Greetings EAGLE Community!

Let me be the first to proudly announce the release of EAGLE version 9! This is a whopper of a release with more muscle than anything we’ve ever attempted in the past. (And I promise that’s not just hyperbolic; we have really stuck a flag in the ground with this one!)

With this release - which all of you subscribers are eligible for (no upgrade fees with subscription!) - we have introduced new ways to wire your schematic, route your board, new tools for cleanup & new ways to make designs look awesome! We have added new tools for navigating your design and new approaches to locating objects and launching commands. We extended the 14-day offline limit to 30 days to ensure you aren’t stuck in a dark corner of the globe, cursing the EAGLE development team. 🙂

As you know we put a ton of energy into EAGLE and I would ask that if you can support the development by subscribing to either the Standard or Premium versions ($100 or $500 respectively) that would be amazing. If you drop off, it’s cool, your designs will continue to open and you can always generate outputs, etc. (Zero lock-in!) Subscription is how we pay the development staff and your support is an important vote of confidence that keeps us doing what we’re doing every day, trying to deliver amazing value!

Ok, that said read-on...And stay tuned for emails with links to the What’s New webinars slated for the coming days and weeks! This one is a doozy! And we’re just getting started!

Quick Connect

With this release we are including a new range of tools for schematic wiring collectively named Quick Connect. This is an ongoing project so expect this is the first (albeit significant) step on the path toward some really special and highly unique features to make the pain of schematic wiring easier.

Buses

(Yes, we’ve heard…”But I never use buses”. Hear me out, please…I promise this is awesome!)

With this release we’ve completely overhauled buses and the bus properties dialog, with the changes here making it MUCH easier for you to generate groups of signals and move them around the design in more abstract ways (think: bundle of signals called ‘UART’ or ‘LCD’ instead of 16 wires to name and label every time!).

And while we knew it was great to be able to create buses, if you were going to go to the bother of making them, we should provide the tools save and reuse them. So with EAGLE v9 we’ve also added the notion of Persistent Buses. Now you can quickly create an SPI bus, save it once (with all of it’s signals) and recall it design to design, sheet to sheet, etc. You can even embed signal ranges in the buses for things like multiple chip-selects you might require on an SPI bus.

Cool? Wait, we’re not finished! 🙂 If we only improved buses but not the signal handling going into and out of buses, we would be missing an opportunity, so with EAGLE v9 we have also included tools to breakout buses quickly and easily, into individual nets and we will automatically generate the wires and single names & labels to make this whole process much, much smoother.

Have a look at the following video for more details:





Quick Connect - Breakout++

We didnt stop with buses or bus breakouts. The Quick Connect tools now allow you to quickly breakout component pins as well and will again, automatically generate wires with names and labels to make building designs so much cooler than ever before!





Quick Route

With the addition of Quick Connect we felt it was a little unbalanced and thus we’re also announcing the addition of the new Quick Route tools in PCB (why should schematic get all the fun?). These are long overdue additions that will blow you away with their speed and simplicity. As you’ll see in the video below, quick route is fully integrated in the routing tools you’re familiar with and replaces the oft-unused and overly complicated Follow-Me Router.

With Quick Route you can single-click an airwire and route the from-to, a complete signal, even a differential pair. Hit “Enter” while routing and Quick Route will complete the connection. Quick Route also includes Bus Routing for multiple signals...even multiple diff pairs. The Bus Router will enable short work of groups of signals and works hard to join the tracks together in a way that feels totally natural. Check out my video below and try not to cry...I was stunned at what the team pulled off and again, we are only getting started!





Design Manager

Ok folks, we heard you. Navigating a design in EAGLE (especially a complex design) needed work. Locating devices, signals, their individual net objects like pads and vias was painful.

Finding an uplaced part and moving it on to the board...Selecting all the tracks in the GND net and increasing their width...Grabbing groups of parts and aligning them or moving them or rotating them without fishing for a reference point...All of this could be improved!

With EAGLE v9 we present the Design Manager, giving you a top down view of your PCB like never before. Locate objects, launch commands like Quick Route or Ripup, grab groups of items and apply changes using the Change command. The Design Manager makes all of these processes easier and I’d encourage you to check out the video below.

Smash -> Reposition Attributes = Component Text Handling on Steroids

The all new Reposition Attributes command replaces the old Smash tool (the command still works...rest assured) and takes the notion of unlocking and positioning component text to a totally different level! Have a look at the video below to see how selecting the attribute type and specifying the location ‘around’ the body of the part, this new command allows you to now click...click...click to place text in positions that make sense, aligned magically around the body of your parts.

Ripup -> Ripped up and redone

This latest release also introduces some pretty significant changes to the ripup command that will make many of you happy. No longer struggle to hide all of your polygons or ripup all the connections on the board. Or more precisely, ripup things like connected copper or the copper in a signal on a specified layer. All of these are now opitions with the new ripup tools to make cleanup and rework of a design MUCH easier. Again, checkout the video and let us know what you think.





Outtro

With that, I’ll leave the rest of the details to the blogs, what’s new videos, release notes, these forums and more. Look for more videos, more content and of course more new things. Please join me in thanking the development team for this AMAZING release. And for our trusty support teams, marketing org, and everyone else for making sure you know what’s there and how to use it.

Best regards,

Matt Berggren

Director - Autodesk EAGLE





