Are we ever going to see actual drawing support?

[chris.eganY2EK3]

We're coming up on 2 years of electronics being included in fusion and there is still virtually zero drawing support. 

My group is at the point that we're trying to get documentation in place to submit to board shops, and trying to make any kind of fab drawing is nearly impossible. You can start a drawing from the 3d board file, but it won't show all the items you need. The rendered soldermask doesn't show the actual cutouts (Which is a bug in general), so you're left to decide if you want to just show copper, or only through holes. The silkscreen layer just doesn't show in the drawings at all. There is zero support for adding drill tables, I've had to run the ULP in the layout window, print that to it's own PDF, and then insert it into the finished drawing PDF with a separate tool. Same with a BOM, my options are manually create the table in the drawing, which is painful, or output the BOM from the manufacturing processor and just make it it's own document. 

I realize that most information can be captured through the manufacturing processor outputs, but there is still information that is easiest shared through a drawing when trying to submit to a shop. The fact that I can't even get an accurate rendering of the board in a drawing is astonishing. 

Will there ever be actual drawing support? 

[Anonymous]

Hi, @chris.eganY2EK3 

Thanks for reflecting on this to us, I see several points here. Some areas do have room to improve because the initial proposal for 3D PCB in Fusion 360 is just providing a realistic view of PCB.

1. BOM for packages can be displayed if you select "All layer" for part list structure.

2. For drill tables, we have already implemented hole features in 3D PCB workspace. nowadays 3D PCB would display all holes are hole feature in timeline, which means drawing is able to fetch hole information from the model. Drill table is a new feature, drawing teams are working in progress on it so please stay tuned.

3. For the solder mask display problem in drawing, it might be hard to be solved. Because the Fusion drawing is majorly used for mechanical design, so drawing view would exclude all canvas even if you have selected the shaded style. In 3D PCB, for the sake of performance, we are using canvas to display soldermask. Anyway, I will reach this problem to the development team.

From my point of view, the importance of pain points listed above is 1>2>3, right? If I have understood somewhere wrongly, please let me know!

Thanks,

Yiqiu

[chris.eganY2EK3]

Replying specifically to item 3 first, because there is two parts to that one. First is the actual soldermask, which is a part that does import into the drawing workspace, because it is modeled as an actual physical part. The issue is that only drills are currently used to make cuts into the soldermask, not any of the SMD pad stop layer info. I attached a picture of a 3d PCB file with only the Layer1 soldermask body visible to show what I mean. 

This then means that PCBs brought into a drawing either do not show the component pads if the soldermask is visible, or you have to hide the soldermask and you see all the copper. Neither is a great option. 

The silkscreening is separate. I get that it's done as a canvas. It would be nice to be able to display this in a drawing so you can make notes against specific markings. 

Drill tables aren't really a new thing. They've been part of eagle forever, and the ULP to generate them exists and works in fusion. But there is no clean way to get them into a drawing. If that's being worked on then I look forward to seeing it completed. 



On the BOM front, listing the packages isn't super helpful on it's own. I don't see a clean way to add the column with the part part number, which is far more helpful. 

[yiqiu.han]

Hi, @chris.eganY2EK3 

The silkscreen problem, as I have explained in another post from you, We do have such a function called "cut stop layer geometry", If you check this option when viewing 3d PCB with options drop-down menu, the pad shape in soldermask can be cut as actual.

For either package BOM or hole table, Workaround from my side is opening table exported from ulp and CAM processor in excel and then do copy-paste to drawing. Although it is not associated with the change in PCB layout, this is the easiest way to make them appear in engineering drawings I believe. 

Hope that helps,

-Yiqiu