Sam Sattel
Elevate your design and manufacturing processes with Autodesk Fusion
EAGLE First Flights Webinar – Building Your Library Nest
Love it or hate it, but library management has to be done. Parts are the foundation of every great design, providing all of the functionality. Without them, our designs would be useless. But using parts is one thing, and creating them is quite another. Do any of us have time these days to make parts, keep them all organized, and hope they’re updated when we use them again in the future? We hope you do. Give us 30 minutes, and we’ll teach you how to build your library nest right the first time, so you’ll always have a solid foundation to call home.
It’s a Full-Time Job
There’s a reason why giant companies have their own CAD librarian teams. Making parts is tough. You’ve got to decipher spreadsheets for the right data that you need, take the time to make a symbol and footprint, and keep it all updated for years down the road. But for those of us engineers, working for small companies, we just don’t have the luxury of a team to do all our library management work.
When I first started designing, I did everything I could, to not make parts. I would scour existing libraries, grabbing footprints, symbols, and 3D models from various sources. This worked fine for simple designs with a few parts, but the more complicated my projects grew, the more issues I came across.
It was on one unfortunate day that I finally hit a snag. I had thrown down some parts from a library that I had been using for the past three years and sent my design off to get manufactured. A day later I get an email back from my fab house, turns out my BOM had a bunch of parts that were obsolete, end of life, gone forever.
What now?!
Panicking, I rushed around learning how to make my own parts. This took hours, and I hated every minute of it. If I would have just built my own libraries from the start this would have never happened. Why didn’t I just sit down and make the time to build my own libraries? There were just too many unknown questions that I didn’t take the time to find answers to, like:
- How do I even find the specs I need in a datasheet for my component? Those things are filled to the brim with 60+ pages and always felt overwhelming to dive into.
- And once I create my parts, how do I keep them organized and updated and searchable? I didn’t want to run into another obsolete part issue down the road.
- Most importantly, I don’t have time for this! How can I create my parts faster? It’s a pain placing all of those pins on my ICs.
If only I had known about some of the best practices in library management earlier. I spent what felt like years building up a solid foundation of parts that I can still confidently use today. But it took time to get me there, and lots of mistakes. Mistakes that you can avoid by learning from mine.
Start Building Your Foundation
Whether or not you like library management, there’s nothing to be gained by not learning how to make your own parts in Autodesk EAGLE. Sooner or later you’ll exhaust all of the free libraries out there, whether that’s running into a specialized part that is new or some other situation. When that happens, you better hope you aren’t under a tight deadline.
So are you ready to start building your own parts library foundation? Join us for our EAGLE First Flights webinar about library management and creation where you’ll learn how to:
- Create Parts Right the First Time. You’ll learn how to create your very first package and symbol in Autodesk EAGLE. Time to stop crossing your fingers hoping those other part libraries will work out.
- Decipher Your Datasheet. You’ll learn how to filter through all the details in a datasheet to find just the information you need to make your parts. You’ll be surprised at how much you already know.
- Save Building Time. We get it, making parts takes a long time, which is why Autodesk EAGLE has a wizard! You’ll learn how to walk step-by-step through the parts wizard to get your components made in no time.
Ready to start building? We’ll be hosting this live webinar on April 11th at 2pm EST for 30 minutes. That’s enough time to learn, with another 30 minutes to build your very own library!
Register here for our EAGLE First Flights: Building Your Library Nest webinar.