Building a library in Fusion 360 - Best practices

[tracy.wynn]

Fusion 360 Community,

I'm new to Fusion 360, but was a long-time Altium user, so have done some PCB work over the years. I find myself in a position of needing to create and manage some basic component libraries for an engineering team and I'd like to structure the libraries (if possible) around common footprints. For instance, I might have a series of ceramic chip capacitors in various values that all use the same .1 x .1  ("1010") case size, but are available from multiple vendors. I'd like for the engineers to be able to go into the 1010 capacitor library, find their value, tolerance, etc. and have the information about internal part number, manufacturer's part number (possibly for multiple manufacturers), and other relevant information linked to that selection. Does anybody have any experience in some best practices for setting up a structure like this in F360? This will be my first attempt at building a library from scratch, so any advice you can offer is welcomed. 

I do also understand that there are tons of built-in libraries available in F360, but due to requirements on maintaining control of parts available to the engineering team, I can't just use the built-ins. That's why I'm building a new library structure.

[jorge_garcia]

Hello @tracy.wynn,

Nice to hear from you. As far as the mechanics of making a library go you can check out this video series

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLmA_xUT-8UlKE-U-eEqrkNEI7rd1fUnLY

Now for your specific instance. You can check out the RCL library for an idea of how you would structure this. Basically, you'll create a Component and create a package variant for each different value or attribute set. They will all use the same footprint but by creating the package variant they can each have their own attribute set with MPN, Tolerance, internal part numbers, etc.

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

Best Regards,

[tracy.wynn]

Thanks for the reply, Jorge. I took a look at the RLC library and I see how
it's organized. It raises some follow-up questions for me about variants
and attribute sets. Again, the goal is to build a library that covers basic
part classes, like ceramic capacitors of a certain package size. Within a
specific library I would probably create a component for each value and
then assign variants for other parameters, such as tolerance, and
termination style. I want the engineer to be able to select the appropriate
part from the list and then, when the PCB design is complete, the
auto-generated BoM can be set up to automatically include information like
our p/n, manufacturer p/n, etc.

To capture that information, I see that I can assign attributes to each
variant, but I note that there appears to be no way to copy the attribute
sets from one variant to another - I have to recreate them. Is that
correct? I also see that I appear to be able to create multiple attribute
sets under each variant, but I'm not sure why that's valuable. Can you give
me an example where multiple attribute sets might be valuable?

Regards,
Tracy

[jorge_garcia]

Hello @tracy.wynn,

I hope you're doing well. You can script the attribute creation process so that way you don't have to constantly make them.  This page has the full docs on the attribute command which is what you would use to automate the creation of the attributes. Collect all of the ATTRIBUTE entries into a file, which we call a script file (just a text file with the .scr extension). Then inside your library you can run it every time you create a new device or if you already have a bunch of devices in the library you can use the 

run-loop-all-devicesets-script.ulp that comes with Fusion to run the script through all the components in the library.

The original multiple attribute sets was originally intended for handling the different technologies used for logic gates. So you could have a 7400 LS, ALS, etc. with different performance characteristics. Instead of making a bunch of the same 7400 parts with different process in the attributes, you can cover all of that in one component. That's the idea.

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

Best Regards,