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EAGLE Component Height for Fusion 360

EAGLE Component Height for Fusion 360

Been using EAGLE for years, and a huge fan of Fusion 360. Was happy to see the EAGLE acquisition, and very excited about the increased cooperation with F360.

 

Just tried out the "Sync to Fusion" feature from EAGLE, on this simple little power board design I just finished:

 

Screen Shot 2017-08-11 at 2.55.32 PM.png

 

I can export this "very standard" EAGLE design to Fusion without doing anything extra. I just get a bunch of warnings about missing 3D files, which makes sense because I haven't modeled any of these parts or gone in search of models to associate:

 

Screen Shot 2017-08-11 at 2.56.53 PM.png

 

When it pushes to Fusion and you take a look, you essentially just see the "Board" component, with no electrical components visible, because there are no models.

 

Screen Shot 2017-08-11 at 2.58.05 PM.png

 

But if you hide the board component, you can see that for every electrical component, a body has been generated. Every one of these bodies are rectangular, and are just set to be large enough to contain all the features in the EAGLE "Package" for that component. Then that rectangle is extruded just a tiny bit (.1mm here) so that it produces a 3D body.

 

Screen Shot 2017-08-11 at 2.58.48 PM.png

 

If those rectangles were just extruded to the correct height, I'd have a board assembly model with decent fidelity with almost no extra effort. For the majority of electronics designs, even a crude 3D model based on simple extruded rectangles is plenty to accomplish most ECAD/MCAD tasks like basic clearance/fit checks. For components where more detail is needed, a "proper" 3D model can be used, but most of the time these simple shapes are sufficient.

 

There is already a mechanism in EAGLE for giving devices arbitrary "Attributes" like BOM information or whatever else you want to put in there. If it was possible to assign a "HEIGHT" attribute to a device, and then auto-generate those placeholder bodies to that height (instead of .1mm) it would greatly improve the fidelity of the models for "standard" EAGLE designs with the very minimum effort from electronics designers. 

 

Screen Shot 2017-08-11 at 3.02.11 PM.png

1 Comment
TrippyLighting
Consultant

The integration between Eagle and Fusion 360 has really just started. You should also post this or at least a reference to this in the Preview section of the Forum.

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