Page 33 - Make Your Own PCBs with EAGLE from Schematic Designs to Finished Boards

you create.
The Sparkfun design rules can be downloaded from the Sparkfun site at

www.sparkfun.com/tutorials/115. They are contained in a single .drc file. You can right-click on
this file on the web page and chose “Save As” to directly save it into the drc folder within your
EAGLE installation.

Downloading the Book Examples

This book develops a number of example EAGLE projects. You will find it useful to download these
so that you can open them up and take a look at them from within the EAGLE software. These files
can be downloaded from www.simonmonk.org. Just follow the link to this book.

Light Edition Limitations

The developers of EAGLE have to make some money somewhere, and professionals will soon find
that they need features of EAGLE that are not available in the light edition. However, for most of us,

the Light edition will do just fine.
There are no restrictions on the number of projects you can design using the software. The main
restrictions of the light edition include the following:

• The maximum size of a board that you can design with this edition is 4 × 3.2 in. (100 × 80
mm). This may not sound very big, but actually you can fit a lot of components in an area of that
size. Also, because the PCB fabrication services tend to get expensive as boards get bigger, it
is no bad thing to keep your designs compact.

• A maximum of two layers is allowed. This means that you can have copper tracks on the top of
the board and on the bottom of the board, but you cannot produce four-layer (or more) boards.
Again, this is not a problem for hobby use.

• You can only create one sheet on the Schematic Editor. When designing a circuit, electronics
engineers will often split a complex design into a number of schematic diagrams with links
from one sheet to another. This restriction means that you have to fit all your design onto a
single schematic diagram. This is nowhere near as restrictive as it might sound because there is

no practical limit to how big that sheet can be.

EAGLE Light can be used as freeware as long as the use is noncommercial or for nonprofit
applications. If you plan to build a business out of a product that you design with EAGLE Light, then
you should buy a commercial license. For EAGLE Light, this is only $70 at the time of this writing.

Summary

In this chapter you have learned a little about PCBs, installed EAGLE, and run it for the first time.