I’m a ham radio operator who likes to build his own equipment. Been using Eagle for at least a year, but have been limited to single layer boards that are easy to do with either a laser-printer etch-resist or a photo-process.
SparkFun’s PCB service looks like a GREAT WAY to expand my design complexity to two layers.
So, I pull up one of my single sided designs and go thru the tutorial. Everything is cool, the silk_gen.ulp script does its thing, and I get two new layers for top and bottom silk.
But, my design is so complex, I don’t have room for the values. But, since they’ve been translated into the two new silk screen layers, editing them with smash is futile and tiring. I beleive in the future I’ll turn off the values.
What do y’all do in this instance? Especially on a complicated, double-sided board?
run silk_gen.ulp, in the initial dialog note the check boxes, each layer has one for values. uncheck them, build your silk layers, submit your design and relax, have a homebrew…
I ended up doing exactly that - turning them off in the silk_gen.ulp module.
That worked pretty well, but somehow I lost all the component names (IE: R1, R2, R3) for all my resistors. Before I understood what silk_gen.ulp was doing and that I had some options I could choose, I was smashing and moving around/deleting the unwanted values. Probably lost them that way.
But that’s okay! I now have a board that looks good, passes DRC both in Eagle and from the DRCBot.
You may notice, none of the SFE designs have values, and some don’t have designators. For protos, and production units for that matter, we print out the top silk layer, blown up to 8x11" and label the individual components with their values and any special notes, orientations, etc. The assemblers then work off this sheet with relative ease.