Adding company part numbers in Eagle that I can access with ULP

On 25/10/15 06:05, Carlos Acosta wrote:

Hello all,

 

I have successfully written my first ULP to format data for my pick and

place machine. For the most part I got the data formatted to be a direct

import into the machine except for one detail - part numbers.

 

The software in the machine needs to associate every reference

designator with a part number. This association tells it what package,

reel, value, etc it is. In Eagle, I am not sure how to assign our

internal part number to each component so that when it comes time to

program the pick and place it can be one swift ULP action to get the

data I need.This is also a problem when outputting general purpose BOM's

 

I have been using the same resistor for all the resistors on the PCB of

the same package type. Just change the values as needed. This of course

is the same for the capacitors as well. What I would like to have is our

part number for all the variations of values, tolerance, type, etc.

 

Active and unique parts are seemingly a little easier because I use a

specific part in general. This is not always the case though, maybe an

MCU with the same package has a number of variants of memory, speed, or

whatever.

 

Does anyone have any suggestions or best practices for associating part

number with a part that can be output via ULP's to Pick and Place

centroid files and BOM's? Hoping there is an easy solution that is

hiding in plain site.

 

The usual recommended method, these days, is to place the part number as

an attribute of all components on the schematic or board. That feels

like another manual step to me, but apparently it's the "right" way.

I still use V4 for some of the work I do, which didn't have attributes.

For that, I use a variant of the old BoM ULP, which matches both part

and value against a TSV database of known parts. So where I use an

R_EU_0805 and set its value to 10K, the BoM ULP produces a different

part number than if an identical R_EU_0805 has a value of 100K.

Thank you for taking the time to post. I was reading about the attributes and did a quick test outputting a ULP. It seems to work quite well for the 'fixed' parts. For the passives with variable attributes - it gets a bit tedious as you pointed out. Do you think it is practical to use the 'variants' for the different values so that I could pick from a list? I have never used variants before so I am not sure if that is even possible.

I am going to take a look at the BOM ULP that uses the external data base to cross ref part numbers. That could be the best long term solution albeit a bit of a setup commitment up front.

Thank you for taking the time to post. I was reading about the attributes and did a quick test outputting a ULP. It seems to work quite well for the 'fixed' parts. For the passives with variable attributes - it gets a bit tedious as you pointed out. Do you think it is practical to use the 'variants' for the different values so that I could pick from a list? I have never used variants before so I am not sure if that is even possible.

I am going to take a look at the BOM ULP that uses the external data base to cross ref part numbers. That could be the best long term solution albeit a bit of a setup commitment up front.