a request to sparkfun and the community

Alot of these projects that you sell are supposed to be open source, the request I have is to post all past and future projects not just in eagle formats but also in a more accessible format like .pcb (i.e. geda) so everyone can contribute to revisions as well as reproduce the boards in home etching styles.

This is not always possible with eagle.

It would be nice if people would start using programs like gEDA that everyone can use.

my $.02

terramir

I agree that would be cool. However, everyone has their own preferred format. I’ve used Eagle for probably 6 years, and I’m quite used to it. At this point, I’d rather spend my time making more cool projects than learning a new CAD tool, since I feel good enough in Eagle to get good work done. All of my designs can be opened by the free version of Eagle, and only the 4 layer designs can’t be edited in the free version of Eagle. Eagle is getting more open, with the new XML based file formats of version 6. If somebody were to write a translator that could translate files between the two formats, that would help a lot. Maybe that will come in time.

For now though, when I start a new project I start it in Eagle because that’s the only one I know. And many people have taken my Eagle files and made derivative projects. So it does work this way.

Is there a reason you can’t home etch a board from within Eagle? What about geda makes this easier?

*Brian