Making Custom Footprints in EAGLE
This is a tutorial for the Eagle cad program, designed for intermediate level users. The idea is to import images of parts to create a customized footprint that matches the footprint on the component, and it can be done simply using the tools that Eagle provides.
As always, necessity is the mother of invention, and is what sparked using this Eagle tool here at SparkFun. Too many times we encountered problems with footprints having incorrect proportions, incorrect measurements, and often-times were too busy (too many things too close to each other). This led to reflow problems in our ovens, caused shifted parts, tombstones, and many, many jumpers to ground, especially on our QFN package ICs.
Our Testing and Quality Control Manager, Pete Lewis, figured out a good system to utilize Eagle’s built-in image importer so that we could get exact footprints created for the problem parts.
As mentioned, this tutorial requires some intermediate skills with Eagle. If you would like a refresher on how to use Eagle as well as a few other skills, please visit these other tutorials.
- PCB Basics
- How to Read a Schematic
- How to install and setup Eagle PCB software
- How to layout PTH PCBs: Schematic
- How to layout PTH PCBs: Board Layout
- Creating SMD Footprints
- How to layout SMD PCBs