Eagle Cad is a fantastic schematic design program. If you’re not familiar with it, be sure to learn how to use Eagle Cad. Once you create your schematic and go through a few simple downloads, you can render your circuits in 3D. Thousands of the most common components are pre-modeled for your convenience. If you have a more uncommon component on your board, it renders a blank pad in its place. Plus, you can actually create your own 3D parts too.

• Comprehensive installation tutorial.
• The official Eagle3D website.
• Check out the thousands of components in the 3D parts library.
• How to make your own 3D parts.

You can also use Google Sketchup for your 3D Eagle models.  Now that you’ve created a virtual board, head on over to the HacknMod store to pick up parts for your DIY projects – Thousands of satisfied electronics gurus already have, why haven’t you?

Ahhh…The joy of holding your first beautiful green printed circuit board. A feeling every electronics guru understands. Eagle Cad is a fantastic free PCB design program. The learning curve is steep, but you’ll learn quickly with these fantastic tutorials.

• Learn the basics of the user interface and button control.
• Check out this outstanding, detailed tutorial about anything you’d possibly need to know.
• Sparkfun has a nice beginner tutorial.  Plus, they tell you how to create new parts.
• This last tutorial is a bit dated, but you’ll still learn plenty from it too.

If you want to make larger boards, you’ll have to pay for a license. Otherwise, for anything under 8×10cm, you can just use the free version.

Learn to render your Eagle schematics in 3D.  Subscribe to our RSS Feed to be sure you don’t miss out.