Feature Request: Part Numbering

Feature Request: Part Numbering

Amyoqzy
Advocate Advocate
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3 Replies
Message 1 of 4

Feature Request: Part Numbering

Amyoqzy
Advocate
Advocate

Part numbering is very important to keep track of complex designs with many parts. Currently, Fusion360 has no real support for part numbering. One is expected to use the component names for the part numbers and also for the component description. This leads to a huge amount of manual work, and maintaining the numbers is error-prone.

 

Please add part numbering as an integral feature to Fusion360

 

Possible Solution:

Part numbers should be handled separately from the component names, but displayed with the component name. So the part number is like an attribute attached to each component. It may make sense, to allow the user to show/hide the part numbers from the component browser.

 

A part number has usually a logical composition.

One example is:

[company identifier][year number][project number]-[part group number]-[part number]

LR2055-401-001

A very different example is:

[series identifier]-[nominal width][nominal height]-[part number]

G5-0805-01

 

a) Attributes for Designs and Components

Fusion360 could implement part numbers by adding attributes to the document (design) and the component:

  • Design:
    • Attribute: Part Numbering Schema
    • Attribute: Project Identifier (or text parameters)
  • Component:
    • Attribute: Part Number
    • Attribute: Part Number Level

The part numbering scheme should allow defining a logical part numbering scheme using placeholders:

  • LR20[project_identifier]-[part_number#2:02][part_number#1:02]

On the component level, you can add a part number to each component, and also define which level this part number has. This allows composing part numbers from various grouping levels.

 

Using levels removes the need to repeat parts of the number, which will make renumbering parts/groups simple and less error-prone.

 

A nice addition would be a "printf", or even better python string format like syntax, to create fields prefixed with certain digits or letters. One could enter "1" in the part number, which would be added as "001" to the actual part name.

 

b) Optional Automatic Numbering

Fusion360 could automatically add an increasing part number to each created component.

 

c) Renumbering Command

Fusion360 could provide a command, to renumber the parts in a design.

 

d) Display in Component Browser

Fusion360 should optionally display the part number for each component in the component browser.

 

e) Text placeholder

Fusion360 should provide a text placeholder, to emboss a part number automatically to each part and update this number automatically if the number change.

 

f) Parameters as part of the part numbering schema.

If one creates a series of objects with different dimensions, adding these dimensions to the part number would simplify the whole process. The schema for the part number could contain user parameters like this:

Schema: LR2055-[width:02][height:02]-[part_number:03]

The resulting part number will be automatically adjusted, depending on the values of the user parameters "width" and  "height". 

 

-LR

 

 

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3 Replies
Replies (3)
Message 2 of 4

OceanHydroAU
Collaborator
Collaborator

That sounds like a trivial thing easy to solve with a simple add-in.

 

Everything already has attributes and entityTokens now, and the right-click allows add-ins to look at that and decide on what menut things to pop open etc, and the command events let add-in do automatic work on anything they like.

 

The guy who did the BOM add-in was posting today - maybe his tool already supports this?

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Message 3 of 4

peteTF56M
Observer
Observer

With the advent of databases using fully coded/significant part numbers are a thing of the past and lead to problems long term. For a variety of reasons I have seen customers end up with significant part numbers that were 20-30 characters long ovre time. I would love to see the ability for Fusion to allow for incremental auto numbering of items based off of a customer supplied sequence.

Message 4 of 4

Lee_Pattinson
Contributor
Contributor

This is a fantastic idea. I currently name and emboss part numbers manually. Does anyone know of an add-on which can automate this process? 

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