Which pcb design software for weird outlines?

Community PCB Design
1

I’m presently using eagle, but the CAD aspect of that program sucks, which means wrt board outlines (my boards are typically weird shapes - not rectangular…and have to be very precise) I have to use a specific CAD program, save as a DXF (selecting a path where my eagle board is- yawn), convert to an eagle script using dxf2scr.exe (browsing to the the path where my DXF is - sigh), then run the script (selecting a path again!) in Eagle to have my board outline show up in the dimension layer.

It’s labourious! (especially if I have to tweak my board layout…got to go through the whole rigamarole again - and I tend to tweak a lot!)

so, even thougH i’ve gone through the pain of leaning eagle, i’d consider jumping if someone can advise whether there’s a better pcb design product out there that has more CAD integrated.

Or failing that can someone outline a better (faster) way of getting something designed in another cad program into eagle …it’s be really cool if Eagle just allowed ‘import DXF’ then prompted you for which layer…is there a ulp that I’ve missed?

2

Pulsonix can create odd board shapes quite easily, and can import Eagle designs and libraries:

http://www.pulsonix.com/index.asp

It can also import DXF files from mechanical CAD programs, if you have something really awkward.

3

I’ve never had problems making precise outlines with Eagle. In fact, I’ve used Eagle as vector CAD for non-electronic purpose, on occasion. The interface is not very different from AutoCAD…you can type in numbers to get very accurate line placement. Do you have an example of the type of board outline that would give you difficulty in Eagle? The only thing I can imagine would be tough is a complex spline shape, but in Eagle you can still type in endpoint and radius information on curved traces.

4

There are some tricks to making complex and precise shapes in eagle:

  1. Don’t use the GUI. Using the CLI, Script, or ULP capabilities lets you specify exact numeric coordinates.

  2. Once you’ve flushed the GUI, you can use polar coordinates, relative values, and “advanced” forms of line curving that would be otherwise difficult.

http://forums.eagletoolkit.com/index.ph … 54&start=0