Fusion keeps crashing during basic operations, autosave not working, and usability issues.

[dirk030]

Hi there, I moved everything over from Eagle about 3-4 board designs ago. 

The biggest problems I have with Fusion electronics are the amount of application crashes + the lack of recovery files. Just today I have lost 2x30min of work, which is not a lot but adds up over the weeks. 

I now need to adapt to a quicksave-after-every-click lifestyle, which reminds me of using MS Word back in the 90s. Not a good place for an engineering software. This really stresses me out and I am thinking of switching over to KiCad for all electronics, because KiCad does not crash nearly as often, and is MUCH more snappy in my last tests.

1) Crashes to desktop during mundane tasks, with autosave not working

Mostly when I activate a text field and press enter, for example

- when putting a net name into the place via dialog

- search for a component name in the place component dialogue

- randomly when placing components

- especially annoying because autosave does not work on electronics projects both on my windows desktop and my mac (5 min in settings). 

2) Near crashes & app becoming useless

- Trying to separate a tab into a separate window is scary. The app is non-responsive, different windows come to the foreground, it looks like the app will crash any second. Everything involving window manipulation is so slow and unstable. 

- Drag and Drop a .lib into the library manager should add that library. Instead, the text contents of that library overwrites the library manager UI and the whole thing becomes useless until restart. 

- Randomly, the place components dialogue in the side panel will turn into an all-black rectangle until restart. 

3) Usability, slow everything in Electronics. 

- In general, I find it much more work to keep libraries under control. In eagle I could drag and drop parts in different libraries, I need that kind of control back. It should be easy to copy parts between libraries. Also, it is unclear to me which libraries are global, which ones are local to a project, cloud synced, lib.io synced, etc. I would like a simple manager app where I can open two libraries and drag&drop devices between them. That's all I need. 

- Switching between schematics / PCB files is so slow. It feels like 2-4 seconds, it should show immediately like Eagle or Kicad, or any other desktop software. 

- Side panel implementation is really bad. Side panel views reset when I restart the app. Order of elements in side panel is not stored, and is sometimes completely messed up by random panels opening. Graphical glitches between panel components leave the impression that this is an alpha version feature, not thought out at all. 

- Place components dialogue in side panel is not very useful. I have a 4K screen, but the width required to make the place components dialogue work well is so large that I have to manually increase the width of the sidebar every time I want to add a component. Screen real estate is not managed well. I think a pop out window for component placement would be faster and more useful. 

What I miss is clear communication of where Fusion Electronics is headed. I really like Fusion for mechanical designs, and it works really well. The difference in quality of Fusion mechanical vs. Fusion electronics is so incredibly large that I would wish for some kind of strategy / vision from Autodesk. What is the timeframe to bring Fusion electronics to a level that makes it at least as useful as the old Eagle? Right now it is a chaotic construction site. 

Thanks for coming to my TED talk 🙂

[jorge_garcia · Accepted solution]

Hi @dirk030,

I hope you're doing well. Thank you for this feedback I'll make sure to pass it up the chain. 

We here you, our next release is a massive bugfix release. It's due this month or early next, we would be really interested in seeing if this next Fusion release addresses these issues you are running into.

The vision for Fusion 360 is that it is a platform for end to end product design. That's where things are headed, a seamless integration between between ECAD and MCAD.

We know the library workflows are in need of work and will be addressing it.

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

Best Regards,

[melisa.kaner]

Hey @dirk030 , just to add to what @jorge_garcia has already said, 

I'm on the product management team for Fusion 360 Electronics and I just wanted to pop in and say sorry that this was your experience - I agree that the things you highlighted aren't good and shouldn't be this way. As Jorge mentioned, we do have some great releases coming up for issues like these, but thank you for reporting it and being active on the forums. If you'd like to DM me, perhaps we could jump on a quick call so I can understand your experiences further, I'd love to hear your perspectives in full.

[mazlum_doganZ6XHH]

1

[mazlum_doganZ6XHH]

@melisa.kaner @jorge_garcia 

I've just had a catastrophic crash that made me lose both 7 hours of work and added a few more hours just to get to the old place I was 7 hours ago.

Using Fusion360 Electronics regularly and then Fusion360 freezes for 30 mins before the program closes. I open it back up to recover my work to find that it saved the PCB and not the schematic. Now I have an electronincs project with a mismatched schamtic and PCB file.

After the initial panic went, I looked for a solution that your automatic recovery system could not do. I found this article;

https://www.autodesk.com/support/technical/article/caas/sfdcarticles/sfdcarticles/Unable-to-open-a-f...

Following the steps I was able to find the recovery file that did not show up in the window with all the other files that was recoevered. Worst part was there were still some mismatches between the PCB and Schamtic file.

After spending another hour to match the files, im now in the same position I was 3 hours ago. Stressed, angry and tired. Funny part is my yearly renewal is scheduled for tomorrow. I will be setting my autorenewal off until I get some feedback on what just happened. Why your crash recovery system only partially worked, and why you don't look to optimise your product.

Best Regards,

Maz

[melisa.kaner]

Hi @mazlum_doganZ6XHH , 

I'm sorry you've had this experience. Please could you DM me any further details related to your crash (email ID used, CER number/details)? I will investigate this internally ASAP. 

Best regards,

Melisa 

[badazzentertainment2009]

A bunch of crap the program still doesn’t work right it still freezes and crashes