how to arrange LED's in a circle with eagle

[sidmonster]

Hello,

I have been using eagle for my control panels for the past few months and one thing I've not gotten the hang of is how to arrange led's in a circle, they always come out kind of looking like an octagon rather than a circle, I can do it if I set the grid to "finest" but I want to make sure they are all evenly spaced. Does someone have an eagle part library with led circles or is there some trick people are using?

[m00dawg]

I thought there was an Eagle library for circular LEDs on the wiki but didn't find out. With a bit of math, you could figure out the angle of the LEDs and positions. Eagle allows you to specify both absolute positions and angles so you could do it that way.

I would consider making an Eagle library for it so you can just plop down your LED rings into your schematic for however many you need. That way they will at least look the same.

Failing that, you can find LED rings as pre-built parts. Not as fun, but seems like they work - I haven't tried them though so I don't have any specifics on where to go to find them. But I know they exist :)

[nuke]

...just make an own package in library and move the led off the center to the right, then you can use the angle tool to rotate them around that centerpoint... 360/ amount of leds = angle :ahappy:

[Wilba]

Can't you design what you want with some other program (like Inkscape) and then type in the co-ordinates for each LED?

I'm not an Eagle user, but that's what I did with another crazy idea I had recently, arranging LEDs according to Fermat's spiral, just made a spreadsheet to calculate the coordinates I wanted and then copy/pasted into the component's coordinates.

[nILS]

[x] What wilba said.

position x(n) = r * sin(n * (1 / n) * 2 * Pi)

position y(n) = -r * cos(n * (1 / n) * 2 * Pi)

for n LEDs arranged in a circle with radius r.

[m00dawg]

BAM there's the math! That should make things easy!

[Bääääär]

There's an ulp for that. Take a look at cmd-draw.ulp

It does exactly what you need (and even more). Experiment with its settings, its pretty straight forward. Just put some LEDs on your board, with names adjunct to each other. Example LED10, LED11, LED12, LED13. The run the ulp and select "Move". (You want the LEDs to be moved). Enter the name of the first element, then radius, start and stop angle (and don't forget to set a tick on "rotate item to match") and what else you might want to let the script do. Then hit enter and be happy :)

Bääääär

Edited December 16, 2011 by Bääääär