Exporting Eagle Libraries To FOSS Tools

Since Autodesk’s acquisition, Eagle has been making waves in the community. The de facto standard for Open Hardware PCB design is now getting push-and-shove routing, a button that flips the board over to the back (genius!), integration with Fusion360, automated 3D renderings of components, and a bunch of other neat tools. However, Eagle is not without its warts, and there is a desire to port those innumerable Eagle board layouts and libraries to other PCB design packages. This tool does just that.

The tool is an extension of pcb-rnd, a FOSS tool for circuit board editing, and this update massively extends support for Eagle boards and libraries. As an example, [VK5HSE] loaded up an Eagle .brd file of a transceiver, selected a pin header, and exported that component to a KiCad library. It worked the first time. For another experiment, the ever popular TV-B-Gone .brd file was exported directly to pcb-rnd. This is a mostly complete solution for Eagle to KiCad, Eagle to Autotrax, and Eagle to gEDA PCB, with a few minimal caveats relating to copper pours and silkscreen — nothing that can’t be dealt with if you’re not mindlessly using the tool.

While it must be noted that most Open Hardware projects fit inside a 80 cm2 board area, and can therefore be opened and modified with the free-to-use version of Autodesk’s Eagle, this is a very capable tool to turn Eagle boards and libraries into designs that can be built with FOSS tools.

Thanks [Erich] for the tip.

New Fonts For GEDA PCB Tool

In the open-source world, there are two main choices for PCB design: KiCad and gEDA. But if you’re tired of the boring Hershey fonts telling you which resistor is which, or if you need to comply with ISO 3098, there’s one clear choice: PCB-RND, the improved fork of gEDA’s PCB tool. Why?

Because PCB-RND now supports osifont, which supports a ridiculous number of languages. In addition to the usual suspects, like Azerbaijani through Vietnamese, support has also been added for legacy users, including those of Middle Earth, who build PCBs that can only be read when the thrush knocks by the setting sun of the last light on Durin’s Day.

And they haven’t stopped there. Looking forward to the Treaty of Organia in 2267, you can now create PCBs that are fully plqaD-HaSta compliant.

We’re glad to see these important steps made toward reaching out to underserved PCB-constructing communities. However, we’re appalled at the continuing lack of support for Rihannsu. This will have to be rectified by anyone who wants to push their projects in the Beta Quadrant.

Free Routing For GEDA

If you lay out PC boards using software, it is a good bet you have an opinion about autorouters. Some people won’t use a package that can’t automatically route traces. Others won’t accept a machine layout when they can do their own by hand. You can, of course, combine the two, and many designers do.

The open source gEDA PCB package (and pcb-md) have an autorouter, but it is pretty simplistic. [VK5HSE] shows how you can use a few tools to interface with the Java Freerouting application, to get a better result. For example, the original router made square corners, while the Freerouting application will create angles and arcs, if configured properly.

Continue reading “Free Routing For GEDA”

Custom Circuit Drives A Small Round CRT Display

[Svofski’s] latest hack seeks to do no more than look cool on his desk. We’d say mission accomplished. He doesn’t even need anyone around to be proud of the small round CRT display unit he put together. Just having it hum away next to him will be more than enough to keep him going when regular work gets a bit tedious.

One of the biggest challenges when working with a cathode ray tube is the supply. He compares the requirements with that of Nixie tubes, and this is quite a bit more challenging since he wants to generate the 750V from a 12V DC source. To pull it off he hand wound his own transformer. There are two secondary coils, one for the cathode heater and the other as the supply. You can see a brief clip of the unit in action after the break.

Take note of the PCB section of his writeup. He took a meandering route through several different software packages before printing the board. It started with Eagle, moved to freerouting.net, which produced a Specctra file that he converted to gEDA using a Python script.

Continue reading “Custom Circuit Drives A Small Round CRT Display”