gaussmarkov: diy fx

To start, suppose that you have completed a layout like the Green Ringer shown here.

The highlighted button (next to the GND pad) initiates the POLYGON command. Choose that or enter “polygon” into Eagle’s command line.

And … before you do anything else … also enter “gnd” into the command line. This is a quick and easy way to tell Eagle that the polygon is going to create copper that is part of the ground net. This assumes, of course, that you are using GND as the name for the ground net. That is the default in Eagle and in the gaussmarkov libraries.

Now take your mouse and enter the corners of the area to be filled. I generally outline the entire board and that is what I do in this tutorial.

1. First, I clicked on the GND pad in the lower left-hand corner.
2. Second, I clicked on the +9V pad in the upper left-hand corner.
3. Third, I clicked on the upper right hand corner (outside the bevel).

Before clicking on the OUT pad in the bottom right-hand corner, my screen looks like this:

When you try this in Eagle, you will find that it may be hard to see the outline of the polygon that you are creating. Notice a couple of things in this picture.

• Now there appears to be a solid trace connecting the two pads of C5 that was not there before and the upper right-hand corner has been completed.
• Under C4 you can see the outline of a new trace that is about to be entered when I click on the OUT pad in the lower right-hand corner.

If I were not entering this outline over existing traces then it would be easier to see what I am doing. If you get confused, you can always move your mouse off the layout and see that you are indeed entering a new trace because the outline of the new trace will follow your mouse cursor.

Finally, I clicked on the GND pad a second time to complete the rectangle around the entire layout. Alternatively, I could have double-clicked on the OUT pad and Eagle would have completed the rectangle for me. Here is what things look like now:

You can see the rectangle highlighted in light blue.

Oops, you can also see that I accidentally deleted some of the ground traces as I was creating this tutorial. R10 and R12 are not grounded as they should be. That’s a good accident, because you will see on the next page that the ground pour takes care of this.