utilities

We’re trying to take it up a notch by adding the Dangerous Prototype logo to future PCBs. We weren’t sure how to do this in Cadsoft Eagle, so we thought we’d share what we did.

The Cadsoft miscellaneous downloads page has a number of utilities and Perl scripts that convert images to Eagle compatible scripts. We tried a few, and liked BMP2EAGLE the best. BMP2EAGLE works by converting simple monochrome bitmap images into dots that can be drawn in Eagle with a script.

1. The bitmap format used by our usual photo editor wasn’t compatible with BMP2EAGLE.  We saved the logo as a large (450px wide) GIF file, loaded that in Windows Paint and saved it as a BMP. Windows Paint outputs a compatible format.
2. Start BMP2EAGLE and load the image file.
3. The ‘Scale’ setting determines how big each bitmap pixel will be in Eagle. We got the best ‘resolution’ by using a large image and small scale value (0.2mils per pixel) to produce a small logo.
4. BMP2EAGLE scripts draw the black areas of the bitmap, tick ‘Negative’ if you’d rather draw the white areas.
5. Click start to output the script.
6. Open Eagle and create a new part library, then create a new package.
7. Run the script (file->script) to draw the image on the new package. Save the library.
8. Load the library for use (library->use). Add the logo from the library directly to the PCB (there’s no schematic component).

Maybe this will help someone else import a logo or image into Eagle. There’s a few other conversion utilities in the Cadsoft miscellaneous download folder if BMP2EAGE doesn’t work for you.