Variants - Alternate Parts

Same question here!  Sad no one has answered Aleksander's question in over a year.

CS provides basic variant handling. You can have fitted / not-fitted and adjust the values / parameters of components but not have completely different components. Are the two components you are considering footprint compatible or not? If not then just have two components on the schematic with opposite fitted / not-fitted settings.

HI Peter,

Thank you for taking the time to reply.  The LDO Voltage Regulators components are footprint compatible.  Basically, need an alternate for supply chain reasons.  What do you recommend for this situation?

Dion

If the regulators are directly compatible with absolutely no changes required to PCB or schematic then I would be tempted to just leave the one part and not worry about variants. A lot will depend on how your company handles component selection. I would guess that many parts on the board can be alternative sourced (e.g. resistors, capacitors, connectors) and you would not typically create variants for every possible sourcing solution. Could the regulator not be treated the same way - the buying team know the possible alternative parts and source as best they can. The variant feature is most suited to different models/builds of a board where perhaps a reduce priced version has some features/components removed or where changing a component would need other changes (e.g. change of regulator needs different supporting resistor/capacitor values).

Peter,  Once again thanks for taking the time to respond so promptly.  I agree with your logic that variants are not a good way to deal with alternative sourced parts (e.g. resistors, caps, connectors, etc.)  Currently, our system funnels all alternative/substitution request from our CM to my desk.  I suspect I could add alternative manufacturer and mpn to the parameter data within a component (ughhh), and then have the BOM generation tool spit these out with the specified part number.  Would you agree?

Personally I would keep variants just for cases where there really is a difference in the design, use variants to document component removal / value changes / alternative footprints. Altium libraries tend to be quite manufacturer specific so using their standard library parts automatically leads to the BOM suggesting one manufacturer's part. In the past I've kept separate data (e.g. Excel sheet or database) that is built up over time to let buyers know what alternatives are acceptable or should not be used. For example an specialist industrial board may have a design life of 10 years where the circuit/board never change yet it may be necessary to source different parts over the years for production. Rather than revising the schematics/PCBs it seems more logical to have a separate document that qualifies components for buying purposes.For many parts there could be dozens of suitable alternatives (manufacturers / speed grades / logic families / tolerances) which is really too much information to manage on the schematic.

I have the same question.

Here is a screenshot of the options available when you click on the ellipsis button beside a component in the Component Variation column of the Variant Management dialogue:

As OP points out, there are only two options here:  fitted and not fitted

According to the official CircuitStudio reference documentation:

So, it would seem that either this is an unintentional bug, or else that the official documentation is wrong.  Either way, this sucks.

I'm stuck on this CS bug too.  No word that there's a way to work around this?

Still stuck too.  I don't know of any workaround.  e14softwareuk do you have any words of wisdom for us?

Still stuck too.  I don't know of any workaround.  e14softwareuk do you have any words of wisdom for us?

It does look like the documentation is wrong and this feature simply isn't available. If the alternative components are footprint compatible then I would not worry about variants and handle sourcing alternative parts as a separate issue. If the parts are not footprint compatible then you may have to add both to the design and alternate the fitted/not-fitted flags. This will require some messing with design rules if you want to overlap the two components.