Turn your EAGLE schematic into a PCB

Step 3 The untouched PCB design

This is what the newly created board design will look like. All your components will be in a clump over to the left of the origin, and there will be a frame that marks the allowed size of a board when using the freeware or "Lite" versions of EAGLE (80x100mm). All the component pads will have to be inside that outline when you move them around, although you can cheat a bit and have traces or board outlines that exceed the board size limit. This has the annoying side-effect that if you pick up a component from it's original localtion, you can't put it back down outside the outline (however, you can use ESC to abort the move, and the component will revert to its original location.)

Ok, a few defintions are in order

All the signals you created in the schematic are currently AIR WIRES; thin yellow lines that are drawn in the shortest possible way, crossing each other as needed. They stay connected to component pins even when you move the component around. The RATSNEST command recomputes and redraws these after you move things around (and, say, make two connected pins closer together than they used to be.)

ROUTING a signal consists of turning an airwire into an actual copper trace on some layer(s) of the board, and positioning that trace so that it doesn't short agains other traces on the same layer of the board. The Freeware version of Eagle only supports a TOP and BOTTOM layer, and as hobbyists we have motivation to try to use only ONE layer. A signal can transition from one layer to another using a via, which is a conducting hole, sorta like a jumper (and we'll use jumpers to implement the top level of the board if we can make the board mostly single-sided.)

Creating the PCB design consists of placing all the components in logical places, and routing all the airwires in a way that allows the design to work.

Comments

[tomtortoise]

yo when i did this step the two non-polar capacitors disappeared from the whole thing? i have know idea what happened to them and i still barely know how to use the program.