Render 3D realistic images of EAGLE circuit boards

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Have you ever wanted to see how some of your electronic projects would look before you actually get to build them? This post will show you how to create really good-looking 3D renderings of your PCB designs that you can use in presentations, websites or only to get an idea of how it will look. The process is the following: your PCB design created with Cadsoft (now Autodesk) EAGLE is converted to a POV-Ray source file with a script. POV-Ray uses ray tracing, a rendering technique for generating an image by tracing the path of light as pixels in an image plane and simulating the effects of its encounters with virtual objects.

This is an old post that I decided to update in 2020. Unfortunately, this method was never too popular and required software is now out of date and hard to find. Most of the links are dead by now. Meanwhile, the most important software, Cadsoft EAGLE was bought by Autodesk and included in Fusion 360. Fortunately, I was able to find an official download link for EAGLE 7.4.0, released in 2015. Everything will be done in a Windows 7 virtual machine.

Arduino Mega rendered with POV-Ray

Arduino Mega rendered with POV-Ray

Compile and setup PonyProg on Ubuntu

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PonyProg is a device programming software for the SI Prog serial interface programmer designed by Claudio Lanconelli. The latest version of the PonyProg software can be found on SourceForge, but there are no Ubuntu packages.

Here is how to compile it on Ubuntu. This post was updated for Ubuntu 16.10. First you'll have to install some development libraries:

sudo apt install build-essential libxt-dev libxmu-dev libxaw7-dev

Then download the archive from SourceForge and extract it to some folder you want (at the time of writing this, the latest version is 2.08d).