Bill of Materials and the Library for Schematics

[bpittman56BXW]

I've been using the electrical and mechanical portions of Fusion 360 now for about 3 years.  The handshake between the two allows some great functionality and to really dial in your packaging. That being said, I have some questions about the component library and schematic BOM handshake. 

I've been hand generating the Bill Of Materials for the electrical schematics due to the disorganized BOM that Fusion generates.  (screen grab attached) Most of the component names and values are not named in an appropriate manner - and a good portion of the components that I use I have downloaded from either Ultra-librarian or Snap Eda.  I'm struggling to find a place in the library editor to assign appropriate names, values and descriptions to the components - there doesn't seem to be a clear way to tidy everything up and create a useful BOM.  On the mechanical side you can click on the "properties" of a component and change the PN and description there - and adding a table for the parts list works like a charm.  

Is anyone using the BOM output in the Schematic, and if you are, how did you go about getting it to generate something that's clean and useful?

Thanks,

Bryan

[mjstn2011]

Hi @bpittman56BXW  I am using component attributes to add or modify if present at least the following fields:

MANUFACTURER, MPN, DESCRIPTION  (often these are present but blank so edit my choices)

When not present I add them either to my own library part or directly to each component on the schematic.

I also add the attribute of DIGIKEY_PART_NUMBER.
For a single part on a schematic a right click then 'Attributes' gets you to be able to change or add attributes.

Then I use the  BOM ulp and here output CSV which by default uses ';' so I edit that for use of ','.

I must then manually shuffle columns and remove the many other unused columns to get it to look as I need.

I have asked here a couple days back about this and was told there is likely effort to make the BOM ulp script nicer and I hope that it includes removal and re-ordering of columns and ideally a way to say that is what you want for this project so hopefully that can be avoided for making boms as the board progresses.

[jorge_garcia]

Hi @bpittman56BXW ,

I hope this message finds you well. @mjstn2011 covered the process pretty well. One thing that will immediately make the BOM more useable is to set the Values radio button instead of the parts radio button. You'll see the list will be much better organized at that point. There is active work going on right now for a new integrated BOM tool so soon this should be a thing of the past.

Let me know if there's anything else I can do for you.

Best Regards,