Draw Electronic Schematics with CadSoft EAGLE

Step 3 Find and place ("add") components

Components are added to a schematic from the ADD dialog, which you get to by clicking the ADD button over on the GUI menu.

One of the major challenges of using Eagle is finding the components you want in the "official" libraries.
These libraries are extensive, not particularly well named (and the components aren't so well named either),
and seem to date back to a time when there was a different philosophy about multiple packages for a particular device. Resistors and capacitors have so many packages defined that picking the right one is difficult. Transistors, despite formable leads, tend to only have a single package defined. Many experienced EAGLE users don't use the standard libraries at all, copying common components and packages into private libraries or creating them from scratch.

The search capability of the add dialog is pretty good; you just have to be less specific about what you search for if you expect to find it.

When working from a published schematic, I prefer to add all the components in the approximately correct locations before I start connecting anything.

Once you've finished the add dialog, the part will get attached to your mouse pointer, and you can put it down wherever you want on the drawing page by clicking the left mouse button. The right mouse button rotates the part 90 degrees. The middle button, or left and right simultaneously (maybe) "mirrors" the part drawing, which may also be useful.

Comments

[stainsor]

DO NOT click the "Drop" button in the Add dialog. My first time using Eagle I thought that was the button to drop a part into a schematic. It turns out that's the button to remove a set of parts from the libraries! If you do click this button and accidentally remove some of the libraries you can get them back by reinstalling Eagle.

If I knew anything about UI design (which I don't) then I would probably say that this was a horrible choice for both the placement and naming of the button. I would probably think that it should be changed immediately.

[webster32]

It's very misleading, but all you've actually done is "disable" that particular library. The Control Panel window that opens on startup allows you to re-enable that library. Just expand the "Libraries" and click the dot beside the library you disabled.

[badbad214]

Thank you webster32

[Cobalt59]

Thank you. I did the same thing as Stainsor. :)

[tamentis]

That's also what I initially thought, I tried it on a random weird component by curiosity.. It doesn't warn you, there is no tool-tip.

[rachel]

Ha! I was just about to add this same comment, as I had the exact same wrong thought about what "DROP" meant. It's a terrible design choice and doesn't even have a confirmation dialog! Danger Will Robinson!

[joie2vivre]

Looks like you can get the library back by clicking on library/use, then select the library you want

[amando96]

 haha i pressed that aswell, but never figured out what it did xD

[lodewijkadlp]

 Any tips on a basic library?

[westfw]

I've added some text here, and extra pictres for each of the steps illustrated with a button icon showing the location of the icon in the GUI menu.

[nz]

It's not obvious that the large blurry image is actually the button to launch the "add" dialog. It's on the vertical toolbar on the left of the main window. It can also be accessed via the menus - go to Edit: Add... It may take some time to load. Perhaps you could add a caption to the image, and show it at normal size, or within some context of the toolbar it comes from. I initially took it to be a screenshot of a component being placed. Actually, there's no text in this step at all on how to launch the add dialog.