Does anyone enjoy doing Eagle PCB layouts?

Hi all. Laying out PCB's has always irritated me, definitely not my strong point lol.
I know in the past I was struggling with one, I posted it here and someone (I think maybe Boncuk?) laid it out 100 times better than my attempt!

I will be etching myself so I always try to keep to one layer, with minimal jumper wires!

Attached is the schematic. I'm building a time lapse motion dolly for my camera.

Here is one of my failed attempts

Depending on how good your etching is, you can route traces under 1206 and 0805 resistors/caps, and of course, between the pins of a DIP IC or header. Sometimes using a ground plane makes routing easier, so long as you get the isolation right, so its not too close (I used 24 mil spacing I think..). Generally you place things where you *want* them to be, try to route, then move some things around when you hit a brick wall. Connectors around the outside of course, but anything else can be moved.

Observe where the connections between chips are and try to orient the chips by rotating and moving them to minimize the distance and crossovers required for those connections. This can be seen from the rat's nest view of the board. Sometimes having one chip vertical and another horizontal is the best way to minimize the crossovers and connection distances.

As previously mentioned, but also consider using double sided copper clad. Leave one side intact as a ground plane, maybe hard to solder without thermal relief but should be doable. Would save lots of PCB real estate and lower your circuits noise.

Thanks guys. I'm considering trying AGAIN lol, but I have tried this board a few times and always seems to turn out the same for me. Failing that I might just etch it and use a lot of jumper wires. Or scrap the smd stuff and use all through hole? would seem a shame though

I think eagles user interface is not very good. You need to learn it well in order to make good designs. KiCad is another free CAD software that you could try.

Then there is this classic tutorial: https://www.electro-tech-online.com/custompdfs/2012/11/PCBDesignTutorialRevA.pdf