Fusion 360 Tutorial – Turn Eagle PCBs into 3D Models with Fusion 360

hey what's up guys welcome back to another layer by layer tutorial in today's tutorial we're going to take some eagle cad files and we're going to turn them into 3d models this is the adafruit feather m4 it's a brand new edifice feather and you can see here that i have all the components here on the board very very awesome one to one representation of all the components you get silk screen you get the traces and all the pins and vias that are in this you also get some components like the headers this is a really detailed model absolute amazing and the best part is i didn't model this at all um these are all um an x this is all brought in from eagle and then just linked to various components using uh library io which is what we're going to take a look at we use some of the tools to generate some of these components really cool so we're going to do that let me show you another one this is the hollowing this is a really sweet board it's got a lot of things going for a lot of connectors accelerometer neopixel switches capacitive touch display it is very cool and i didn't model any of these well okay i'll take that back i did model the jst connectors but that's because i couldn't find one so we're going to walk through that and kind of see all the components that we can get our hands on uh and this is another one this is just an example of different shapes so you can create and generate custom resistors custom capacitors and of course custom chips with different legs and stuff so it's really cool so we're going to learn how to do all that stuff and take a look at the workflow here uh real quick i want to show you this is how i used to do my stuff i would uh just take the the the dxf out of eagle and just kind of create the board shape and create components that kind of made sense it's really cool to come from this a couple months ago and go to this so that's really awesome all right so let's get eagle make sure you download eagle i'm using the latest version i think it's 9.1.3 at the time of this recording also using the educational license for non-commercial use because we're educating here all right so now that i got that you do want to be online so make sure you're online that's how you can do it by clicking on your little name profile so sign up use your same autodesk account you want to make sure you're using the exact same out of this account or at least get shared to it so i got my auto so i got uh eagle yay i got fusion what else do we need we need a board i'm going to take the cap 88 1188 capacitive touch breakout from adafruit this is a really cool board so we're going to take the eagle cad file and regenerate it and make 3d magic to it really cool so if you scroll all the way down you go to the tech details you can see there's a learn guide normally there's downloads there and sometimes there's a direct link to the github repo kind of so click on that that would take me straight to the you get some nice uh previews here but the best part is you get the eagle cad file on github so i'm gonna download that another cool thing is you get the data sheet for the for the chip the the cap chip so that is a pdf i already got it open here it's from microchip if you scroll all the way down we get to the the details what we're going to do is we're going to use this tech we use this technical drawing or take these numbers and we're going to pop them into the generator in library arrow to create a custom chip this will be cool so let's go ahead and get the board files so i'm in the github page here and remember i got to it by hitting that download link here in the learn guide for this for this board so i got my my github file and i'm going to download it here click download zip i already did that so i'm not gonna do it again and what we'll do is we'll we'll navigate to it this is what it looks like and you get these two files you get the board file and schematic file let's go ahead and right click open that in the latest version of eagle because i also got the old version of eagle so this is what it looks like really cool now some caveats here i don't have the micro builder library library if you right click on any of the components let me do that again right click on the component properties you'll see that it is a part of the micro builder library i don't have access to it that's fine we're going to look we're going to be working on this stuff locally so if you are an electrical engineer and you're designing the boards you will probably want to do a managed shared library i have some links in the description that talk about that workflow it's a little bit different this workflow is more for like working locally and in fusion to get your your thing uh modeled all right so we got our board and we don't have a library but we don't need it right now so we're gonna do is we are gonna play around with the manufacturing tab there's a new tab here it's green it says manufacturing this makes a preview like a graphical preview of what your board looks like this is green it is not supposed to be green so i'm going to click on the cogwheel solder mask color let's choose the blue color um somewhat of a dark navy blue something a little deep a little bit more saturated there you go it looks pretty it's going to update it and that looks more like an adafruit blue awesome you can do that to any of these layers copper layers silk screen substrate all that stuff i'm going to leave it all the default and this looks this just works really well you got some other cool tools i haven't noticed you can export an image that's cool so if you wanted to make an image of this and you know get a screenshot or print it out or something very cool i didn't know that um this is a kind of cheap way to make a fritzing diagram that's kind of neat export dxf yeah yeah yeah been there done that not doing it anymore i'm gonna hit uh close because we're done with it it's all saved sort of and i'm going to click on the fusion 360 button all right we got two options do you want to link it to an existing design or you want to create a new one let's create a new one hit next it's going to take forever now i have a bunch of uh projects so it has to pull it from the cloud it's kind of slow um maybe because i'm in education that's free nah just kidding so i'm going to go down to my folder for projects use the arrow to drop it down wait a second to load it i like this it gives you confirmation where it's going to be saved i don't want it there i want it in a subfolder a parts folder so i'm going to save it in there it's still loading i know what you're thinking probably thinking oh man i could have designed and modeled it um by the time it finished and i thought the same thing too um but no it saved a lot of time so there's my parts folder i just click on it it says will save it there hit okay this is going to tell me all the parts that are associated to this and all the footprints and it's telling me that none of them have 3d stuff in it i know that but thanks for letting me know do i want a description yeah sure i don't really have anything to say but you gotta add one push so we're gonna push this out now it's actually gonna generate the thing send it to the cloud um you know create that fusion 360 file for it it has to kind of do a couple things just to kind of translate all these pins holes and and it does it very very good absolutely accurate this is crazy how good it does it um yeah not got to knock on this wood here so it doesn't break or something um so it takes a little bit of a moment maybe take a coffee break or something but you'll get alerted as soon as the thing is done it says hey your thing is done go look for it all right cool and you got some buttons here you know let me know if i'm up to date or not i am up to date because i'm done anything so hit close let's go back over to the fusion now depending on where you saved it go there i'm in my parts folder here i'll hit the refresh button and it'll get added up here yay here it is so let's go ahead and open it so click this is what it looks like when you open it so none of the none of the parts have been linked to any 3d model so this is what it looks like when it when when you get that you get these little red rectangles and some other colors um and those are just little placeholders so what you'll do is if you open the component it's a pcb component you actually get access to every single component here very very cool now if you want to start replacing them you got to right click on this this pcb object in the timeline and hit edit this is going to bring you into a pcb workspace so if you click here now you have a pcb workspace and what you have here you have a couple tools to move things around and even um even even replace some things so if i wanna flip some things so real quick let's kind of run through some of these parts and just show you that not everything is a component so you see that we have some plated mounting holes if you uh hide those i'm gonna shift select the group and then hit v the letter v that gives you a hides it or you could just use the light bulb and turn them off individually those are just there as placeholders the way it was formed in the well while it was being designed i guess the mounting holes are created as objects and uh eagle doesn't know that they're not 3d objects you got some other things here like fiducials and test points as well so these adafruit components here are are just logos and things but for some reason the logos do show up so the silk screen is perfect i don't see any problems with it i guess you could modify it more if you wanted to um so we got rid of those we got rid of that there's some test points somewhere around here fiducials so you can hide those you don't need those that's pretty much it i think i've got all the the weirdos out or the unnecessary things out all right so now the next thing is we i want to show you guys the headers uh so how to generate your own headers uh because typically i would have to model them but now i don't have to do that so it's really cool so this is a 1 by 13 uh pin header you got two of them so let's get those in here so let's go to our library i o so it's library.io that's the homepage i don't have any these libraries are here but i don't have to create a library let's go to uh let's let's do explore for example and just show you guys that there are models here i can see that their models there i can click on the sub tab here the 3d models i can search for various models these are all being brought in new ones are being added um all the time so that's awesome and you can search for them so if you wanted to search for uh something specific like 0.608 something something you could probably find something like that i don't know if that's a real number a real size but anyway um that's just the stuff that's already there these are some non-things but you also get the package generator uh up here so dashboard packages i'm gonna create a new package this is gonna open like this kind of blank canvas where i can build different uh components so this is called package generators these are all the different shapes and body types for various ics and components you got your resistors you got your chip arrays you got your dips and um all those let's go to the pin header i want the male kind we also got the angled kind now there's being new ones being added all the time what you see here um there's more coming i i hope but for now this is what we got we got quite a few so this is gonna everything we need it's kind of here let's go to the pin head get the mail straight i'm gonna hit update preview down there it's gonna preview a default uh generator it's gonna generate the default values i have here just to get a look at what it looks like so you can see here i got a two by four header you can see it kind of goes down there this uh plate here this kind of green plate here is just uh this isn't that part of the model it's just like kind of a show thing kind of a floor we can turn that off by hitting the options and then show board just turn that off then you can see um your thickness uh your clearances if you need to um so that's nice to know uh so let's go ahead and start updating things so this little graphic here gives us all the dimensions and all the letters associated to the various edges and things so i want my one by 13 row and if i update that um it'll update the pins excuse me but it won't update the black header piece that one has to be manually like figured out easy to do so um d is what we want so the d is the length of this whole thing so right now you can see it's set to 10 millimeters do a little bit of math so our pitch uh is uh 2.54 that's 0.1 inch right that's 2.54 millimeters cool so we can take that 2.54 millimeters we can multiply it by 13 and we get 33.02 that is the length that we need for the letter d they're 3.02 now why is it here twice uh that's just one of the things uh with with data sheets is normally you get a max uh dimension and a lowest dimension because there's tolerances when you manufacture they give you the lowest and the maximum possible value so i just like to use both of them to set them the same um so if you have one higher than the other that isn't you know it might conflict another thing we need to update is the width so that's letter e so the width needs to be dropped down from 5.8 to 5 uh 2.54 and then l is i think the length the thickness of the actual uh black piece which uh is is fine at 2.54 that's normally default so you can you can create your own custom thicknesses and pitches and that's really cool you also get pin numbering if you if you want that you're like why do you need pin numbering this can actually be exported as an eagle library footprint so that's awesome so you get kind of both worlds here so you want to generate your footprint and eagle that's great but we're not doing that because we're just kind of getting this out so once you have once you're happy with your file you got to hit the finish button up here this will create a version of it um don't worry about it if you're not using um the library the shared libraries that are in the cloud you don't have to we're not doing that for this with this workflow so i'm just saving it out it's creating a version for me and it's nice that i can go back and see the versions but i normally don't use it i'm not using it right now but this is creating that uh versioning stuff for me so that's kind of nice if you're using that so now we have that we have an export button up here export you get an object or a step go with the step because we're doing fusion you download that and save it into your part folder or whatever it gets a name that you can modify and change it'll just have the values like 1 by 13 for example so i've already gone ahead and saved those out in my little header folder here so i have a 1x13 pin head we could also make it a female connector if we wanted to and if you wanted to update the model you can just hit generate model again and update this update these numbers and if you do update the numbers let's say i want to do use the model centroid or footprint centroid there you go so that now makes it in the center of the footprint that could be a good alignment trick to do and then you hit generate model i think again somewhere you have to you have to let's let's do two real quick yeah you hit update preview um this is important just because it's bit me before so you do when you do uh update and you've already exported steel you want to update again you do have to hit the update preview again and then you hit finish again and then it'll create a new version and yada yada so just throwing it out there but for now let's say i can actually just close this out excellent so now back into fusion let's go ahead and if you click on that first header um it highlights it here in the browser so that's great so now i have these two and what's cool about this is because it's the same object if i replace one it'll replace the other so i'll replace component body right click replace component body and we want to navigate ourselves to our header and select the one so this is a 1 by 13 pin head it's a step file hit open and what will happen is uh sometimes it it comes in like this at a wrong orientation but you have all the x y and z angles that you can change so i'm gonna rotate this back this way bring it in this way and then bring it down so i like using the arrows as opposed to this free form thing here just because you're going to get more snap points and then you can fine tune this now you can see as i'm moving this the other side is moving as well so you can see it's mirrored like that and this right here doesn't seem to be perfectly accurate that's fine you can you can fuss with it if you'd like but maybe we will just a tiny bit sometimes this doesn't work so i get myself a little a little bit of numbers here it's a little number fudging 1.54 looks pretty good i'll hit enter that saves it in there and now i got my pin yeah i got my pins sweet the next things we're going to do is uh let's let's uh let's make these chip leds so these chip leds are um not a generated thing there's no tool to generate those but the autodesk team has gone ahead and kind of modeled them for us if you go to the explore tab and you search for chip led all in caps in one word you get a bunch of them there's a lot of different sizes of them a lot of different colors of them so choose the ones you want you can show all you can you can grab them let's say i want that one for example it gives you a render of it here so you can see if that's the right one like oh yeah that's the great color this is the right footprint if you want to actually download it you can go to view three model and that'll give you the export step file so i've already gone ahead and done that i've downloaded this very same one i believe it's the 805. let's go into fusion to see yep it's 805. so again i just need one of them right click replace component navigate to where you saved it here i have chip led 0805 hit enter and the bam it entered it now again i do have to do a little bit of work um i gotta orient it right so let's go this way and up here now obviously if you're doing this in eagle or you know in your footprint you've got to have to make sure that your orientation is correct or yeah your pin orientation your polarity is correct so you can you can fuss you get a little bit of wiggle room here in cad land but not so much when you're actually designing the board all right so there you go there's our chip leds looking pretty nice now there are some other things um that we can get that we can either auto generate or just search for them i i'm really liking just searching for them and see if they have it and then if i can't find it just generate one so for this example uh these are resist uh these are yeah these are resistors so uh right click replace the body component body i already have these resistors so just right click now there is a little bit of a weird thing here with this particular board my capacitors turned into resistors for some reason but that's fine um i'll right click on it on just that one you can see it's labeled r that's for resistor in c or for capacitors so i'll right click on that capacitor replace component body i got these capacitor resistors again um from the from the library i o site uh i think they're where did i say yeah c is a 603 no it's a 805 so where my 805 caps it really helps to organize your parts i'm just getting a bunch of them but i'll definitely have to there it is is it 805 no yeah 805 no that's what i want and uh oh look at that that didn't do what i thought it would let's do the backwards where i grab this resistor replace the component body ah it just keeps doing it that's a that's a shame i really wish it didn't do that are they actually resistors or capacitors i mean it says c so i'm thinking that is a capacitor you can look at the picture of it there's normally a nice picture of the board does it really matter yeah i think it matters yeah they're actually resistors they're not there's one cap okay there's two caps i got it wrong i guess it's the labeling was wrong maybe no that's supposed to be a cap dude that's weird so let's look this is a cap right no that's a resistor what so you can you can you know go down this rabbit hole um this looks like a pad those look like resistors all the meat there's two here next to that um the saw chip anyway you know um let's get this updated that's that's odd hmm what is this one all right so this is a res pack this could be generated as well um but you could search for it here i think they have a oh no you know what i actually generated it i couldn't find it here so to generate the res pack you can go to dashboard packages create a new package and there's a chip array editor up here so let's click on that chip array editor you have two different options i think there was a two-sided two-sided flat concave and a two-sided convex so it's up to you whichever one you want i think it's this one that we want you just put pop in the numbers that that are that are to the sides i've already gone ahead and do that because it is a little bit of a number fudging and looking around and we're going to do that just for this chip because i think that one's a little bit easier than the rest of them so we got these chip these got these uh rest packs these resistor arrays let's replace those um i think i called it rest pack too are you no that's a resistor rest pack 4 00603 there we go that's the right size and everything now again i do have to do a little bit of orientation here so let's get this into place go down over and you only have to do this once so if you're using this like a whole bunch of times like i am here at least twice hit okay done excellent all right this is a sot an sot with five legs replace again this actually generated in the library i o so the sot uh was it so sot 23.5 that's the one i want and they also have a you can either generate your your own one look at that i didn't have to do any uh orientation that's ideally what will happen uh so this was generated um so sometimes it works somebody doesn't the orientation wise sometimes you win the lottery sometimes you don't okay the last thing we're gonna do is we're actually gonna run through this guy here this is the the chip the actual qfn body size qfn 24 because it has 24 um pins uh it's four millimeter pitch i believe but if we don't know all the details we already have our data sheet ready here to pull data from to pull numbers out of so that's cool so we got our d e e one d one and these are kind of um they kind of match well with uh what's in library i o so let's create a new wait are we already in the new pack yeah so we create a new package let's go back go to qfn because that's the chip we got the qfn body type down here qf and we also got a qfp which is not surface mounted i guess the legs like look they look like they're protruding on the outside so we got qfn um it's uh how many pens is it i already forgot here's our data sheet yeah so i think it's what five six so it's a six by six so you can just type that in here it looks like we already got six for the d side six for the e side oblong pad shape you can change this if you want to rectangle density level i haven't really played with that i'm not sure what that is leave it at normal e is our pitch i believe our pitch is 0.5 if you look down at the numbers you can see um terminal pitch 0.5 u and then the overall body height and stuff is going to be four by four the x and y body size so it's four i've already locked through this this uh data sheet so it looks like i know it and it's because i kind of do but you would have to kind of look at the number and then look here and look at the number but now that i'm familiar with it i can quickly browse through it and digest the data but yeah the x and y body size is pretty much by four another thing that is these are common dimensions you'll see that there's a minimum and a maximum i think i talked about that because the tolerances there's you know because of manufacturing there's tolerances and they change a little bit but for the most part it's four by four so let's go ahead and type that in for the l and uh is it d yeah it's d and e so capital d capital e four before before before uh it is one millimeter thick and my pads are b lower case b is like the length of the thickness of the pad uh let's see what it is i think it's the same i think it's like point two the it's going to be b lowercase b same number lowercase b is 0.25 so lowercase b point two five it's pretty close let's change this to the maximum we'll turn it to five get rid of the three all right i'm gonna hit preview and this is gonna generate that um that uh the chip for us now it's a pretty simple chip so why'd you spend all this time it's just a rectangle but if you're creating this footprint again for your you know for eagle you get the you get the option to download the footprint for eagles it's great so there's our chip it's got those little details really are helpful there's got a chamfer on the top and you got all your legs and your pins it's looking pretty good just have the orange the like the indicator here telling you where the power or voltage is i'm done with it and hit finish hit okay the what you would do is you wait you know you export it as stl using that export button i'm not going to wait for it's already exported it so back into fusion let's go ahead and get our qfn right click replace component body and i have it named here qfn 50p whatever whatever that's just the numbers that we use and it kind of auto-generated it so we got that i'll bring it in and that is brought in absolutely perfectly there's no need to adjust any of the x and y's or the rotations it's just perfect so that's pretty much it um very very cool you can spend quite a bit of time um you know searching and picking but i think that is a little bit more efficient than having to model each and individual part a lot of these parts have already been modeled for us and some of the parts i actually didn't get from library i o um i'll try to find this this trim pot i actually found it from digikey from the uh the actual product page in digikey and and the manufacturer of this actually provided a step file that's great so you can do that same thing with the micro usb port same thing with the pico blade thing here the the little micro connector uh what else did i grab the the slide switch as well i think i grabbed it from grab cat or somewhere else um so you just have to make sure that the pin the the pads are correct you know the distances are correct and all that but the rest of the chips uh this one this chip array all these little chips and capacitors those were all either grabbed from library or generated from library i o so i think that's really cool there's a lot of different other workflows that you could do um that i think you should check out if you want to use the the managed shared libraries so that's in the cloud that's a really great way to have a way to track all your versions and stuff obviously so anyway um one last thing i'll do is share with you guys the github repo of all of our cad drawings so that is what over here yeah so this is actually the reason why i created this because there's a parts request in my issues thing here and this gentleman here said like hey these are some parts i use all the time it'd be great to have them in model so um i actually grabbed that from here from this list uh so that was really cool i think it was where is it there it is this guy here the eight key capacitive touch so yeah so now i got that and um one last thing let's see what else we want to do obviously okay so i got a link for that github repo of the a4 cat parts if you want to do a parts request you can do so here um and we'll see if we can get to it but for the most part they're all here step files fusion 360 files and stls are all in here and i've been adding a bunch of them too i think the last thing i want to do is to show you a tip that you'll notice that in fusion orientation and looking at your view cube matters and working in your comforter in the orientation you like is really nice and i do a lot like working in this orientation here where this is the front and this is the top i don't like doing that so here's what i'm going to do i'm going to make this the top so to do that i have to go to the front what i think is the top this is my top i'll right click on this little escape thing and then say set current view as top so we'll do that so now that is the top so when i hit the when i when i orient around it it's now like this it's a little bit better that's kind of how i like to work so that's a nice tip for you uh and then if you want to set this view to be like your home so i'll click on this angle i can set that to be my home by right clicking and saying set current view as set current view as home and then fit to view and now now whenever i'm lost i can hit the home thing and it'll go to that view that particular view that i selected so that's pretty cool very nice colors i like it so there you go uh that's using adafruit gosh that's using the eight different boards using autodesk's library io eagle infusion360. let me know what you guys think you have any questions or anything like that or if you have some better workflows i'd love to hear about them thank you guys so much for watching and i will talk to you in the next one

Channel: Adafruit Industries

Views: 85,271

Keywords: adafruit, electronics, 3d modeling, CAD, fusion 360, autodesk, library io, eagle, PCB, design, components, tutorial, layer by layer

Id: S8U09Pj1m6M

Length: 28min 53sec (1733 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 04 2018