The Plain Facts, Carved
What It Is
Custom Eagle symbols, devices, packages, and scripts — the garden’s own library for the PCB CAD of the era. Footprints for parts the catalogs had never heard of, symbols drawn by hand, ULP scripts for the jobs the tool refused — an entire alphabet of the bench, filed and reusable.
Eagle, in its day, was the workshop’s second language; a personal library was how you knew a bench was serious. Every part drawn here was drawn because somewhere a schematic needed it and no vendor supplied it.
It is the oldest kind of tool there is: the marks a maker keeps so the next drawing does not start from nothing.
Told in the Seanchaí Tradition
The Build Story
An eagle sits on the crown of Yggdrasil — the Norse are very specific about this — and it is not there to be beautiful; it is there to see. Between its eyes, the stories say, sits a hawk, and the two of them watch everything that is built or broken beneath the tree, and say what they see to whoever climbs high enough to hear. The eagle’s whole job in the mythology is the librarian’s job: witness, remember, keep. The Athlone bench learned the job early — 2011, the first year of the Elder grove — because Eagle, the CAD tool, arrived with an empty shelf: no footprints for the parts the bench already owned, no symbols for the ones the catalogs under-describe, no scripts for the chores the tool outsourced to nobody. So the maker did the tree’s work and made the marks: symbols, devices, packages, scripts, each one a small stone carved with the exact shape of a real part, filed where every later board would look first. Draw a thing once, says the eagle on the tree, and everything drawn after sees through your eyes. The moss grows on this stone like lichen on a surveyor’s benchmark — the green patina of the first mark in a long map.