Using Adafruit Feather M0 in a PCB design

[jokke.heikkila]

I'm fairly new to working with Fusion360 schematic designs. I've done few simple pcb's designs and now I'd need to do pcb design that houses Adafruit Feather M0 board on it and few other components. What would be the recommended way to bring a Adafruit Feather board into the design?

a) use Adafruit supplied .sch and .brd  files and create component(?). Would I need to add headers to the board so that the pcb to be designed has holes in correct places?

b) Maybe make component that has just two headers that matches the holes on the Feather board?

c) something else?

Thank you for any hints how to approach this.

Cheers,

jokke

[jokke.heikkila]

Replying to my own question as I think I stumbled to most straigh forward way. What I gathered is

1) create new library

2) create new component into the library and name it accordingly, Adafruit_Feather_M0 in this case

3) create new symbol as part of the newly created component

4) create as many symbol pins as there are pins on the board

5) create new footprint that has the physical dimensions an locations of those symbol pins

6) create package out of this whole thing and that I should be able to use later on the actual project

Does this sound about right?

[jorge_garcia]

Hi @jokke.heikkila,

I hope you're doing well. The correct answer depends on the application. If you are trying to just create a daughterboard for the feather, IOW the internals of the feather are not critical, then the approach you have defined would work. You basically make a library component that just contains the headers of the feather and use that in your design.

If you need to incorporate the internal circuitry of the feather then the better approach is to upload the feather sch and board and then use the insert Electronic Design functionality to bring it into your new design.

Let me know if you have any other questions or concerns.

Best Regards,

[alpierce]

There is actually an Adafruit library that contains the generic Feather symbol and footprint as well as many other parts. They also host a 3D model library that includes many of their boards, displays, etc.

https://github.com/adafruit/Adafruit-Eagle-Library

https://github.com/adafruit/Adafruit_CAD_Parts