Electrical – How to draw simple parts with EAGLE

eagle

I want to make a small breakout board with Eagle and upload it to OSHPark.

The breakout board needs:

  • header pins
  • a BJT transistor
  • resistors
  • a LED

Looking at the EAGLE menu, it is hard to map the parts to items in a schematic. How would I:

a) Select a Module or Port for the header connectors?

b) Select the BJT and resistors?

enter image description here

EDIT:

Looking at existing PCBs, I wonder how to find e.g. simple parts like these header pins:

enter image description here

or these LEDs with resistors:

enter image description here

Best Answer

All components in Eagle are stored as part of libraries, where they are called "devices". Each device consists of a symbol (for the schematic) and a package, or footprint (for a PCB layout).

One device in the library can have several different footprints -- for example a 2N3904 NPN transistor can come in either a through-hole or surface mount part.

In Eagle, even if you are just drawing a schematic, you have to select a footprint, which can get annoying if you are not going to be doing a layout.

You add parts to the schematic by clicking on the Add tool enter image description here, which brings up a dialog where you can enter the type of part you are looking for, such as transistor or header or resistor, or a specific part such as 2N3904 (which narrows down the number of results dramatically).

enter image description here

Adding a component to a schematic is a really basic operation in using Eagle. I would suggest looking at the many tutorials such as this one. (The picture above is taken from the tutorial.)

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