Adafruit Eagle library

posted Jan 21st 2010 1:00pm by Mike Szczys
filed under: tool hacks

We love it when a PCB comes out right the first time. We’re careful enough with our designs that if something is wrong it’s usually a footprint problem, like we picked the wrong package for the components. Adafruit is helping to make the design process easier by sharing their Eagle library. Like the Eagle library version control we saw earlier in the month, this library is housed on github making it easy to stay up-to-date. The library includes many components (switches, crystals, IC’s, etc.), and fixes some prolbem-footprints, like 0805 surface mount pads.

Comments [15]

tagged: adafruit, EagleCad, footprint, library

15 Responses to Adafruit Eagle library

sneakypoo says:

January 21, 2010 at 1:57 pm

What do you mean by “like 0805 surface mount pads”? Reason I’m asking is that I’m an SMD newbie getting ready to etch my first board that includes quite a few 0805 components.

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axodus says:

January 21, 2010 at 2:11 pm

sparkfun also got a library of parts for eagle:
http://www.opencircuits.com/SFE_Footprint_Library_Eagle

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martinmunk says:

January 21, 2010 at 2:35 pm

I just stopped by the ladyada website the other day and wondered why i hadn’t seen anything ’bout the adafruit library before. And, here it came :)

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jeff-o says:

January 21, 2010 at 2:35 pm

Sweet, I’ll be sure to download this and sparkfun’s library.

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Andrew says:

January 21, 2010 at 2:35 pm

Adafruit’s license (public domain) is nicer than SparkFun’s (noncommercial) though :)

I’ve just sent off a board using a fair stack of 0805 parts. I noticed that the resistor and capacitor footprints I’d used were vastly different. I left it as-is as an experiment to see which I find easier to solder.

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RoHS says:

January 21, 2010 at 3:06 pm

Acutally they are both available for commercial use.

Just check the link above.

“You are welcome to use this library for commercial purposes. For attribution, we ask that when you begin to sell your device using our footprint, you email us with a link to the product being sold. We want bragging rights that we helped (in a very small part) to create your 8th world wonder. We would like the opportunity to feature your device on our homepage”

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Bergo says:

January 21, 2010 at 3:58 pm

Do you run into “prolbems” often?

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tim says:

January 21, 2010 at 5:00 pm

i did download it and see nothing new or interesting in it :(
Andrew, 0805 have to be different if you are going to use wave soldering or reflow soldering

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Drone says:

January 21, 2010 at 9:28 pm

Dump eagle, use KiCad, free, open-source unrestricted board sizes and layers, 3D viewer, large support community, continually evolving and improving.

http://kicad.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Main_Page

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wrr says:

January 21, 2010 at 11:24 pm

Not sure what’s problematic about 0805 lands, but you should be able to come up with a workable footprint design using IPC’s tool here: http://landpatterns.ipc.org/default.asp

It’s definitely a cool utility to have around, capable of generating designs for everything from chip discretes to 1000-pin BGAs.

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BartB says:

January 22, 2010 at 2:01 am

I have used the standard 0805, 0603 and 0402 footprints from eagle RLC library. And those from the super-RLC library downloaded from the eagle website. The SMD discrete footprints are a bit cramped to solder but still doable if you have good tweezers.

Still I like that that library is released, but ladyada also linked to another library that has tons of useful footprints. (PSP screen connectors, woohoo!) I suggest that people also look at microbuilder.eu eagle library, and sparkfun’s library.

@wrr

Nifty tool, I am going to look into that.

@Drone

Tried KiCAD. I know it is a bit getting used too, but it seems so cumbersome with the extra steps in between the schematic and layout mode. The 3D mode is in my opinion useless, why would I want that. Its not altium designer where I can maybe check collisions between parts on board and a casing. I wished that they focused more on usability like a proper multilevel undo function. Better routing options, easier to manipulate grid, heck even push aside and bus routing would make life easier instead of a 3d mode and autorouter.

I will switch to KiCAD eventually or make my own CAD program if I cant get used to KiCAD. Maybe I am too much bound to workflow eagle has.
I do follow the KiCAD mailing list, and it is pretty active. Maybe i should try out a SVN build instead of the one on the site that is ancient.

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svofski says:

January 22, 2010 at 5:06 am

Eagle’s standard 0805 and 0603 footprints are way too beefy. I reduced them in my libs, now I can pull 2 narrow tracks between the pads of a 0805 resistor (not that I’d want to do it often, but it’s possible).

Re: KiCad.. I tried reading the wiki after the last Eagle vs. OSS discussion. I found out that nothing really changed since the last time I tried it: the workflow is fatally flawed. Why would I draw a schematic without specifying component packages and then spend long hours remembering which goes where while assigning package designations to components referred to by nothing but only names which I don’t really want to know or remember? This is weird and broken. Fix it. When I put a resistor in my schematic, I know what kind of resistor it is. In a rare occasion I can swap package while doing layout, but most everything is pretty much defined at the moment I choose my components.

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wdfowty says:

January 22, 2010 at 5:29 pm

Nothing personal, Mike, but you make a lot of typos.

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Mike says:

January 24, 2010 at 5:16 am

Man, I would have LOVED to see this effort gone into KICAD.

Seriously, I’ve never understood why the Make/ladyada/sparkfun community aren’t all pushing the use of kicad.