Nothing but problems

[kschepens]

Hey guys,

Well, I'd like to start with a positive note: This new electronics integration would be great.

Having said that: Would be, because since the new version I barely have been able to do any work. It actually feels like I'm alpha testing the software. I'm not, and I actually need work done! 

So I'll list a few of the problems I'm having now:

1. Constant crashing. 

Whether it's switching from board to schematic, or simply editing a package, at random times Fusion 360 will just crash. I get the opportunity to enter what went wrong and send a report. If anyone is reading any of my reports: sorry for my language: I was very frustrated 😉

2. Error messages/warnings

This happens often and it happens at seemingly random times (I know there's no such thing). They all have in common that they provide very little information about what went wrong. Just now I got this: 

"Warning: The PCB document isn't working in an electronics design."

If I understand this correctly, this means that the board (is that a PCB document?) I'm working on is no longer a part of (in?) an electronics design. Well, it was just before. I even opened it via the electronics design and I see no reason for it to not be "in" it anymore (I hope just closing the Electronics design did not cause this). Is this really a problem? No solution provided here. Also, clicking more info just gives me the exact same error message in a different view.

I feel I get loads of warnings and error messages, even when I didn't change anything. I didn't write them all down but I'm now trying to keep a list.

3. Constant warnings of board inconsistencies

This already happened in Eagle but it seems it now is not only more frequent but also harder to solve.

4. Versions, versions, versions

Every change I do increases the version number. Not only that, but if I change something in, say, my library, I have to save the change (for instance a package, V++), save the library (V++) and then also all documents that depend on this library (V++). That means that all document a one-up on their version number and I have to type in the change comment for every one of them. This seems a bit unnecessary.

5. Changes in library are not always visible (more often not)

This is for me a hard one to describe. I have no clue what's going on here. It seems that I first need to upload my existing Eagle library to the cloud and then replace all components to use the new library.

When that's done, I want to add a 3D package to the library. I can't really figure out what's going on there. A change in the library forces me to save my electronic document (board, schematic), yet the library version number of the components lags behind (My library is now at V9, yet in my board and schematics, some are still at V4 with no option to update that). Now, when I want to see the new 3D packages in the 3D board, I click "View 3D PCB" (with or without canvas, result is the same). I would expect my 3D packages to show up but for some reason they sometimes do and sometimes don't (they more often don't). I still haven't figured out what I'm doing wrong but in my opinion this is a flaw in the workflow (this should be easy). 

6. Sluggishness

Although the last update has helped a bit, the software stays sluggish. Especially the electronics part. I never had any performance issues in Eagle or Fusion 360 when they were separated but now I often have to wait minutes before something loads (and then often it crashes).

So, all in all, I'm not a happy customer. This whole endeavour has been very unsatisfactory and I'm mostly frustrated that I have already have a whole week of unproductiveness. 

I hope that in newer updates these issues will be addressed or that maybe someone here could give me some pointers as to how to fix or avoid them. 

Sorry if I come off a bit negative but I hope this can help the Fusion 360 team to get some user insights too. 

[RichardHammerl]

Hey @kschepens ,

thank you for your comments and no need to apologize. We are happy to get feedback on Electronics in Fusion and we are monitoring all comments and will improve Electronics step by step. Not only fixes but also additional functionality will come into Electronics soon.

You reported constant crashing. There are some improvements in the new release 2.0.7421 which has been released yesterday. This should improve stability.

About the warning "The PCB document isn't working in an electronics design": You have to create an Electronics Design first (File menu, New Electronics Design) and link your SCH and BRD files to it. This is done in the Design Document. See image.

Back and Forward Annotation will work then. Simply run an Electrical Rules Check  to be sure. 

Thanks for your comments on libraries. There are a number of improvements planned for the nearer future.

Regards,

[kschepens]

Hi Richard, 

Thanks for your response.

I've already updated to that version. The crashes unfortunately still occur :(.  

Yes, I actually have created an Electronic design but I got the message nonetheless (it was working before). Restarting Fusion 360 helped but now ALL 3D models of packages are gone (all bodies of packages are missing)! Also, shift + middle mouse click now suddenly selects in stead of orbit.

Again one step forward and two backward.

[kschepens]

I now get the message "board and schematics are not consistent". I don't understand why this is again.

But when I check them, they use the same device in the schematic and board. How do I fix this?

[kschepens]

Ok, I'm just going to keep updating my adventures so that maybe other people will benefit.

So, for some reason the components that I replaced on the PCB document (or board) were not updated to the schematics so the schematics were using different packages from the old library. I personally think this is a bug in Fusion 360 (it should have updated the schematics, regardless of whether the Electronics design tab is loaded). Somehow the link between the board and schematic got lost.

Once this happened, it's a mess: new changes will not be synced between the 3D model and board and schematic. This needs to be fixed first. So I manually replaced each component with the one from the new library so that the schematic and board/PCB document match. 

After that, the link between the schematics and PCB document (board) seemed to be fixed. 

Next challenge: trying to fix the 3D model. 

UPDATE: I removed the link between the board and 3D model (on the board choose Switch > Remove 3D PCB Link) and then re-added it (Switch > View 3D PCB with canvas). This solved the issue.

[engineeringNCMXB]

While I have not experienced the exact same issues - it is rather clear that this release should have been a preview or at least advertised as late alpha or early beta.

Like I have said in other threads - this is not ready although it is rather exiting to see the direction it is going. Most of the issues are things that can and should be identified and dealt with internally. I don't have time to join the Autodesk development team at this level. Perhaps when the basic functionality is ready, we can all dive into the finer details and provide that feedback to the dev team.

[jorge_garcia]

Hi @kschepens,

It's a little hard to sift through everything you've run into but there are a couple of general things that may help.

At all times the board and schematic documents should be open together, if you close one and then continue working on the other consistency will break.

Second when you upload a personal library to Fusion360, one of the first things you should do is perform a library update that way the design will reference the Fusion360 cloud library and any future updates should run without issue from there.

We recognize there are a lot of things that need to be addressed and there will be hotfixes in the coming days and weeks to address them.

Best Regards,

[kschepens]

Hi @jorge_garcia, 

Thanks for your message!

Ok, so that might explain why things constantly break. To be honest, I really think that should change. I don't want to keep all files open all the time because I want to keep my workspace clean and save memory. Also, people might accidentally close one of the files. Not sure if this behaviour already was in Eagle (I bet it was) but there you just didn't see that the schematic was also opened (it was in a different window). Besides, I didn't have performance issues in Eagle so I didn't feel the need to close any windows and there were only 2 of them, not 4 like in Fusion 360 now.

And thanks for that tip! I was not aware of the library update functionality (it probably also was in Eagle but I've never used it). Updating the library does however not replace all devices with the ones in the new library. Just for the record: This is a former Eagle project. It still point to the old (local) library. By the looks of it, I still need to replace each part. Am I right? Or is there an easier way to do that?

[engineeringNCMXB]

---

@jorge_garcia wrote:

At all times the board and schematic documents should be open together, if you close one and then continue working on the other consistency will break.

---

This is among the strangest of things in Eagle.....now making its way into Fusion 360.

Since data consistency between schematic and PCB are critical - why in the world are they separate files that can be opened independently (and damaged). Why is it not a single file? Now, in F360, it appears that I need to have another file opened as well. A single project has 3 files.

As things progress and I have dozens and dozens of projects (all with 3 fragile files) - this would seem to be a data management challenge keeping track of what is what and who is who.

Is there any chance that projects (Schematic-Board) embedded into a single file like Fusion360 already does with very complex MCAD datasets?

[kb9ydn]

---

@engineeringNCMXB wrote:

---

---

This is among the strangest of things in Eagle.....now making its way into Fusion 360.

Since data consistency between schematic and PCB are critical - why in the world are they separate files that can be opened independently (and damaged). Why is it not a single file? Now, in F360, it appears that I need to have another file opened as well. A single project has 3 files.

As things progress and I have dozens and dozens of projects (all with 3 fragile files) - this would seem to be a data management challenge keeping track of what is what and who is who.

Is there any chance that projects (Schematic-Board) embedded into a single file like Fusion360 already does with very complex MCAD datasets?

---

The separate files thing feels like a legacy concept from back in the DOS days.  The wikipedia article on Eagle has some interesting history if you're so inclined.  Anyway I can't imagine they wouldn't at some point try and merge the separate pieces together into a single 'electronics design', the way Fusion does mechanical designs with CAM and simulation.  It's just too weird the way it is now.

Something that will also have to be dealt with eventually is multi-level schematics and PCBs.  It's easy to imagine wanting a single schematic that then is split up into multiple PCBs; and even have connections to external modules that aren't PCBs at all but off the shelf purchased devices.  Electrical design covers way more than just circuit boards.

But I digress....

C|

[mrm1018]

It would seem that at this time Fusion Electronics is more of a port of Eagle than anything else.  Clearly the fine folks at Autodesk are dealing with tough decisions regarding Eagle legacy...because for sure, there is no way you would design a ground up ECAD system that would require simultaneous files to be open to function properly.  At least not one this unintuitive.

From my perspective, they are treating this as a problem to be managed at this point in time, not a problem to be solved.  I do however hope it will evolve in time to something more modern.

[engineeringNCMXB]

---

@kb9ydn wrote:

---

Something that will also have to be dealt with eventually is multi-level schematics and PCBs.  It's easy to imagine wanting a single schematic that then is split up into multiple PCBs; and even have connections to external modules that aren't PCBs at all but off the shelf purchased devices.  Electrical design covers way more than just circuit boards.

---

This has been a major challenge for me on every project I have ever done in Eagle. All of my products have multiple PCBs that make a complete system. One of my designs has 15 PCB's that all started with a single schematic that had to be manually (and very painfully) segmented into pieces and very painfully kept in sync as things changed over the natural course of the design process.

Having the ability to bind multiple PCB's to a single schematic would be a paradigm shift for Eagle.

[jorge_garcia]

Hi Guys,

As is the process sets up the infrastructure for being able to bind multiple PCBs to a single schematic. That's partially why the linking process is the way it is. I agree that there's room to improve and in time it will. This work is partially responsible for bringing multi-monitor support to Fusion360 you can now move the the different editors onto different monitors better leveraging your screen real estate.

It's important to understand that in some respects electronic design data has it's own particular needs that can't be shoehorned into the mechanical paradigms you may be accustomed to. We will adopt as much of Fusion's ideas and paradigms as it makes sense to for electronics design workflow but not everything will fit. If you want to keep 10 boards in sync with a schematic you can bet that they need to be open in order for those changes to transfer in real time and be able to cross probe.

That's the way it is now and everything is open to change and improvements. Thank you for your suggestions, keep them coming.

Best Regards,

[matt.berggren]

Hi All --

I'll do my best to address a number of concerns here, perhaps in a couple of different posts!  Firstly, on the notion of an Electronics Design file:  The issue with classical eagle's approach was that the files had a dependency on Folders and file naming that prevented a number of things from "working" in a more sophisticated way.  For example, the notion that you could reuse a schematic in a new PCB (ie retarget the same circuit for a different form factor) was overly complicated.  They needed the same name and they needed to be copied to a new directory.  If you preserved the old name you had ambiguity and if you renamed them, there was no link back to the original.  In this case (coming) you can reuse the same schematic and a change in one *can* (but not essential) be reflected in the other PCB.  (This is in the works and though the two docs need to be opened and updated independently (i.e open PCB-1 and update, then close and open PCB-2 and update) we are planning a much cleaner system for this.

And to the suggestion of placing everything in one file, the issue there has always been the portability versus reusability argument.  

For a bit of history, I was at Protel (later became Altium) back when Protel used a database for a file format and shoved all files into the DB container...The issue was always that to reuse something meant first exporting the contents and reimporting them.  In the mechanical CAD world this is the difference between "Internal" and "External" references.  I have to emphasize that the internal references are wrought with limitations if you want to reuse, copy, paste, etc.  Not altogether a bad concept but really comes with some painful restrictions we wanted to avoid.

The Electronic Design also enables us to manage the relationship to more than a 2D PCB but also a 3D PCB and eventually "more".  I wont hint at what "more" is until we nail this down but it could also be a version-specific / release-specific set of MFG files as one example.

Another concept we are exploring is the notion of schematic breakup and retargeting.  So imagine you could have a schematic with a switcher circuit you build, simulate, even build a small board just to test.  That isnt the product but you might also want to reuse that and testing it is just "part of the process".  The Electronics Design could, conceivably, enable us to one day have multiple schematics <M> target multiple PCBs <N> in a many to many relationship that lets you move the components in a design to a mezzanine card without breaking the overall integrity / continuity of the design.

SO...all that being said, as Jorge mentioned it is still early days.  The workflow is evolving and you are along for the ride but do not have to just sit idly by, waiting for us to get it right.  By all means we WANT to hear your feedback and I will promise, if it makes sense, we WILL look to leverage your ideas.  So please let me know or the team know what you feel is un-intuitive or broken and I will make it a priority to review it and take a shot at it along with everything else we've got planned.

Thank you!

Best regards,

Matt Berggren

Autodesk

[engineeringNCMXB]

@matt.berggrenor @jorge_garcia 

Can you PLEASE offer some sort of EOL statement for Eagle or is the plan to surprise us all while we are mid-project?

Weeks?
Months?
Years?
Decades?
Anything?

Everything that is happening leaves me assuming that Eagle will disappear as soon as possible, yet I am terrified of the infant and toddler phases of F360 Electronics.

[kb9ydn]

---

@engineeringNCMXB wrote:

@matt.berggrenor @jorge_garcia 

Can you PLEASE offer some sort of EOL statement for Eagle or is the plan to surprise us all while we are mid-project?

Weeks?
Months?
Years?
Decades?
Anything?

Everything that is happening leaves me assuming that Eagle will disappear as soon as possible, yet I am terrified of the infant and toddler phases of F360 Electronics.

---

I can't really answer this question but I can give one data point.  In 2012 Autodesk bought a small relatively unknown company called HSMworks.  HSMWorks made a CAM plugin for Solidworks, and at the time I was using the free 2D version of that plugin called HSMXpress.  Being a regular participant on the HSMWorks support forum, I can tell you that many users thought the takeover by Autodesk (probably Solidwork's main competitor) was for sure going to be the end of the Solidworks plugin.  I mean, why would Autodesk want to do anything for Solidworks customers when Solidworks is their competition?  Well, ffwd almost 8 years and HSMWorks for Solidworks is still around.  And they didn't just let it languish and wither away either, they've continued to make improvements to it.

Now obviously there are never any guarantees in life, but relatively speaking Eagle is a FAR bigger player in the ECAD world than HSMWorks has ever been in the CAM world.  So I would be more than shocked (bad pun) if they killed Eagle as a standalone product.

C|

[engineeringNCMXB]

My biggest concern is not so much whether standalone Eagle survives or not, but rather KNOWING what the roadmap looks like. I am sure there are arguments to keep Eagle and arguments to kill it. All I want is a reliable path forward without being forced to nurse the crying baby Autodesk has named Fusion Electronics.

Total silence on the roadmap while my living is on the line? Not interested.

As I have given all I can trying to size up the Fusion efforts, I tried to just go back to my previous Eagle-Fusion workflow only to find that it is broken. Now - Eagle is broken and Fusion is unable to do the work.

@matt.berggren  @jorge_garcia  THIS A TOTAL A COMPLETE FAILURE. NO EXCUSES. NO VALID REASONS. NO POSSIBLE EXPLANATION.

Revert back the to what was previously working and develop the Fusion Electronics on a parallel path. I fully understand this is not a trivial project. It is new. It is the 'first release'. All the more reason to take a parallel path, leaving the know-good workflow in-tact. Do not experiment on my ability to work and make a living.

[matt.berggren]

Thanks for your reply.  This is actually something I have aspired to build for years now.  Truthfully virtually all schematic hierarchy systems have their origins in HDL-based design.  This is why Cadence’s higher end SCH tool ConceptHDL carries that oft-dropped suffix.  

The issue with that hierarchical model IMO is it is largely based on targeting a single chip.  Very few (read:  almost none) chip designers are simultaneously building multiple unique chips at the same time, and balancing the distribution of that circuitry to those devices to maximize use of area (except when using FPGAs for prototyping ASICs).  

Thus the model, when extended to PCB, has been largely driven by the one to one correspondence of one schematic to one PCB.  

The introduction of the Electronics Design in Fusion and the flexibility to “rethink” a few long-held covenants in the electronics CAD domain has led to exactly this sort of planning / strategizing and this is now more than an “idea” and something we will endeavor to really nail.  In the days of modules and likewise fairly commonly, a secondary PCB having some direct, mating relationship to the enclosure (whether as a front panel of even just housing a handful of LEDs or  buttons) I find that all too often I’d have the excess space but no means to “retarget” parts of the circuit to say, a mezzanine card with a trim pot on it. 

So what’s super exciting is that what you’re doing really reinforces that position for us.  And to be fair, it is not uncommon just underserved!

I’ll let you know as we move ahead just what we land on in this regard but I would expect us to move toward this model barring any unforeseen “gotchas”.  🙂

Best regards,

matt

[matt.berggren]

Thanks for the question, it is completely valid and I understand why the urgency when asking it. 

To put it simply, we didnt want to put out anything that would be regarded as 'fake news' in this regard and no matter what we say, it's going to be met with a healthy dose of skepticism.  However, that disclaimer being said, let me stress that we went to great pains to ensure a few things were in place that would enable EAGLE desktop to continue to operate as it has been without interruption:

1)  We migrated the licenses transparently.  You'll notice, you didnt have to even logout and login for the license to work on both platforms.  This is in large part because of the work we did to ensure desktop EAGLE can still run using a Fusion license.  What does that mean in practical terms?  As long as you have a Fusion subscription, desktop eagle will continue to work.  Forever?  In fairness it could break at some stage, maybe, but to be clear, we would have to write code to change this and the obvious question is "why?"  ...Why break it and risk the community?  Under the current circumstances we keep you using EAGLE and we dont lose you as a customer...Yet we have a chance to prove, over time, that Fusion has capability that goes WAY beyond PCB design.  That felt to us like the right thing to do.  We need the user base to join us on this journey or none of this makes sense so any sudden shifts would have been catastrophic. 

I also know that it isn't 100% reassuring as people can always cast doubt and speaking for myself as an EE and physics dude, I am skeptical like crazy!  However I would stress that to change this model of 'EAGLE works with a Fusion license' requires a substantial back-office effort that nobody is eager to do, esp. right after we just went thru the pain of migrating licenses *without* breaking either application's authentication process.  This was non-trivial but by design.

2)  Actually we havent forked the code bases.  (SW-speak, sorry!)  We have certainly made use of EAGLE's code in Fusion and over time it will begin to take on it's own unique look and feel, however I want to stress that as I write this, I can compile both using the same build and automation system we have been using since we acquired EAGLE.  I would add to this that what this required was to write some extremely sophisticated interfaces to enable this to work which played out over a span of almost a year.  (Imagine as an example a button in App-A having to call a DLL in App-B, wait for a callback, then update state in both App-A & B, on either sides of an API...this is hardly trivial for one command much less complicated commands that are "stateful" and which might put the application in a mode that were the command crash, would take the whole thing down!) 

I only say this since having worked as an EE for years, I know that we (you) write our (your) share of code and many of you will understand this is not trivial and thus should, I'd hope, emphasize just how much thought we've had to put into ensuring the code works in both Fusion and could be ported to EAGLE (cherry-picked, if you speak 'git') if we felt a specific feature was critical to 'port' to both platforms.

3)  We have preserved data model compatibility so that every file - whether BRD, SCH or LBR can be supported in Desktop EAGLE & Fusion 360.  I would just emphasize that this is only an "export" because when saving versions of data in any decent revision management system, we zip the files prior to posting them to the server or downloading them client-side.  This reduces bandwidth, reduces server storage in any Version Controlled back end, and improves the overall experience (we'd hope).  However if you want to test my math, you can rename the FLBR file to .zip and unzip it to see the contents.  We are just doing the compression to save transfer / storage 'costs'.

I hope all of these things - and this isnt an exhaustive list - point to the fact that for those of you with EAGLE, we really care about you staying a customer and moreover, that you migrate on your own time, or perhaps never, so long as you have a Fusion license.  We ensured also that the same license will run legacy Autodesk versions of EAGLE from version 8.0 thru 9.2, including the hobbyist version.  (I would expect 7.7 to run also but I honestly havent tested it since most users on 7.x moved to 8).  We also grandfathered-in our EAGLE standard customers to a Premium license with the aim of not upsetting anyone in this transition. 

Every step has been deliberate and over time, though I would expect that the Fusion version will 'catch up' and eventually surpass EAGLE (we have a LOT planned this year and next - sketch routing, high speed constraints, layer stack planning, rules & constraints, etc. and not all can be done without some significant architectural changes that are hard to force-fit into EAGLE's legacy code base) we aren't intent on leaving the EAGLE community behind to focus only on the competition and their user bases. 

Having spent 20, even 30+ years in ECAD business, my team and I have seen first-hand these acquisitions and transitions take place in real time (sometimes wishing it was bullet-time).  We hope to do this right and we hope everyone you'll stick it out so we can deliver what makes the most sense.  But of course we also want you to hold us accountable and complain and argue with us when we get things wrong. If something sucks, we cant fix it unless we know about it, so please hold us accountable.

Finally, look for me to create a handful of 'Advanced' videos and some power user webinars to highlight some of what we've done.  I promise there is some stuff in there you havent seen (yet) but which will blow you away when you do!

Best regards

Matt Berggren

Autodesk

[engineeringNCMXB]

@matt.berggrenThank you for addressing the concept of having multiple PCBs associated with a single schematic. I can fully appreciate the challenge.

Are you able/willing to address the bigger and more important elements in the conversation - EOL planning for Eagle and the current situation where the previous Eagle-Fusion workflow has been disabled to the point where I my new projects are stuck in the mud. Real projects with real customers with real money are stuck in the mud. 

To ensure I am being 100% clear. I do not care about ANY new features at all if they are at the expense of my current capacity to function. No new feature is interesting if it breaks my ability to design and sync PCB layout with Fusion360. That alone is the primary reason that I am an Eagle / Fusion 360 user. Now it is not working.

A: What is the LTS / EOL plan for Eagle? (Silence is the equivalent of saying we will cancel Eagle ASAP and without notice - suck it professional users)

B: When can you revert back to the previously working 'Create PCB' from sketch that allows me to push/pull PCB's between Fusion/Eagle? Just preserve the previous functionality while your team is experimenting with whatever the long term integration will be. (Again - silence is the equivalent of saying suck it professional users we do what we want!)