[sdiy] Buying the full version of Eagle

[Dino Leone]

>  > It's the limited board area that gets me 160x100mm isn't much space
>>  when your not making modules
>
>     This is one of the great problems of Eagle. I asked cadsoft some times
>to changing their licensing mode, to something that covers the AREA of the
>pcb (ex: 160 x 100 = 16.000 mm square). But they refused that. 16 x 10 is
>too small even for personal projects. One less customer for eagle :o(


I've partially circumvented this by dividing bigger projects into 
sub-modules, each being an individual eagle project. Then, depending 
on whether you etch your own boards, or not, you generate "linker bus 
traces" on each module. I then take the postscript outputs from each 
module into Adobe illustrator and align them so that these "linker 
buses" are connected. If you're having boards made, you can replace 
these buses by simple AMP MTA (e.g. 0.1") connectors to link your 
boards. It's (very) tedious, I know. But so far the price difference 
has made it worthwhile for me.
The single most aggravating aspect of this approach is that you're 
breaking the schematic into 2 or more sub-modules, so during 
stuffing/debugging etc you're constantly switching between the 
different projects in Eagle. Very tedious and annoying.
Also, I'm using Eagle on Mac OS X (on X11), so I did have even fewer 
choices for a PCB app...

Best,

Dino