Download and first-time setup - Eagle Tutorial

- Okay, so now we're ready to get started with the software itself. And the first step to do that, if you don't have already have one, is to make an Autodesk account. It's free. You can go through that process here, and I won't bore you with the details. And once that's done, we can go ahead and download the software. And let's make a couple of notes about that while we get started. So you'll see here on this page, how to get started with a new Autodesk EAGLE license. You should know that there's a couple different flavors here. So as I scroll down, and here's the good stuff we're lookin for. You can see that there's a version of EAGLE that is completely free. It let's you do all the basics. You have to have like, Layout, Schematic, and Autorouter. We'll talk about those soon. The things that we're interested in here, are the amount of Signal Planner Layers. So right now, we can only make relatively simple PCB. But that's what we're here to do anyway, with the free license. And we're also restricted to a Board Area of 80 centimeters square. And, that's a completely artificial license. The program can handle much larger Boards. But that's one of the ways that they they encourage to get into more expensive license. And then, you can see up here what those costs would be. Which are broken up by annual and monthly costs. So, this is the place that we live in now, with modern software. Gone are the days were you just download a piece of software, and pay for it once, and that's the end of it. So this, as with many other programs, requires either a monthly or a yearly licensing free. But, free will be good enough for us to go head, and get done what we want to do today. And then, if you really love the program, you'll have the opportunity of paying more for larger features in the future. Okay, the last thing I'll do in our setup here, is to open up EAGLE. The first time I open it, we get the Control Panel, and we'll go into this in more depth in a moment. But, the last feature I would like you consider before we get started in Earnest, is to go up to Options, and then to say User Interface. So this, I believe, is a completely default panel. So it should look pretty much like yours looks like right now. If any of these features have changed significantly, you may want to change them to match mine. For example, one of the things I like to do, is to have a small cursor in each of these views, for both the Layout and the Schematic. I tend to like working with a Colored environment, and Detect Board Shape, I'll also have checked. It's a little hard to tell right now, just based on this menu, what these are going to look like. But if you're confused because your screen looks differently than mine, this is the place you would make those changes. All right, that wasn't too painful. Our software is ready to go, and we've done a little bit of pre-configuration. Now we're ready to take a tour of the Control Panel.