Hey guys. I’m wanting to get into pcb design and I’m looking at diptrace vs eagle. I know kurte likes diptrace, and mike likes eagle… I have a high level of respect for both of you and figured you guys could give me an idea. My three main questions are:
Which program is best for a beginner like me?
Do diptrace and eagle use the same kind of library files?
Do you guys have special files such as CAM, libraries, preferences, etc… that you would be willing to share with me?
It is sort-of hard to say… The bright side is you can get a freeware version of both of them and try them out. With the freeware versions they limit you to 2 layers and so many pads or so big or… But fine for simple boards.
I did not find the Eagle User Interface to be at all friendly or intuitive and so I looked around and found Diptrace and liked it. The recently released version of Eagle has improved things, but I am comfortable with diptrace. Note: the Licenses that Jim purchased do not work on the current version.
There are probably more places that support and use Eagle, like Sparkfun. But there are some others like Parallax that use/sell Diptrace. There are more libraries available for Eagle. However Diptrace provides you with some conversion scripts, that you use with Eagle that allow you to import Eagle Libraries, likewise for Schematics and boards. There is a bug in the current build for importing the libraries, which hopefully they will release the update with the fix soon. However if you need a library like Sparkfun, they have done the conversion and posted the library up on their forum…
I am willing to share anything I have, but mostly I try to stick with normal stuff, except in a few cases.
Kurt
