Printing off of Eagle

[lemonyx]

Hi All,

I've put in a search for this and just got Handyman's post on diy PCB's. Nice diy article but I don't want to use the clear cel and make my boards from there.

Since I don't have a laser printer at home, I want to "print" my board off the laser printer at work so I can do the tonner transfer method. I've looked in the print option in Eagle (using Eagle lite) and there is nothing for this - unless I'm blind.

So how can I take my board from home, mirrored and ready to print it off from work - short of downloading Eagle to one of the PC's at work - county ISD won't like that. I've tried Infran Viewer and the scale was way off and I really don't want to print it off and have to go sodmewhere to get it reduced so i can use it.

I've seen site's where guy's have uploaded their boards to for others to use, just iport it as pdf and print it off.

 

[tinman10011001]

One solution is to install the printer drivers of the printer that you use at work. When you print at home, print to a file. Take that file to work and then send it to the printer using a DOS prompt. There are also utilities that you can use to send the file to the printer at work, although I haven't had to use them.

On the Home System using Windows OS:
After installing the printer drivers, open the printers folder, right click on the printer that needs to print to a file, select ports, select 'Print to File'. Open Eagle, and print using that printer.

On the System at Work:
Open a command prompt then,

copy printer.prn > lpt1

assuming the printer is on lpt1.

 

[lemonyx]

So you can output your "board" to a file, but can you mirror it before hand? I can only see the mirror function in the "gerber" part of the output and not in the print option. I'll have to go home and play with some more @ work now.

Thanks for the work around

 

[philba]

you can print mirrored. the print dialog has a check box for mirrored.

why not just install eagle at work? or make gerbers and take them to work. use a gerber viewer like viewmate to print them. lotta ways to skin that cat.

 

[justDIY]

use the EXPORT feature instead of print ... export your board at 600 or 1200 dpi (whatever the res of your printer is)

this will give you a rather large bitmap, but it will be at the exact scale you need it to be, then you just use any picture viewer app and print the picture without any scaling options selected ... should come out exactly right.

my method (for making transparencies for the photolithographic method) is a bit more involved ... I go to export, 600 dpi to clipboard ... then I fire up paintshop pro, paste my design as a new image ... now I clean up any weirdness (like tiny orphans of a ground plane pour), I also mirror the design if needed, and then copy and paste it into a new image, sized for the PCB blank i'll be using ... I can usually fit 6-12 designs on a single 4x6 inch PCB. Then I save the file in the TIFF format, so the scale is preserved ... now I open it on my machine with the inkjet printer, print it to acetate and off I go.

 

[philba]

what ever works but I've had trouble with export and getting it to not scale properly. in theory, print give you more control over scaling but I much prefer the gerber viewer as it allows me to do multiple copies of the board. I usually make 2 at a time - gives me a better shot at getting at least one good pcb.

 

[lemonyx]

Thanks guys for the help.

I'm doing this on the "cheap". I tried to download Eagle @ work, but the firewall there just won't let me do it - I work at the Sheriffs office and in between booking custodies and taking their photos, I have some "Free time" to surf - so why not work on my projects

I'll try the Gerber method. I would assume that you can do anything with Viewmate to your board. Where can I get viewmate? Is it free?


Found it - and it's free


thanks again

 

[philba]

note that you should mirror before generating the gerbers. Viewmate mirroring is a little more involved than a checkbox. the free version doesn't allow saving so I dont make any changes that i want to save.

By the way, you could put the eagle installation file on a CD-ROM...

 

[lemonyx]

thank you - will do