Here are a few tutorial and concepts you may want to familiarize yourself with before dropping down into this rabbit hole: It's an excellent place to start if you've never designed a PCB before. For us though, EAGLE has everything we need to design simple-to-intermediate PCBs. More powerful PCB design tools out there might have a better autorouter, or nifty tools like simulators, programmers, and 3D viewers. Whether you want to study the design of an Arduino board or import a popular sensor into your design, somebody has probably already made it in EAGLE and shared it. Community support - For those reasons, and others, EAGLE has become one of the go-to tools for PCB design in the hobbyist community.An upgrade to the next license tier (if you want to make a profit off your design) costs at least two orders of magnitude less than most high-end tools. Free/Low-Cost - The freeware version of EAGLE provides enough utility to design almost any PCB in the SparkFun catalog.

So you can go from download to install to making a PCB in minutes. It requires anywhere from 50-200MB of disk space (compared to the 10+GB more advanced tools might require).

Lightweight - EAGLE is about as svelte as PCB design software gets.

This is a feature not too many other PCB design softwares can boast. Cross-platform - EAGLE can run on anything: Windows, Mac, even Linux.So you might ask: 'What makes EAGLE so special?' We're fond of EAGLE for a few reasons in particular: Why EAGLE?ĮAGLE is one of many PCB CAD softwares out there. This first tutorial goes over how to install the software, and tailor-fit its interface and support files.

Free download the first tree price