Does anyone know a good way to add an area of perf board prototyping area to a design in Eagle? I looked at ladyada's protoshield, but her multipad areas seem to be custom components that aren't available. I think I can use vias (if I can set the size appropriately) and manually wire them together, but that seems tedious and inelegant.
You could add some headers to the board. They have the correct spacing and you can wire them together as you like it (of course you wouldn't ever really solder the headers to the board, bt just use their mounting holes). There are some nice header parts int the sparkfun eagle library.
That's a good idea. It will be messy on the schematic and I'll have to figure out how to delete or modify that part of the silk screen, but it won't hurt to learn how to erase silk screen in eagle.
You can "smash" the part, and then you can easily delete the name and value attributes.
Adding vias isn't as bad as it sounds, depending a bit on exactly how you want them connected. You can use the GROUP/CUT/PASTE to rapidly increase the size of the "chunk" you're working with. (put down 5 vias, group and cut. Paste down 5 more copies of the 5 vias. Group and cut. Paste down more copies of the 30 vias...)
CMiYC: I looked up smash and it does sound like it will help with that issue.
westfw: I think for pretty much any useful arrangement that cut and paste method will work. Unless I want to do something really weird that will make the board harder to use.
The part that makes me nervous either way is actually getting useful holes (for example resizing the vias properly). The last board I made, I started with ladyada's protoshield, deleted what I didn't want, and then added what I did. It's only now that I'm starting from scratch that I realize just how much about Eagle I don't know.
One advantage of vias over other solutions (say, a defined "proto-area" library part) is that you can change the drill size (in groups) with the "change drill" command.