Fusion 360 March 2021 Update

[edwin.robledo]

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

[RichardHammerl]

Hi Edwin, 

thank you very much for posting the latest news and improvements for electronics in the recent Fusion update. 

I would like to point out one additional feature which is part of the update and also mentioned in the March blog post, you gave the link to in your post.

It's not an electronics-specific one, but for me, Design Reservation is a real help. Now I can see if there is someone working on a file or project. 

The file entries are now marked, if someone is working on it. 

Best regards,

[Anonymous]

Hi folks,

With this update and inroducing the synchronization dialog, I cannot sync my schematics with pcb anymore. This feature looks working incorrectly if you have multiple instances of a module in your schematics. When it is synchornizing with PCB, it transfers only a single instance of a module, not all instances (I have 6 instances of the same module). The "source" part of the dialog seems to show component for a single instance of a module only. This feature is broken for me, at least for my old designes that worked fine without it.

Thanks!

- Sergey

[jorge_garcia]

Hi @Anonymous ,

I just got confirmation that this is not working with modules. Thank you for the report.

Best Regards,

[fjen3N85H]

Hi @jorge_garcia will these features, ilke the improved resync, eventually get pushed down to EAGLE?

[jorge_garcia]

Hi @fjen3N85H ,

I hope you're doing well. I can say for certain but it seems unlikely that the synchronizer would be backported to EAGLE. 

If I get anything more solid or confirmed I'll post.

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

Best Regards,

[ritste20]

@edwin.robledo @jorge_garcia 

First off, I like a lot of the updates I've seen over the last couple of months with the electronics so I don't want this to come off the wrong way.

I'm not sure when this started because I have been away from the electronics tools for a little while but I've noticed when editing library components and saving the changes, after the save Fusion realizes that something is out of sync and asks to update. Once the update is done, Fusion tells you to save the file to be sure the synced component edits are included in the library forcing a second save. It does it to me whether I have a design open behind the library or just library by itself.

I don't know about everybody else but I add to my library as components are needed and save to be able to add to a design so version numbers of the libraries are arbitrarily inflated to higher and higher levels and makes version history harder to navigate if you ever have to go back and promote an old version. Fusion is the first library I've truly built from scratch to my liking so it took me several iterations to get a system for symbols, footprints, and devices in a single save operation. I came from the CAD generation of save early, save often, or else pay the price...

Regards,

[Anonymous]

Any plans to fix the synchronization issue for modules? It seems thare has been a coupld of updates rolled out since we talked about that issue for the first time, but it hasn't been fixed yet. It is really annoying that sync worked pretty acceptable for me in old versions of Fusion 360 and now I cannot sync them at all, and need to break my design with modules and copy-and-paste a lot of stuff just to avoid this bug. How can I use old sync functionality and disable new (broken) one?

[hienminhphan]

It does change the CAM environment and features such as it changes the way when posting G&M codes; it won't open the HSM editor when posting the G-codes anymore, we have to open manual instead (backward improvement).