Exploring Eagle CAD ULPs #6 – Group-aps_v4.ULP Autoplace by Group

Welcome to the 6th post of the “Exploring Eagle CAD ULPs” series. Each post will be discussing 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 think about it as a plug-in for Eagle.

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

In the previous post we explored Place50 ULP which places all parts of the board to the position in the schematic. Place50 moves all parts of the board, but sometimes we need to do this auto-placement for just a certain group of parts. Beside that, we can’t change the position scaling factor in Place50. Group-aps_v4 ULP overcomes these two points of limitation in Place50 ULP by doing the auto-placement by group, and having user defined position scaling and offset.

To use Group-aps_v4 ULP first download it from Autodesk website. Before running it in the schematic editor, you need to define a group of parts first.

Group-aps_v4 has a simple dialog to enter scale and offset values.

Scale is used to scale the value of original position (X and Y) of the parts in the defined group in the schematic. While X,Y offset is used to offset the final position of the part in the board after scaling it. For example, if scale was 0.5 and the position (in mil) for the part is (500,100) then is will be considered as (250,50).

Group-aps_v4 ULP originally places the group in the calculated position of the the first part. So as an output, all parts will have the same X and Y and that’s not effective. So i made a simple edit to the ULP to solve this issue. You can download the updated version N_group-aps_v4.ulp.

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