Draw Electronic Schematics with CadSoft EAGLE

Step 6 Add capacitors

Capacitors are worse than resistors, largely because their bodies come in a wider variety of shapes (that are less standardized), and of course there are all those different types; disk, ceramic, mylar, film, electrolytic, tantalum, AC filter, etc (and those are just the FIXED value caps!) Again, threre are slightly different US and European schematic symbols C-US and C-EU in rcl.lib. Again, there's a plethora of packages, but there's a standard format. In this case it's SSS-WWWXLLL, where SSS is the lead spacing (with an extra digit this time!), WWW is the body width, and LLL is the body length.

Polarized caps are similar (CPOL-US or CPOL-EU in rcl.lbr), with a package name like TSSS-DD, where
T is a type designator (E for electrolytics, TT for tantalum drops, for instance) SSS is the spacing again
(only now it probably has an actual decimal point!), and DD is the diameter (for radial caps)

Most hobby projects can get away with either 2.5mm or 5mm lead spacing, and the designer "remembering" to leave enough space for the physical capacitor body; there might not be a silkscreen anyway.
(the "silkscreen" is the pictures and text describing the components, usually printed in white ink on the component side of the board (if you had it made professionally.) Library designers spend a lot of time getting the silkscreen to look nice; all wasted if you make a board that doesn't have that printing.)

Comments

[spsj21]

it is really a nice instructable. So far I was struggling for a nice EAGLE tutorial and finally it helped me a lot.