"Assemblies" as an improvement for "Projects"

[electronics4fun]

Hello Everyone,
I work in a company called APSensing and we switched to Part-DB a while ago.
While the Part management works well we saw some possible improvements for “Projects” and other details of Part-DB.
Therefore, we hired a developer (https://github.com/webdevinition) to implement those features.
We are sure that a lot of people can benefit from those features.
Here i want to go into more details for each feature that we have implemented (or planned) to bring some light into it, from the perspective of an electronic development standpoint.
Also i want to split it up into the single features that are planned, starting with “Assemblies”.

This references to discussion #1041
and pull request #1082

I will add electronic development perspective details like this for the other features like “IPN suggest” soon.

Let's start.

Assemblies

“Projects” is in general a nice Feature for organizing PCBs or PCBAs (PCB-Assemblies, sometimes also called PCAs).
But it lacks in some details.
It is sufficient for PCBs with electronic parts on it.
But if you want to add other things like a housing, lightpipes, skrews etc that is not part of the schematic (BOM) it gets complicated.
Also, if you have a more complex device that consists of more than one PCBA, it is not possible to represent.
So, how about a “Projects” that can reference Parts and Assemblies in its BOM.

Here you see a Assembly with Parts

And here a Assembly that consists of other assemblies

And then you also need a nice import functionality.
If you are using KiCad or another EDA that gets it’s parts from Part-DB, you always get the unique ID of the Part that you have included. Now you can include that id into your BOM for the use of importing it into Assemblies. If the id is present, the import is very simple because the reference to the part is already explicit.
It is now nice to see the whole Assembly in Part-DB with working references to Parts and Assemblies. But now you want to give it to Procurement (and they want it to add it into their ERP-System (Enterprise Resource Planning)). Therefore, an export as csv/pdf/excel would be nice. The export must take care that every Assembly and Sub-Assembly with all the Parts/BOM are included in the correct amount and hierarchy.
The Parts will have (like projects before) a reference to Assemblies where they are used.

It is also notable that the intention is not to purge Projects.
We want to implement it as a feature that can be turn on or off in the settings.

MountNames, Designators and Price with Price-Currency

There is an oddity (in my opinion) that we want to get rid of.
Projects is using “Mountnames” and “Names”. As far as i understand is names the same like a Designator for a device on the PCB.
Like “R1, R2, C4”...
Mountname could be the same, but i am not sure.
The import is using Mountnames.
Maybe someone can enlighten me here.
In my opinion it makes sense to introduce a new column "Descriptors" instead.

As you also can see in the table, there is a price with currency. For now, it is not planned but i can imagine that those columns can be deleted for Assemblies and instead, the part in the BOM get a dropdown menu where you choose the supplier that is given by the part (Purchase information). Then the Assembly could also calculate the correct price and the export can give you the supplier part number for ordering.

Alternative Parts / "Part choices"

This is also something that we have planned to introduce “Alternative Parts” to the Assembly-BOMs.
In this extra column you can add additional (qualified) Parts (from Part-DB) that can be used if the actual part is not available.
This makes it easier for the assembler (Bestücker) when parts are not available on the market or if they are obsolete (or just not in Stock of the Part-DB).

So please let us know if you are interested in this feature and what you think about it.