Homebrew PCBs

Hi Dennis,

I've found making your own components in Eagle to be quite awkward; 
whereas doing that in ExpressPCB is a piece of cake.

What I do to make pads larger is I just route over them with a wide 
trace.  For a typical resistor pad, I use 40 mils; set the grid to a 
small enough value where I can extend the pad by routing from one side 
of the hole to the other.

I didn't realize Eagle had an option to create a ground plane.  Is the 
space to other features controllable?  What version are you using?  
I'm using the Lite version (probably around 4.13) and am to "cheap" to 
pay for the full featured version.  When I need a larger board than 
the lite version allows, I just place vias and route manually.  I 
usually route manually anyway.  I'm a better router than Eagle...

As Stefan mentioned, there's some artistic aspect to board layout.  I 
like to keep traces on multiples of 45 degree angles and don't push 
spaces or feature sizes so the boards are easy to transfer, etch, and 
drill.  Take a look at the first picture in my album (dl5012).  That 
was drawn with Eagle, but I just placed pads and routed manually.  
That board is actually a bad example of upsizing pads for ease of 
drilling.  That was my prototype and I fixed the pad sizes in rev1.

Regards,
Dennis

--- In Homebrew_PCBs@yahoogroups.com, "sbdwag" <sbdwag@...> wrote:
>
> Stefan
> 
> Thanks for the tips on the solder pads. Unless I create my own 
library
>  objects is there any easy way to increase the pad size/hole size in
> Eagle.
> 
> Regards
> Dennis Waggoner