I licensed Eagle 6.5 in 2013. When I resumed designing boards this year it started bugging me to upgrade. Figuring it would be disruptive I put it off. Well, I went to finally upgrade this week and discovered that the ‘light’ license has no upgrade option. It’s another $69 if they want me to upgrade. Hmm, what do I get? So I read the release notes and couldn’t find any useful improvements. They certainly don’t seem to have fixed the things that irritate me the most about the program, such as:
- Annoying habit of not connecting parts to wires if the scale is off just slightly.
- No way to “fix” such connections.
- Parts get out of alignment and can’t be “snapped” to alignment.
- no decent basic parts libraries for stock discrete components. Forcing one to scrounge for SparkFun and ADAfruit libraries, or make your own.
- Not being able to “pin” the ground planes to the outline of the board.
- Having to “smash” parts and manually move the labels
As a bonus, the upgrade is one way for your files. So if you open something in v 7.5 you “convert” the file and can’t go back to it with an older version.
I decided to stay put on v 6.5. It works just fine and I haven’t found anything I need in the new version.
