Laying Out Your Schematic

It's essential that you start with your Eagle schematic first. The schematic tells Eagle what parts you plan to use, and how they should connect together. With this information it can help you place those parts on your physical board layout and draw the wires to connect them.

A schematic does not have to look like your final layout; instead it should be as clean, clear and readable as possible.

You may wish to separate decoupling capacitors and pull-up resistors and place them out of the way for better clarity. You can use text to label "Pull-up for Reset pin" or "Decoupling for ATMega328p" so it's obvious what these parts are.

Placing Components

Every schematic starts with components. You've got a circuit diagram sketched out, right? And you know what components you need to make it? Don't worry, for now we'll use the Atari Punk Synth as an example.

Let's brave the "add" menu.

In the Command Bar, type "add" and hit enter.

A new window will pop up. It will contain a list of all the Eagle libraries you've got installed. In these libraries are lists of packages. Some packages have variants for different sizes, shapes or landings.

Let's add a resistor. Type "resistor" in the search bar. You should see a library called "resistor", that's the one we'll use since every Eagle user will have it.

Expand "resistor" and you'll see a long, long list of packages. It may seem daunting, but in practice you'll probably use just R-EU_R0603 and R-EU_R0805.

These are the standard 0603 and 0805 sizes respectively. If it's capacitors you want, you might use C-EUC0603 or C-EUC0805.

Pick the part you want and click OK ( whatever you do, don't hit Drop! )

Now place the part on your design, you'll be able to place multiple instances of the same part

When you're done, hit ESC to cancel placement

TODO

• Finish your schematic first!
• Laying out a schematic diagram
• Naming signals
• Labelling signals
• VCC/GND icons
• Keeping things tidy - placing pullups/decoupling separately