This post was last modified on July 18th, 2011 at 11:50PM EST

In part 1 of the Mac OSX tutorial series, we installed X11 and fink on the system to enable open source hardware packages. Now, with that taken care of, it’s time to install PCB layout software.

Eagle Cad Overview:

EagleCad is an extremely popular PCB layout package for electronics hobbyists, with a number of libraries and tutorials freely available online. Eagle’s freeware version is available here, and is available for Mac OSX, in addition to the Linux and Windows platforms.

Eagle Tutorials:

This tutorial covers setting up PCB Layout software on Mac OSX, but doesn’t go into the finer points of using Eagle. For that, there are a number of excellent tutorials for how to use Eagle, particularly a number of well-written tutorials from Sparkfun Electronics:

• Eagle Schematic Tutorial
• Eagle PCB Layout Tutorial
• Eagle Custom Footprint Creation Tutorial
• Mistakes and Lessons Learned

In addition to the above tutorials, Eagle user documentation can be accessed in the Eagle documentation folder (/Applications/EAGLE/doc). There you will find the Eagle User Manual in pdf format, as well as a well-written tutorial detailing virtually all aspects of Eagle’s operation.

Eagle Libraries

In addition to Eagle, many hobby sites make their Eagle libraries freely available online. Many Eagle libraries are available on the Cadsoft website. In addition, some sites make their libraries available via services such as git and SVN. Here at NBitWonder, we followed the example set by Adafruit and Sparkfun and made our Eagle library available on github.

Gerber File Viewer:

In addition to the Eagle software suite, a Gerber file viewer is a very useful tool for checking your completed layouts before sending your gerber files off to the PCB house.
For Mac OSX, there are a few options:

1. McCad GView: The more user-friendly option, McCad has a freeware version, but it doesn’t support multiple layers without an upgrade.
2. gerbv: A slightly more involved install, gerbv is open source and considerably more capable than GView. gerbv is included as part of the geda project, and can be installed on Mac OSX as a fink package (“fink install gerbv” or “fink install geda-bundle”).