Managing Fitted / Not FItted components

Am 18.11.2015 um 16:30 schrieb Rachael:

When doing a design I often find I need to have parts that are fitted or

not fitted so I can either make a decision on how things should be set

depending upon evaluation of a design on the bench or it might be to help

support having different variants of the same design for different

products. As far as I can see the only way to identify a part as Not Fitted

at the moment is to change it's value to NP or NOFIT so that when you

generate a BOM you can discard all the not populated values. The problem

here is you lose the value so you need to keep a track of what it should be

elsewhere in case you want to reinstate it at some point. It's also a bit

fiddly and with a large design could take a lot of additional effort to

manage.

 

In other tools I have used I have set things up so I can specify a "Fitted"

property (yep we can do this in Eagle just fine too). You can then have a

right click menu item which for a particular part will allow you to toggle

it's fitted state. If not fitted there would be a cross placed through the

part to indicate that it was not fitted on the schematic and the property

would be automatically set. The BOM generation would then be such that it

would output the BOM containing only the fitted parts and then optionally a

separate not fitted BOM so as to easily allow further checks on a build in

manufacturing. This way you can very easily manage fitted / Not Fitted

parts, you don't lose the intended value information and you get a

correctly generated BOM and it should work well when trying to manage

multiple variants of a board.

 

Many thanks,

 

Rachael

 

Hello Rachael,

it seems that your are describing the "Variant" command of eagle

Help-> Variant

HTH

Werner

Am 18.11.2015 um 16:30 schrieb Rachael:

When doing a design I often find I need to have parts that are fitted or

not fitted so I can either make a decision on how things should be set

depending upon evaluation of a design on the bench or it might be to help

support having different variants of the same design for different

products. As far as I can see the only way to identify a part as Not Fitted

at the moment is to change it's value to NP or NOFIT so that when you

generate a BOM you can discard all the not populated values. The problem

here is you lose the value so you need to keep a track of what it should be

elsewhere in case you want to reinstate it at some point. It's also a bit

fiddly and with a large design could take a lot of additional effort to

manage.

 

In other tools I have used I have set things up so I can specify a "Fitted"

property (yep we can do this in Eagle just fine too). You can then have a

right click menu item which for a particular part will allow you to toggle

it's fitted state. If not fitted there would be a cross placed through the

part to indicate that it was not fitted on the schematic and the property

would be automatically set. The BOM generation would then be such that it

would output the BOM containing only the fitted parts and then optionally a

separate not fitted BOM so as to easily allow further checks on a build in

manufacturing. This way you can very easily manage fitted / Not Fitted

parts, you don't lose the intended value information and you get a

correctly generated BOM and it should work well when trying to manage

multiple variants of a board.

 

Many thanks,

 

Rachael

 

Hello Rachael,

it seems that your are describing the "Variant" command of eagle

Help-> Variant

HTH

Werner

Werner Harbrecht wrote on Wed, 18 November 2015 16:53

Am 18.11.2015 um 16:30 schrieb Rachael:

Hello Rachael,

it seems that your are describing the "Variant" command of eagle

Help-> Variant

 

HTH

Werner

Hi Werner,

Yes this is actually very close! This is almost what I am trying to do

except I would like to be able to extend it to be able to mark parts as

fitted or not without having to specify a separate variant and switch to it

and without having to go into the variant dialog to be able to mark

something as fitted or not. I.e. I would like to be able to right click on

a part in the schematic and mark it as fitted or not fitted.

Maybe if the "default" variant allowed the selection of fitted / not fitted

then this would then be easy to add into the context menu for individual

components?

I guess the down side of this approach is it may be too easy to

accidentally mark a part or parts (combined with the group command) as not

fitted but hopefully it would be quite obvious what had happened and could

easily be undone. Alternatively the "Mark as Fitted" or its converse "Mark

as Not Fitted" could be on another menu (e.g. Edit) so you group select the

parts of interest and then go to the menu.

Many thanks,

Rachael

--

Web access to CadSoft support forums at www.eaglecentral.ca.  Where the CadSoft EAGLE community meets.

Hi Werner,

Actually looking at this some more, as soon as I create myself a 'Default'

variant I can then easily use the variant command to make the changes. I

guess the creation of any needed menu items is then down to writing an

appropriate bit of ULP to build them which is currently not my strong

point.... It would be nice as an out of the box feature of Eagle to be able

to do this though so I think it's still a valid feature request but I guess

there are a lot of requests and finite developer resource!

Thanks for your help in pointing me in the right direction on this.

Best Regards,

Rachael

--

Web access to CadSoft support forums at www.eaglecentral.ca.  Where the CadSoft EAGLE community meets.

Good afternoon, Rachel,

A ULP program can not modify anything.  However, it can be used to

collect a series of script commands into a string,  then exit the ulp

with the string as the single argument:

    string cmds;

    cmds = "value R1 10k;\n";

    cmds += "value R2 22k;\n";

    exit(cmds);

As a side note, one can use any method to produce a file containing

script commands.  ULP is just one method.

Regards,

    - Chuck

On 11/18/2015 12:22 PM, Rachael wrote:

Hi Werner,

 

Actually looking at this some more, as soon as I create myself a 'Default'

variant I can then easily use the variant command to make the changes. I

guess the creation of any needed menu items is then down to writing an

appropriate bit of ULP to build them which is currently not my strong

point.... It would be nice as an out of the box feature of Eagle to be able

to do this though so I think it's still a valid feature request but I guess

there are a lot of requests and finite developer resource!

 

Thanks for your help in pointing me in the right direction on this.

 

Best Regards,

 

Rachael

Hi Chuck,

Thanks for the tips! I've not looked at ULP or any other scripting in Eagle

until today but I have done scripting in other tools so hopefully I should

be able to pick things up relatively easily here, it's good to know some of

the limitations of ULP though! I've just finished a project I was working

on for a client so I should have a little time to investigate and have a

little fun trying to get things working how I would like.

Many thanks,

Rachael

--

Web access to CadSoft support forums at www.eaglecentral.ca.  Where the CadSoft EAGLE community meets.