pls allow some comments to Olivers do not fit suggestions. We recently
stumbled accidently above Kicad after quarrels with commercial tools and
found its push & shoove capabilites are a remarkable and motivating
feature.
Experience shows, that the „do not fit“ feature is much more complex.
Unfortunately PCB do not have interface standards for contract assembly
and soldering in comparison to Gerber for etching or CNC drilling.
Therefore cooperation with non black belted contract manufactureres is
always painful. For this reason, we run our own SMD pick & place machines.
„Do not fit“ components are nothing else than changed value properties
of components. E.g. variant A has no R100 and value of R100=DNF, variant
B with R100=1k, variant C with R100 =4k7. Shure this decision is in the
responsibility of the design engineer. To decide this inside schematic
will end up in complex variant manager tools. Variants become instances
of schematic. This raises more questions what beginners hardly
understand. Finally we recognize that variants are not only a question
of assembly but of component purchasing, stock keeping and so on. This
leads to the blueprint V6 library format discussion what is much more
complex.
I dont offer contract assembly and all designs are own and drawn by
diffrent CAD. After struggling years with Excel BOM and insufficient CSV
macros like many other contract manufacturers, we started
https://sourceforge.net/projects/cad2board/ Up on today Qt is only
compiled and tested for windows, cannot read Kicad input and output
format is limited to our Heeb pick & place machines (today ATN
innoplacer Berlin) So is of little consequence for Kicad but solution
works comfortable here. We have complex variant managers but do not use.
Variant decisions are executed at latest possible moment. Eg. the reel
with CPU crystals run unexpected empty and there are a few more boards
to populate. It is one click to take out this component from project
temporarily without saving and continue assembly if I decide to complete
the few crystals by hand while board testing. Same way we manage all
variants and „DNF“ components permanently inside pick2place project
files. They can be merged any time with updates from full size BOM. To
understand Olivers efforts: The disadvantage of this solution is a
possibly inaccurate schematics not representing all details of any
specific variant.
Happy routing
Janvi
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