The way you arrange your parts has a huge impact on how easy or hard the next step will be.

While you're moving parts, you can rotate them by either right-clicking or changing the angle in the drop-down box near the top. Using the MOVE tool - you can start to move parts within the dimension box. If you need finer control, hold down ALT on your keyboard to access the alternate grid, which is defined in the Alt box. EAGLE's status box, in the very bottom-left of the window, provides some helpful information when you're trying to select a part.ĮAGLE forces your parts, traces, and other objects to 'snap' to the grid defined in the Size box. If you were trying to grab one of the other overlapping objects, right-click to cycle to the next part. If it is, you have to left-click again to confirm. In cases like that, EAGLE will pick one of the two overlapping objects, and ask if that's the one you want. Normally, you use the mouse's left-click to select an object (whether it's a trace, via, part, etc.), but when there are two parts overlapping exactly where you're clicking, EAGLE doesn't know which one you want to pick up. Since the board view is entirely two-dimensional, and different layers are bound to overlap, sometimes you have to do some finagling to select an object when there are others on top of it. This is an interface trick that trips a lot of people up. Here's one last tip before we get to laying our board out. Before you start routing, make sure the layers above (aside from tStop and bStop) are visible. To turn any layer off or on, click the 'Layer Settings.' button - and then click a layer's number to select or de-select it. This might show the outline of a part, or other useful information. These are usually drill holes for stand-offs or for special part requirements. These define where soldermask should not be applied.Ībsent soldermask on the bottom side of the board. Origins for parts on the bottom side of the board. Top origins, which you click to move and manipulate an individual part. Silkscreen printed on the bottom side of the board. Silkscreen printed on the top side of the board.

Rubber-band-like lines that show which pads need to be connected. Also indicates copper on both layers.Īirwires. These are usually covered over by soldermask.

Smaller copper-filled drill holes used to route a signal from top to bottom side. Any part of the green circle is exposed copper on both top and bottom sides of the board. Here are the layers you'll be working with in the board designer: Color We use a palette of colors to represent the different layers. The EAGLE board designer has layers just like an actual PCB, and they overlap too. The layers of a double-sided PCB (image from the PCB Basics tutorial).

Open board view schematics