercial product and didn’t want to pay a commercial license. I’m liking it a lot, but I still have a copy of Eagle installed.

The best part of Eagle is the same I can say about Arduino. If you need something, there’s probably a library for it. I can simply search the part and get a library of the component just waiting to be used. Talking about libraries, I still have to get used with KiCad libraries management. I still find it tiring to use and make custom libraries. If you’re doing anything nontrivial, and you expect to have good manufacturability once you’ve made your boards, then the footprints you’re using need to be carefully checked and drawn against the components that you’re using.

This really tells us nothing relevant about any relative merits of KiCAD or Eagle. With the possible exception of the very ubiquitous, standardized EIA/JEDEC packages, like IC packages or 0603 passives or whatever, you can’t just assume that you’re going to be able to find somebody else’s library online that has an accurate footprint.

Taking 5 minutes to carefully check is much cheaper and faster than re-iterating your board fab. This is especially true for things like connectors where there are no clear, strict industry-wide standards in many cases, and different manufacturers may manufacture connectors with a slightly different footprint even if they are “the same kind” of connector, like a barrel jack for example. This is really a part of the design/engineering/DFM/BOM process, and it is (like most things) completely independent of particular choices of layout software. We will make a pass thru all of the EAGLE libs and get them up to par going forward. It’d also be great if new users could just plug in parametric info into a calculator a’la PCB Libraries and generate IPC compliant footprints. This feels to me like a very straight-forward way to help people new to electronics build new parts that are guaranteed solderable. Otherwise there’s just too much left to chance.

So expect some big changes there in the coming months in EAGLE. We want this to be as straight forward as possible.

With regard to the Element 14 libraries, I agree, they need checking. I wouldn’t normally bank on 3rd party libraries anyway without at least checking them, but this is our first exposure to the work done by Element14 (at Autodesk). So we’ll probably continue to share them but also try and make a pass thru them to confirm they’re decent.

If not, I’m sure we can do better. I fully agree one the importance of having footprints in a format that’s easy to review. Alas, most systems lack even the most basic automated measurements. That’s why I wrote fped, for use with KiCad: Here are some examples of what it can do: fped is fully parametrized.

The typical workflow is to first jot down all the dimensions you find in the data sheet, then try to understand how the geometry is actually structured. Then you draw the sub-parts (e.g., outline, pads, markers), and put them together. Here is a short intro for the main concepts: Development of fped is mainly driven by my own needs (I originally made it in the context of the gta02-core project), so some things are less polished than others. But it has served me well so far:) It won’t automagically generate footprints matching IPC standards.

So you have to do a bit of legwork for that. I started electronics engineering with Multisim and Ultiboard version 6.

Fairly straight forward programs. This combined with etching your own boards. Later I did some work in Eagle but mostly avoided the PCB designing.

Mostly because Eagle is hard and it takes a while to get used to it. I left it to my fellow student who had cracked the pro version of Eagle and was great at it. Recently I started a engineering job. They use Altium.

It also takes a while to get used to. But now I can design circuits in a few days. Only for the bugs and crashes it would be a mutch better piece of software. Then it works its great, when it doesn’t jou need to find a work around. I have yet to try KiCAD and PCBmodE.

What I find interesting is that CadSoft, IIRC, had something like 3 engineers working on EAGLE when it was acquired. It’ll be interesting to see what Autodesk is able to do with more resources. Having worked in R&D for EDA tools, and now doing a startup in EDA, this statement really nails it: “Altium has been working on the problem for several decades, it’s still not perfect. KiCad is old enough to vote, and there are still problems. Eagle, too, is almost thirty years old. Building EDA suites and PCB design software is hard, and possibly the hardest single domain of software development.”. The only thing I got out of this is a someone to blame for Autodesk’s continued lack of support for Linux.

“I had the chance to talk with [Matt Berggren], former Hackaday overlord who is currently serving as the Director of Autodesk Circuits. He is the person ultimately responsible for all of Autodesk’s electronic design products, from Tinkercad, 123D, Ecad. Keygen Max Payne 3 more. io, and project Wire, the engine behind Voxel8, Autodesk’s 3D printer that also prints electronics. [Matt] is now the master of Eagle, and ultimately will decide what will change, what stays the same, and the development path for Eagle.” I blame YOU Matt Berggren~.

Unfortunately Autodesk has a well deserved reputation of screwing over their international customers with ridiculously high prices. Not sure it’s still the case, but I remember 3ds max costing like twice as much in Europe as it cost in the US.

For a $20 product, this may not be such a big deal, but it cost 3500$. And in euro’s it was >5000(!) And this is at a time when the EUR was about 1.4$. It’s completely idiotic, and so to me it’s a real shame that Autodesk bought Eagle. If anything, it would push me even more in the direction of KiKad or other alternatives. Here’s someone else discussing this issue. We’ve based the EAGLE pricing on an average price of the Euro over the last 12 months (goes live tomorrow -ishsame pricing in general but with much fewer of these crazy license configurations / SKUs than what they had in the past. Candidly, most just didnt sell any seats so we got rid of the dozens of variations).

We did this because the Brexit makes everything suck in the EU right now, when you try to buy versus the USD. So rather than penalize the Europeans for a big drop in the value of their currency in recent days / weeks / months, we instead decided to average it over a period and base the euro pricing on that multiple rather than the crazy situation the eu and uk are in right now. So to answer this comment directly, I think we’ve been pretty fair with EAGLE pricing going forward. Look for a blog post on the upcoming Cadsoft site this weekend which gives much more detail. Let me know if you think this -isnt- fair and we can discuss.

But why pay 60 Euros for something when an equivalent product lets you do the same for free? I’ll pay a fair price for pancakes but not when the restaurant next door is giving away perfectly good omlets!

Eagle vs KiCad comments seem to be really heating up lately. I’ve been following them because I am trying to decide which to invest my time in learning. So far it sounds like the Eagle camp just prefer Eagle because it was good before KiCad was and they don’t want to go through the breaking in period with something that works differently. I get it, change is work. I also kind of resent that thought process because I think that it’s the same reason that Windows is still so popular even though between Windows, Linux and even Mac OS Windows is probably the worst choice in pretty much every possible way. Wasn’t intended to start a eagle vs kicad war. Just wanted to point out there is a cheap alternative for hobbiest to start a small commercial run.

60 EUR isn’t that much of a cost when going commercial. Yes I prefer Eagle over Kicad as I want a finished product instead of a opensource program which has some quirks and bugs. I don’t want to rely on a community to fix something at an unknown time.

With a commercial product I just have more confidence in getting. I understand people like a certain product like Kicad, but it didn’t work for me back then and don’t have the time nor money to learn a new product.

After all it is the endresult that counts and not how that result is made. Lets get back to designing boards! A) Not attaching subscription at this time. Can’t say never of course, but it’s not the priority. We’ll start by building value and then visit the licensing model later, when the time is right.

B) The core of EAGLE is the priority for now. C) We’re not forcing your content to some master website. It’s your content. Let the other guy try and coax you into their ecosystem. We’ll keep the file format open so you never have to question whether you have the source data or not. D) If by IoT we mean connectivity, then yes, building tools to make building wireless designs easier would be nice. But that’s all down to routing and DRC and layer stack management, etc.

Give it time. E) We are not all the same. I live in *this* world. My hackaday.io page is @technolomaniac. And yes, I share my designs, content, time, energy, etc to open hardware. Just s suggestion, have a read about Carl Bass some time. See his TED talks, conferences, contributions to startups, schools, etc.

Read about his views on SW licensing for students and startups making less than $100K / year. Checkout Pier 9 from Autodesk (where I work). Happy to chat after you’ve homeworked things a bit. As an amateur hobbyist, the first board I laid out was in Pad2Pad. Because this was board manufacturer lock-in, my second board was in KiCAD.

Why anyone would use proprietary software that restricts their rights to their own work is beyond me. The embrace of Eagle by companies that cater to hobbyists and that are completely dependent on the open hardware and software community is also entirely beyond me, since Eagle is often the one tool that sticks out like a sore thumb, and demands the use of Windows despite its ever-shrinking presence or necessity.

I’m very glad KiCAD is doing well and continues to not only hold its own, but outshine in many places as well. No hopes and prayers of continued corporate benevolence are necessary! Will be interesting to see where Autodesk is going with this. If they actually invest some effort into improving the tool, it could very well solidify Eagles position in the low end CAE domain.

However, they could just as well blast Eagle in the other direction if they start to change something the community does not stand behind. I could see them trying to push Eagle into the cloud like Altium does with CircuitMaker, and people abandoning the tool because of it. Luckily there are quite a lot of other free tools around, and if they “kill” Eagle, i’m shure someone else will pick up the users. Personally i’m locked into Altium and usually happy with i. Have been with them since Protel 98, and for now, i’ve only ever considered stepping up to Mentor (for high-speed, high complexity designs) and not stepping down to the bottom feeders for the simple designs.

I agree, I’m happy to see there’s now a “maker pro” license that lets you design something and use it commercially but $299 is too much for a 160x100mm limit. Even the $575 business edition (schematic+pcb) license has a 160x100mm limit.

I think Eagle overlooks the important hobbyist market, maybe they think we just pirate the program anyway, regardless of what it costs. Reality is that if I could have bought an Eagle license that would let me design (say) a 250x250mm board or 100 square inches with any length/width, for $300 or even $400, and then sell my design as a kit, I can easily recoup the price of that license when I sell my product to (say) 40 people, so I’d be happy to pay that much. But the way it stands, a license would cost me $1145 so sorry no sale. The time it took me to learn KiCad and convert my design when it got too big to fit in Eagle was a lot cheaper than that. I use KiCAD and it was the first and only PCB design suite I have learned.

I learned to use it in about an hour, but of course didn’t understand how a few things work until I tinkered around for another 3-4 hours. If you’re worried about wasting time learning it, just follow the tutorials and play around with it. It is quite simple. The only thing I don’t really like about it is how modular the interface is. Clearly there are a lot of unconnected projects getting thrown together here. Having to change toolbars to do closely related tasks on the same component seems clunky and antiquated to me. I wish it were a little more intelligent and seamless.

At any rate, I was able to design, print, and etch my first PCB in less than 6 hours. That’s a pretty small learning curve. Hi Winston, This is exactly what we’re working on at SnapEDA. Our goal is to build one canonical library. The library is free and supports EAGLE, Altium, KiCad, Cadence OrCAD/Allegro (Beta), and Mentor PADS (Beta).

We’re also working with component manufacturers to make their data accessible easily through our platform. Here is an example part page so you can take a look:.

We are a small startup, and have been in Beta as we build the product, so would love your feedback if you try it. Although we don’t have a freeware converter, you can upload parts (free) and translate them to other formats but currently only support a limited number of upload formats.