CLOSED - Electronics Design - Schematic Workspace: Share your feedback

[dvd.mlm]

We’ve shared recent news about the New Electronics Capabilities Coming to Fusion 360.

For overall feedback about the Electronics Workspace in Fusion 360 (such as Electronic Documents and 3D PCB Environment) view this discussion board.

Use this thread to share feedback about the Schematic Workspace, or any of the following sub-topics.

• Schematic Workspace
• Adding and Connecting Parts

YouTube Channel | Help Documentation

[isedhe]

My thoughts about the schematic workspace so far:
• To change properties of a device, I have to click on the center marker. Being able to click anywhere on the schematic symbol would be much easier.
• Cramming the inspector, design manager and selection filter boxes in one vertical column is useless as a default. I’m using a 27“ iMac and I’ve already changed UI scaling to get a little more space (running the HiDPI equivalent of 2880x1620) and it’s still way too crammed. Fortunately, those inspectors are tearable.
• The sheets pallet across the bottom of the screen is also not a useful default, as it steals vertical screen real estate. Those should go on the left edge by default.
• I can tear the sheets pallet off the bottom edge, but I cannot resize it nor dock it on the left or right edge.
• Resizing of pallet windows like the inspector is cumbersome, as you have to grab the lower right corner. Make all corners and edges draggable, please. Also, the draggable target zone is way too small.
• No context menu? Seriously? 😉
• Tearing entire tabs off of the main window is very very nice for multi screen setups. It would be useful to be able to merge several torn tabs into one window for the second screen. Right now it is either „multiple tabs in the main window“ or „each torn tab for itself in one extra window“. I would like to have a Fusion window on each screen and then multiple tabs in each window. Just make the tabs draggable to existing windows like in Firefox/Chrome.

[HF_Claus]

Coming from eagle, I just tried the fusion360 integration, and I'm having one problem and one missing feature so far (after 10 minutes of playing around):

1. I  was not able to find a way to view Schematic and PCB at the same time on two Monitors, is this somehow possible?

2. There is no direct integration of samacsys library loader, what one has in eagle

Thank you and I'm looking forward to using fusion 360 for all.

[isedhe]

You can drag the tab to tear it off the main fusion window, just like in most browsers.

[rbkyorem]

We need automated frame drawing script as one  availabe in Eagle.

Attributes edited in schematic are not pushed to board giving consistency errors.

Edit: attributes are pushed due to crash those changes were not saved.

[dps.lwk]

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@isedhe wrote:

• Cramming the inspector, design manager and selection filter boxes in one vertical column is useless as a default. I’m using a 27“ iMac and I’ve already changed UI scaling to get a little more space (running the HiDPI equivalent of 2880x1620) and it’s still way too crammed. Fortunately, those inspectors are tearable.
• The sheets pallet across the bottom of the screen is also not a useful default, as it steals vertical screen real estate. Those should go on the left edge by default.
• I can tear the sheets pallet off the bottom edge, but I cannot resize it nor dock it on the left or right edge.
• Resizing of pallet windows like the inspector is cumbersome, as you have to grab the lower right corner. Make all corners and edges draggable, please. Also, the draggable target zone is way too small.

Completely agree with all these

I just want to be able to tab stack them (sheets, inspector, design manager and selection filter) to one side just like I have them in EAGLE

This also applies to the 2D PCB view

Matt

[isedhe]

• The schematic workspace seems to be missing a print function... Or at least I cannot find it. Fortunately, the "print" command did what I expected...

[kb9ydn]

-Moving parts around after they are wired is amazingly clunky.  Why can't the wires follow the components in an intelligent fashion like traces do on the PCB side? 

-Why can't part names/values be moved around?  This would help readability immensely.

-Make the copy command able to drop more than a single copy of a part without have to click on the original part every single stupid time.  Adding parts from the library does this, why is the copy command different?

-Some commands when accessed from the right click menu, deactivate themselves (returning control to the "select" tool) when they are finished, but others do not.  The copy command for example returns control back to the "select" tool; whereas change name, change value, mirror, and delete do not.  This is confusing and incredibly annoying.

-Whenever you use one of buttons from the quick access bar at the bottom, focus moves off the main window, which then requires an extra mouse click (sometimes) to put focus back on the main window. 

-Does the rotate command really need to pop up its own parameter box?  The parameter box is huge and takes up a lot of screen space for basically no reason.

-Screen utilization is generally not very good, although it's understandable being that it's an initial release.

-The drawing tools for the symbol editor are seriously primitive compared to the Fusion sketcher.  How about leveraging the Fusion sketcher for symbol creation?

C|

[drwhittaker72]

I needed to print out a copy of a schematic in the schematic editor for a customer. I was unable to find a print command in the editor. Now what do I do?

[wmbYBW5Q]

I have lost track of the number of EDA systems I have used in my career, and have contributed to the development of several, so I consider myself an expert user.  Here are my thoughts after a half hour of working with the the new Fusion EDA capabilities. The main criticism so far is that moving stuff is too tricky.  Most modern EDA systems are good at selecting objects if you point at any plausible place on the object; with Fusion you have to point at the little plus in the middle, which (a) requires a lot of precision and sharp vision and (b) isn't at all obvious at first. Moving groups is way too hard.  With other systems, you drag a rectangle around the group, and it is highlighted, then you can move it straightaway.  With Fusion, the only way I have found is to select group, then hit the move icon at the top, then right click and choose Move Group.  So far this is losing in a big way on the ease of use front, compared to the competition.

Another problem is the difficulty of finding stuff in libraries.  First of all, the search is too hard.  Let's say I want to find the part MCP23017, but I forgot the prefix. I type 23017 in the search box and nothing comes up. Then I see the fine print that says I have to use wildcards, so I try *23017* and still nothing.  Finally I notice the library manager and open that, to find hundreds of extra libraries.  Which one of the, if any, has that part?  I finally find it in the adafruit library, but to do that I have to "use" a bunch of libraries first before I can search.

My current pick for "easiest EDA system to use" is easyEDA.  I managed to figure out how to use it in minutes, created a design with help selecting specific parts that are in stock at a prototype shop, did a PCB layout, and placed the prototype order, all within a span two days, having never used that particular system before.  Almost everything worked just like I expected, and when something didn't work, it was easy to search for a solution on the web. I suggest that you do some user testing versus systems like that.

[isedhe]

@drwhittaker72I managed to print stuff by typing the "print" command. It seems all Eagle commands are still valid and working in Fusion 360.

[isedhe]

• I moved a bunch of components (in a group, if that matters) from the first schematic page to a new page I created. However, all component name and value fields are now invisible and I can't get them to show up anymore by using the DISPLAY command. The names and values are still associated with the device, but the text labels are not visible. Newly added components show their lables just fine on the second schematic page.
• When I add a C_CHIP-0805(2012-METRIC) from the Capacitor/C library (the managed one saying by Fusion Electronics), the cap has a designator of "U$1" and a value of "C_CHIP-0805(2012-METRIC)". When I want to change the value, I get a message box saying (paraphrased from german): "The component 'U$1' has no user-editable value. Would you like to change it anyway?". If I click yes, I can set the value to let's say "10nF" just fine. The designator should start with C and the value should be user-editable.

[kb9ydn]

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@wmbYBW5Q wrote:

I have lost track of the number of EDA systems I have used in my career, and have contributed to the development of several, so I consider myself an expert user.  Here are my thoughts after a half hour of working with the the new Fusion EDA capabilities. The main criticism so far is that moving stuff is too tricky.  Most modern EDA systems are good at selecting objects if you point at any plausible place on the object; with Fusion you have to point at the little plus in the middle, which (a) requires a lot of precision and sharp vision and (b) isn't at all obvious at first. Moving groups is way too hard.  With other systems, you drag a rectangle around the group, and it is highlighted, then you can move it straightaway.  With Fusion, the only way I have found is to select group, then hit the move icon at the top, then right click and choose Move Group.  So far this is losing in a big way on the ease of use front, compared to the competition.

The part about having to click on the "center" cross hairs of a component to move (or in fact do anything with) them is super annoying.  In a lot of cases you can't even see the cross hairs because they're obscured by the symbol.  This serves zero purpose as far as I can tell.

As for moving groups, the trick is to select the group, then click on the stupid cross hairs of one of the components in the group and then drag the whole group.  Why you can't just click anywhere within the general vicinity of the group I don't know.  This seems to be a weird carryover from Eagle.

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@wmbYBW5Q wrote:

Another problem is the difficulty of finding stuff in libraries.  First of all, the search is too hard.  Let's say I want to find the part MCP23017, but I forgot the prefix. I type 23017 in the search box and nothing comes up. Then I see the fine print that says I have to use wildcards, so I try *23017* and still nothing.  Finally I notice the library manager and open that, to find hundreds of extra libraries.  Which one of the, if any, has that part?  I finally find it in the adafruit library, but to do that I have to "use" a bunch of libraries first before I can search.

---

The wildcard thing make sense but is a little clunky by today's standards.  The default search should include those wildcards without having to explicitly type them.  If you want an exact search use quotes around the search term.  Also the extra used vs. unused libraries abstraction is an extra layer that seems a bit superfluous.  I suppose if you have a small group of libraries that you really only ever use, it might make it a bit faster to only show those libraries.  But even then you're probably always going to search by keyword so what does it matter?  My guess is that this is a leftover from long ago when searching through a lot of library files on a hard disk was slow.  Creating curated library groups allowed for faster searching.  Now that we have solid state drives and crazy fast CPUs it's mostly irrelevant.

C|

[wmbYBW5Q]

Curation is the key.  KiCAD is much easier to use now that it has a
coherent curated set of libraries, compared to the old days when its
libraries were sparse and all over the map.  The thing that drew me to
use easyEDA for my latest project, even after having already done the
design in KiCAD, was the tight integration with a prototyping shop that
can do assembly from parts stocked at the PCB vendor - parts that can be
chosen right at the "Add Part" level.  That was a huge timesaver,
bypassing several tedious and time-consuming "supply chain" steps.  It's
a whole new level of curation.  Computer drawing is easy - supply chain
is not.

[kb9ydn]

---

@wmbYBW5Q wrote:
Curation is the key.  KiCAD is much easier to use now that it has a
coherent curated set of libraries, compared to the old days when its
libraries were sparse and all over the map.  The thing that drew me to
use easyEDA for my latest project, even after having already done the
design in KiCAD, was the tight integration with a prototyping shop that
can do assembly from parts stocked at the PCB vendor - parts that can be
chosen right at the "Add Part" level.  That was a huge timesaver,
bypassing several tedious and time-consuming "supply chain" steps.  It's
a whole new level of curation.  Computer drawing is easy - supply chain
is not.

---

Linking up the part libraries with the supply chain totally makes sense.  That could be a huge time saver, especially if the PCB shop is doing the assembly.

Curated libraries though, what is is about the curation that is specifically easier?  It's been several years since I've used KiCAD and mostly what I remember is that there just weren't many libraries available.  I don't remember the organization being particularly unruly (though it has been awhile).

C|

[dvd.mlm]

Thank you everyone for ALL your valuable feedback. We really appreciate it and our team is working hard to incorporate as many of your suggestions as possible. In the time that this thread has been active we’ve been able to address a few issues like:

Responding to your feedback

Many points in this thread suggested that we need to improve knowledge and awareness of few key features. Our team is working on it! Check for additional updates and resources about Fusion 360 Electronics Design on our YouTube Channel and Autodesk Knowledge Network for Fusion 360 Electronics Design.  

Continue to share feedback on the Electronics Discussion Board

Since we now have a dedicated Fusion 360 Electronics discussion board, we will close this thread to additional responses. We encourage you to continue posting your suggestions on the Electronics discussion board so they can be responded to appropriately. You can find the Fusion 360 Electronics forum here: https://forums.autodesk.com/t5/fusion-360-electronics/bd-p/6071

Best Regards,

Autodesk Team

​Jorge Garcia - Product Support Specialist for Fusion 360 and EAGLE

David Milam – Fusion 360 Product Research Admin