evandude
New Member
So, this has been bugging me for a long time now (ever since I got familiar with Eagle, and got my toner transfer PCB methods down well enough to make decent boards): the narrowest trace width you can select in eagle is 10 mils.
Maybe I've just missed something that everyone else has known about for years, but I had never been able to find any way to get a narrower trace width (or, for that matter, any DIFFERENT trace widths than those that were on the drop-down list) - not in the options menus, not in the help file, and not in a series of google searches for info. It seemed either nobody knew, nobody cared, or everyone thought it was so easy to do that it wasn't worth mentioning.
Anyway, I finally stumbled upon the answer today in one of my "there has just GOT to be some way to do this" sessions, sitting down and poring over every possible option... Not only that, but I stumbled upon two different ways of doing it. So, just in case anyone else was wondering:
If you select the CHANGE tool (wrench icon), go to "width", and go all the way down to the bottom of the list you'll see "..." which pops up a box and lets you type in whatever trace width you want, in inches in my case (so for 5 mils, enter 0.005) This not only allows you to change any existing traces to this width, but it also adds this new width to the drop-down box so you can select it for new traces. This wasn't that intuitive so I'm not surprised it took me a while to find.
Alternatively, (and of course I figured this one out only after stumbling onto the other method), you can just select the text in the drop-down width box and just type in your desired width there. It seems to like to replace whatever width you had selected before, so it's probably a good idea to select the first option (zero width) before typing in your new one.
This method seems like it should have been somewhat more obvious, or at least makes more sense in retrospect, but then again typing a custom value into a drop-down box is not exactly a "normal" input method in my opinion.
Either way, it doesn't appear that any custom values you add to that list will stay there when you change to a different board - if anyone has any info on how it might be possible to "globally" add this custom width as a value that is always selectable by default, I'm all ears. But, since all you have to do is type it in once and it's on the list for a particular board, it's not a big hassle even this way.
Now, feel free to tell me I'm a fool and that you've all known about this for years
Maybe I've just missed something that everyone else has known about for years, but I had never been able to find any way to get a narrower trace width (or, for that matter, any DIFFERENT trace widths than those that were on the drop-down list) - not in the options menus, not in the help file, and not in a series of google searches for info. It seemed either nobody knew, nobody cared, or everyone thought it was so easy to do that it wasn't worth mentioning.
Anyway, I finally stumbled upon the answer today in one of my "there has just GOT to be some way to do this" sessions, sitting down and poring over every possible option... Not only that, but I stumbled upon two different ways of doing it. So, just in case anyone else was wondering:
If you select the CHANGE tool (wrench icon), go to "width", and go all the way down to the bottom of the list you'll see "..." which pops up a box and lets you type in whatever trace width you want, in inches in my case (so for 5 mils, enter 0.005) This not only allows you to change any existing traces to this width, but it also adds this new width to the drop-down box so you can select it for new traces. This wasn't that intuitive so I'm not surprised it took me a while to find.
Alternatively, (and of course I figured this one out only after stumbling onto the other method), you can just select the text in the drop-down width box and just type in your desired width there. It seems to like to replace whatever width you had selected before, so it's probably a good idea to select the first option (zero width) before typing in your new one.
This method seems like it should have been somewhat more obvious, or at least makes more sense in retrospect, but then again typing a custom value into a drop-down box is not exactly a "normal" input method in my opinion.
Either way, it doesn't appear that any custom values you add to that list will stay there when you change to a different board - if anyone has any info on how it might be possible to "globally" add this custom width as a value that is always selectable by default, I'm all ears. But, since all you have to do is type it in once and it's on the list for a particular board, it's not a big hassle even this way.
Now, feel free to tell me I'm a fool and that you've all known about this for years