Trouble with Edit in Place board editing flow

[bentwookie]

E: As is tradition, it took posting a question to see (half of) what I was doing wrong. Having spent so much time picking stock origins in the Manufacture flow, I was trying to select the top left of the board and not the point on the sketch. The menu item is still seems to be missing though.

Howdy. I'm having some trouble following the tutorial on editing board outlines. In the video, the narrator covers a newer (then anyway) method of "Editing in Place" the outline used for the board. After creating the 3D PCB and editing the component in place, I'm able to erase the original outline as described. However, I'm bumping into two issues. 

1) The menu item to edit the board doesn't seem to be there anymore

2) If I use the toolbar button, I'm able to edit the board, and to select a new profile as an outline, but I'm unable to pick the origin or X-axis as described by the video. Those points and edges don't appear to be selectable. You can't really see it in the picture below, but I'm hovering over the bottom left point on the board. Press and hold doesn't filter to it either.

Am I doing something wrong, have things changed or is something broken here?

[bentwookie]

Blerg. The electronics project, 3D PCB and Fusion design for my case all agree on the shape of my PCB, but for the life of me, I can't get that reflected in the 2D PCB.

E: I had to redo things multiple times before apparently saving/syncing everything in JUST the right order. The way this stuff all links together is more fragile and error prone than it should be. 

[bentwookie]

Loaded the project up this morning and now there are ERC sync errors everywhere. When I shut it all down last night, everything was saved and happy. Apparently not!

I'm ONE guy on ONE machine using ONE app to edit a tiny little board. It shouldn't need so much hand-holding to keep track of the current truth. Changing the simplest thing in THE SAME PROCESS SPACE shouldn't require the same attention to detail as a three-way git merge. 

[jorge_garcia]

Hi @bentwookie,

I hope you're doing well. Electronics consistency errors generally occur if one of the editors is closed and work continues on the other. It's very important to always keep the schematic and board editors open with the Electronics design document at all times when you are working. If you ever close any of those 3 files and continue working that's when the files will become inconsistent.

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

Best Regards,

[bentwookie]

I'm aware of that limitation. It felt dated in Eagle and feels further out of place in 'modern' software like Fusion. Worse, the 3D flow brings in a completely parallel file-based synchronization mechanism, with its own rough edges and latency.

By my count there are three different kinds of syncing operation required to work with an electronic design in a Fusion model. Each is obscure, slow and prone to data loss if you don't do it just right way and in just the right order. It all feels like a bit of a hack instead of properly integrated. In my line of work, we'd say that engineering is attempting to ship the org chart. 

I hope we're heading towards a future where the electronics data model is a first class peer with the rest of the app. I should simply be able to include a PCB in a design without all this business of converting it back and forth to an intermediate 3D document.

Whatever. I'm sure none of that is your problem. 😉 I appreciated your tutorial on the process. If you don't already have one, a video on how to fix ERC sync errors would be helpful.

E: Clarity 

[jorge_garcia]

Hi @bentwookie,

I don't have a video on fixing ERC consistency errors. How many do you have? Generally the recommendation is to do whatever needs to be done to make them consistent. For example if you see messages like part found on board but not on the schematic. Easiest solution is to just remove them from the board. Once everything is consistent, then you can continue working. Don't do anything else until consistency is restored, otherwise you'll just be burying yourself into a hole.

I'll report your suggestions to our team.

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

Best Regards,

[bentwookie]

I had multiple (four or so). It wasn't clear to me what the correct way to address them was. I was expecting to be able to pick the "truth" in the merge error dialog, like you would in something like a git client. The dialog kinda looks like it would allow that, so that's why I was asking. 

[jorge_garcia]

Hi @bentwookie,

The order of "truth" is predefined in Electronics. Here's the Hierarchy

1. Schematic
2. 2D PCB
3. 3D PCB

With 1 and 2 being the most critical since those sync live. The relationship between 2 and 3 can always be sorted out since it's a push pull workflow.

Hope this helps.

Best Regards,