Hi all, I was wondering how do I print a full page, or multiple boards in eagle? I’ve been learning to make pcb’s using a modified laminator and for testing/playing purposes am using a very small circuit (1.5" x .5"). I have been printing them as a PDF and then sending them to my pc with the laser printer, but I don’t know how to make it print multiple circuits on the same page. Any help is greatly appreciated!
You can’t in Eagle unfortunately, not that I was able to find anyways. However, if you export gerbers of your board you can use a Gerber editor to tile the board layout across a full page. I use Pentalogix ViewMate Deluxe. You probably can find a free tool to do the job these days but I got used to the software a while back and like it.
There is a ULP (panelize4.ulp) to panelize your design, that may work for you.
You can use the panelize up to the size limit of whatever eagle license you have. This is usually not so good for "full page", but it can be a big help if your board is only a square inch or so.There is a ULP (panelize4.ulp) to panelize your design
For printing, you can also output postscript and use graphics drawing programs, or even specialized printing applications, to panelize the postscript. (look up the ps-drillaid hack; it’s helpful.)
I used to do this in GC-Prevue.
Create Gerbers for the board, import them into GC, then import them agaain to other layers and offset them.
Do this several times until I have an entire panel worth.
I cannot remember if the merge feature was in the prevue version.
Anyhow, then I could print them out as an entire panel.
Other Gerber software can do this too.
The big problem with doing it in the CB software is usually that if you copy the entire board, all the components will then get renamed
as you can usually only have 1 instance of R1, R2 etc.
I’ve done this a couple times and a few different ways.
Since eagle has 9 positions on the paper, I used to just run the paper through 9 times. Some times if i was using a photocopier, I would move it over and down a little bit to make even more. this worked OK, but the best result was I wrote a short script that could merge PDF files (like layer them. one on top of the other on one page) and then i had 9 boards right away on the PDF. Once I even figured out how to overlay the file, but have it move over like an inch or so, but that was really extended and I wouldn’t even be able to begin to remember what I did to accomplish it.
You can also use this script to work-around the board size limitation somewhat.
It produces an eagle board file containing several sub-boards. The resulting board can be larger than 100x80mm limit and fully editable as long as no component is moved.