Taking the pain out of making custom Eagle parts

Cadsoft’s Eagle is a great tool for the independent maker. It’s a relatively easy to use PCB layout program with a ton of part libraries available for just about any project. If you’re using a part this isn’t included in these libraries, though, creating them by hand is a pain. [Dave] sent in a project he’s been working on that makes parts for Eagle with a Perl script, allowing for easy creation of custom parts that aren’t included in any library.

One thing that’s really convenient for custom Eagle parts is that most components are DIPs or some sort of leaded SMD component. [Dave]‘s script takes the dimensional data from any chip’s datasheet and creates a custom outline for each part. The inputs and outputs can also be ripped directly from the datasheet and assigned to the footprint, making for a relatively automated process that creates custom parts in Eagle. Now for someone to use this script with a little OCR to make a ‘create Eagle part from PDF’ app…