Trying to work on my first Arduino shield, but very much a novice With Eagle CAD.
The aim is to fit two L293D IC on one shield (preferably singe sided, but a few jumpers are far from an issue)
So far iv laid it all out on the .sch, but end up with a huge amount of jumpers when i try and auto route, and for an unknown reason the two L293D's have air wire connecting one to the other that are not on the shield.sch??????
Any chance someone could take a look at my files and make some design recommendations as im pulling my hair out.
I wouldn't really single sided board. Double sided is not that much more expensive but offer you much more freedom.
Don't use auto route. Route manually, do the power pins first. Make sure you use thicker tracks for these. Thinner ones for the signal, something like 12mil.
As Lady Ada would tell you, Auto Route stinks. It's often quicker and easier to just manually route, you'll be moving components around a lot at first, but once you start thinking along those lines, placement becomes automatic to give the traces room to flow.
Once you convert to using the photo process, double sided boards are the way to go.
If you have enough "real-estate" you really can make a good board you can fab yourself. I consider it an "art" project and get great joy in crafting my own boards.
Does autoroute suck badly in Eagle? My impression was that it was its best feature; otherwise why not use Fritzing (lack of component libraries aside; but if that is such an issue, make your own components and publish them)? Oh - and not being able to output Eagle layouts on Fritzing (but this is a homebrew board, so it shouldn't be an issue?)...
Just curious - I've looked at Eagle before, and thought it looked cool, but the price is daunting for larger sizes unless you are becoming a fab-shop; I've installed Fritzing, and like it a lot, but it is missing a few components (why there aren't any TO-3 transistors, I don't know, but I have a design I want to transfer, so I might have to make those myself)...
