spruce_moose wrote:
I remembered another thing that drives me crazy about Eagle. The whole footprint/part creation feels like a workaround for the awful UI. People seem to act like making parts takes a couple minutes, but every time I have to do it I have to relearn the whole unintuitive process because it never stays in my head.
i used to find it a bit annoying too but i think of it like this to sort of remember the process and not have to look at ada fruit tutorials or whatever:
what do you need for a part? probably something that will show up in the schematic and board and have some relationship to each other so...
1) draw schematic symbol (seems like an ok place to start)
2) either copy the pad layout from another library or draw a new one (a logical next step? what will show up on the board)
3) create the new part where you are basically combining the first 2 steps into a final part by mapping the schematic to physical pins on a package.
done. I think in the library editor this results in clicking on the 3 buttons from right to left that deal with new parts/symbols. A helpful thing for step 2 is that you can open a library for editing, then go back to the control panel, find the package you want in another library and i believe either in a menu or if you right click the package there will be an option that says "add to library" or something like that and it will just add the package you have selected to the library currently being edited, so you can go straight to step 3 after that unless you want to tweak the package a bit.
