Wednesday 14 May 2014

PCB DESIGNING SOFTWARES

A PCB is a backbone of every electronic product. while studying and eventually when i got an opportunity to  work at National institute of Electrnics & Information Technology chandigarh , i came across this  domain of electronics.  I worked on orcad 10.5 and Orcad 16.5 ,there has been a drastic change in the look and feel of the two versions like for example in 10.5 you make schematic in the capture save the .mnl file and then open the layout to work on it ,while in the 16.5 version it takes you automatically to the layout. there is also change in the GUI and there are many new softwares added to the bundle. no doubt OR-CAD is a industry standard tool with high precision and wide range of tools to work with and cater all the needs of industry. I particularly like the Pspice which lets you simulate the circuit prior to fabrication of PCB.
 The downside to or-cad i see that first of all it is not OPEN SOURCE (at the time i am writing it the cost i inquired was 1.67 lakhs per licence for education purposes ) and  for a beginner it becomes difficult to acclimatise with the tool ,there are so many libraries that a hobbiest or a student would never need but since they are there it becomes difficult at times to find out the component with right footprints ,although there is a facility of creating your own footprints in case one donot find one in the library but sometimes there is time constraint and sometimes in my case i am too lethargic to do that.
I came across another tool EAGLE CAD which has a lite version which is free and a paid  professional version . But for all the hobbiest and students lite version is good enough ,here i assume that no simulation is required prior to implementation.  the limitations in lite version are that you cannot make a PCB having more that two layers and also there is some constraint on the dimentions of PCB.In Eagle i have all the common components at one place the libraries are much more easier to go through and in case i don't have a component there are so many open source libraries to download and use. link to one such library is below for those who want to use them. i really like this library caters all my needs.
https://github.com/adafruit/Adafruit-Eagle-Library

I have done some videos to explain how to install and create a PCB using EAGLE CAD

TUTORIAL 1: Downloading & Installing EAGLE CAD 



TUTORIAL 2:Making a schematic on Eagle and importing new libraries


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