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