Install CadSoft EAGLE on Linux

EAGLE is a complete EDA software with schematic capture and printed circuit board design. It has a free version that can be used for personal and non-commercial purposes to design circuit boards smaller than 100 x 80 mm and with no more than two copper layers. Another advantage of EAGLE is that it runs on all major operating systems.

The Linux version is supplied as an architecture dependent self extracting run archive. It can be installed on most distros by executing the downloaded file. There is however one small issue. The installer does not create a desktop entry for the main EAGLE executable. Therefore you have to navigate to the folder where it is installed each time you want to launch it.

Besides showing how to install it (on Ubuntu), this article will give you a simple desktop entry file that will bring a shortcut to EAGLE in your distro application menu. Note that you will have to change version numbers accordingly, because EAGLE is updated frequently.

[Video] Render 3D images of EAGLE PCB projects

This is a video follow-up of my previous tutorial about EAGLE and POV-Ray. I will outline below the main steps that you will see in the video and I will continue to improve the result at the end of this post.

If you haven't read about this before, EAGLE is a schematic capture and circuit board design software. The circuit boards can be processed with a set of scripts and converted into POV-Ray files. In this way you can render great looking 3D pictures of the circuit boards. All used software is available for all major operating systems. The video presents only Linux Ubuntu installation and configuration.

Render 3D realistic images of EAGLE circuit boards

Have you ever wanted to see how some of your electronic projects would look before you actually get to build them? This post will show you how to create really good-looking 3D renderings of your PCB designs that you can use in presentations, websites or only to get an idea of how it will look. The process is the following: your PCB design created with Cadsoft (now Autodesk) EAGLE is converted to a POV-Ray source file with a script. POV-Ray uses ray tracing, a rendering technique for generating an image by tracing the path of light as pixels in an image plane and simulating the effects of its encounters with virtual objects.

This is an old post that I decided to update in 2020. Unfortunately, this method was never too popular and required software is now out of date and hard to find. Most of the links are dead by now. Meanwhile, the most important software, Cadsoft EAGLE was bought by Autodesk and included in Fusion 360. Fortunately, I was able to find an official download link for EAGLE 7.4.0, released in 2015. Everything will be done in a Windows 7 virtual machine.

Arduino Mega rendered with POV-Ray