Fusion
Hi,
If you recently launched Fusion 360, you will notice that an update has been applied. Please follow this link to learn about all the new features that have been added. In this post, I will give a quick overview of the features pertaining directly to the Fusion 360 electronics editor.
New! Synchronizer
Fusion 360 does have true forward and back annotation between board and schematic. Meaning that changes on the schematic will appear on the PCB. There have been circumstances in which synchronization is lost. This can be caused by editing the board without the schematic open, or by someone on your team with access to the design files. To recover from broken synchronization can be rather tedious since all actions need to be manual. Add new parts, delete parts, export and import netlist and hopefully align name and value attributes are just some of the actions you have tried to recover annotation. In this release, you will notice in the Validate tab and in the ERC dialog box a new command called Synchronize.
With this new feature, the schematic will be set up as your source and the PCB as your target, we plan to expand on this in future updates. The target and source panels list all the assets in the design. The color code on the target pane indicates components and nets that will be added and in red the ones that will be deleted. After running the Synchronize tool, the update changes will only take a few moments.
To get detailed information of the differences, you select one of the assets, at the bottom of the synchronizer dialog box it highlights the difference.
Improved! Edit in Place (EIP)
Fusion 360 electromechanical workflow depended on changes from the 2DPCB and the PCB in the mechanical workspace to be filtered via the 3DPCB. This works great, but it requires several synchronization steps. In this new update, changes can be done directly on the PCB located in the mechanical design workspace, these changes will be adopted by the 2DPCB in a matter of moments. This is a true paradigm shift to what we traditionally knew as electromechanical workflows.
Changes on the 2DPCB will be reflected in the PCB located in the mechanical design workspace as long as the Edit In Place command is active.
IMPROVED! Library Editor
Using the package editor will build your footprint and 3D model in moments. After selecting the template you need to use, you will get a long dialog box to enter the mechanical details of your component. In the update, the developers have now categorized the different sections of a component into multiple Tabs. Adding thermal pad details or manufacturing details is now only a tab away instead of scrolling all the way to the bottom.
FIXES!
- franck.malepart reported on the forum that after loading some of his design files, the undo function didn’t work properly. Sorry about that; this has been taken care of.
- xpuipc and rbkyorem made us aware of an issue while hiding a polygon while working on their PCB and pushing the 2DPCB to 3DPCB caused Fusion 360 to crash. We dug into this and got it working again. Polygon will now work as expected, we thank you for taking the time to report it.
- Yaqoubdesign, on your forum post you indicated that uploading exported library would fail. After reviewing your post, our developers looked into it and found the problem. This issue has been resolved in this update.
With Warm Regard
Ed Robledo
Edwin Robledo
Tech Marketing Manager
