Eagle questions. Best practices?

[cosminprund]

First the questions: How do you search the libraries? For example I just spent a lot of time looking for a sktothy diode in an D-PAK package and failed to find one. Is there a way to easily find anything in there? This is not related to that particular part, I'll trying drawing my own just to get the hang of it, but for future reference I'd be curious how do you folks do it.

Second question is about "Best Practices":
Searching here and there over the world wide google, apparently people are making there own libraries and packages. I can see the benefit of that: If I had all the components I use in one single library that I built from ground up I wouldn't need a search function But is this the way to go? I'm just noobing around with Eagle at the moment, but I'd like to learn it the right way!

[Razor Concepts]

I think spending a lot of time in Eagle will eventually lead to knowing where stuff is. When I first started and was looking for some pins, it took a while but eventually I stumbled across the "pinheader" library - and so for now on I know exactly where to look.

Also a generic library is good to have, I downloaded the SparkFun library which has a bunch of the most commonly used parts.

[Soeren]

Hi,

You will quickly find that about 95% of the time you use certain standard components, like eg. 2 resistor, a few electrolytic and polyxxx caps, a few transistors etc. according to what you have in stock.
If you make a schematic with one of each of those - no need to connect them - you can make a library containing just those components, by running a script that you can download from Cadsoft. That's a real timesaver.

If you want to find a schottky diode, it won't show when you write "sktothy" - spelling correctly is mandatory for finding anything in Eagle.
 

[Admin]

If I know I am looking for an SMD, I just leave the search field blank, but with 'smd' checked.

It'll list all the SMD parts, and I just manually search from there.

Eagle, to be honest, has a horrible search engine that doesn't work very well, and the part creation tool is quite frustrating too . . .

[cosminprund]

Thanks for the tips. I just spent allmost a whole sunday drawing what in retrospective is a simple circuit in eagle: An Atmega168 (SMD) + an FT232RL, a SMD MiniB USB socket, the usual assortment of voltage regulator, crystal, caps, LEDs + what appears to be the "standard" 3 raws headers for ADC and Servos

It was interesting and I learned allot (that's how I learn best: attack a difficult problem and stay with it until it's done). I modified an SparKfun 2x10 header and turned it into an 3x8 header - much easier to use that way! Tonight I'll be transferring my design to PCB and see how it works.