Importing Eagle files into KiCad 5.1

New KiCad video from Chris Gammell of Contextual Electronics:

Importing Eagle files into KiCad 5.1

In this video, Chris imports the adafruit Feather M4 Express board Eagle files (which is OSHW) into KiCad 5.1.

Here are some of the pitfalls of importing into KiCad.

  • Flags get converted into (tiny!) labels that might not be clear.
  • The frame in schematics is gone. Not a big deal, but will look different than other KiCad projects.
  • Some silkscreen layers will not map as expected.
  • All footprints are imported from Eagle, since KiCad doesn’t know how to map existing footprints. This means that none of the 3D models are included.
Importing Eagle files into KiCad 5.1

Easy silkscreen labels in EAGLE and KiCad

Nick Pool has created an easy way to create silkscreen labels in EAGLE:

SparkFun Buzzard Label Generator

Greg Davill is now working on a version for KiCad:

Buzzard plugin for KiCad

Easy silkscreen labels in EAGLE and KiCad

Autodesk’s Fusion 360 Merges ECAD, MCAD

From Andy Shaughnessy of Design007 Magazine:

Screenshot from 2020-06-05 23-08-12

Autodesk’s Fusion 360 Merges ECAD, MCAD

I spoke with Autodesk’s Matt Berggren about the company’s Fusion 360 EDA tool and the new capabilities added to the software. Matt explains how Fusion 360 blends ECAD and MCAD functionality in one environment and at an affordable price, and why he believes it will help round out Autodesk’s electronic portfolio with end-to-end capabilities.

Andy Shaughnessy: Matt, you’re the director of the Fusion 360 platform, as well as EAGLE and Tinkercad with Autodesk. Give us some background on yourself and the company.

Matt Berggren: I joined Autodesk about four years ago. I came into the company to build out an electronic design portfolio and a collection of tools that we would ultimately integrate into the design and manufacturing tool suite for the company. If you look at electronics design and manufacturing, it’s the next most obvious adjacency for a company that owns the CNC machining market and3D printing market. We have some experience with geometry, going all the way back to the days of AutoCAD.

The obvious evolution for mechanical design in manufacturing is to start looking more holistically at the product. What’s the physical product that somebody is trying to build? That’s what we would consider being surface modeling, creating shapes and things that entice people but are also ergonomic and make things easy to use and carry. The other side of that, which I think we had to recognize as a company, is that it’s about electronics and electrical intelligence that go into those things. I’d spent a better part of 13 years at Altium. I was at Accel EDA before that with the P-CAD team, so this is not my first rodeo building electronics design software, to say the least.

Autodesk’s Fusion 360 Merges ECAD, MCAD

Interview with Matt Berggren of Autodesk on EAGLE and more

The wonderful electronics podcast The Amp Hour recently interviewed  Matt Berggren of Autodesk about EAGLE and more:

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#471 – An Interview with Matt Berggren

 

Interview with Matt Berggren of Autodesk on EAGLE and more

Make your own PCB with Eagle, OSH Park, and Adafruit

Bryan Siepert has published a new Adafruit guide on creating custom circuit boards with EAGLE:

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Make your own PCB with Eagle, OSH Park, and Adafruit!

This guide will introduce you to the basic process I use to build PCBs based on Adafruit and other open source designs. We will extract parts of the board files as what Eagle calls “Design Blocks” and then we will use them along with a fundamental workflow in Eagle to create a featherwing-like board for the Trinket M0. This board will allow you to securely attach the Adafruit INA219 current sensor breakout to a Trinket without having to use jumper wires to connect them together. We’re starting with this modest goal to keep things simple as we learn some fundamental concepts, while hopefully also ending up with a useful circuit.

This guide will cover using a Trinket M0 and INA219 breakout, however these same methods can be used to make a PCB to replace the breadboard or protoboard. These techniques can be used to extract useful pieces from open source boards to use in your own completely new circuit boards.

Make your own PCB with Eagle, OSH Park, and Adafruit

555 Piano

Alexander Ryzhkov created a small 555 timer-based piano:

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555 piano

Main goal of this project has been creating pretty designed 555 based piano in small form-factor. Many 555 piano are using 9V battery for supply. I use CMOS timer and for timer need only 3V supply.
The design files are available on GitHub:

githubChirnoTech/555Piano

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Here is a video of the board in action:
openidev has shared the board on OSH Park:

piano.toplayer.zip

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Order from OSH Park

555 Piano

Trixel Interactive LED Kit

Arkadi designed this interactive LED kit:

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Trixel LED

Create your own interactive Light elements by soldering basic shapes, such as triangle, square, pentagon and hexagon to create an interactive LED sculpture.

Here’s a video of the Trixel LED boards in action:

The design files are available on GitHub:

arkadiraf/Trixel-LED

 

Arkadi_Raf has shared the boards on OSH Park:

Pentagon LED

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Order from OSH Park

Square LED

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Order from OSH Park

Triangle LED

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Order from OSH Park

Trixel Interactive LED Kit