Exploring Eagle CAD ULPs #3 – Teardrops.ULP Make A Teardrop Shape Connection With Pads and Vias

Welcome to the third post of the “Exploring Eagle CAD ULPs” series. Every week we will publish a new post about one useful ULP in Eagle CAD.

“ULP” User Language Program is a plain text file which is written in a C­-like syntax and can be used to access the EAGLE data structures and to create a wide variety of output files. You can consider it like a plug-in for Eagle.

You can reach the posts published in this series using the following link.

In this post we are going to explore a ULP called ‘Teardrops.ULP’. This ULP makes a teardrop shape connection between the traces and the vias or pads.

Before I found this ULP, I thought that I can’t do the teardrop thing using Eagle CAD, while I saw a lot of designs that have been done using Altium have this feature.

Using teardrop shape connection may result in many advantages:

1. It prevents drill breakout due to drill misalignment where the trace joins the via or through hole.
2. It makes stronger connection between the traces and the pads. Thermal expansion when re-soldering/desoldering could sometimes lead to a loose connection where the trace joins the pad.

This ULP should be used with forethought or on a copy of your board file just before plotting because it would be difficult to remove teardrops afterwards. Once added, they can’t be undone using ctrl-z.

In the GIF below, I tried to demonstrate how to use this ULP.

Note: You don’t need to download and add this ULP. it’s available in the ulp directory.
To use it, just press the ULP icon from the tool-bar and search for ‘teardrop.ulp’.

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