Hi.
All of you that use a assembly house for manufacturing, how do you structure the information needed for the assembly house in the component fields to get a BOM that is “producible”.
Do you always add additional fields, or have you found a way to get all the information (mfr, mfr.pn, supplr, supplr.pn, tolerance etc) in to the default KiCad component fields?
Regards
/Matias
I personally add a house part number which is then used to get all the other information required out of a database. (one can even use a spreadsheet for a small enough number of parts.)
Ok, so you do not actually generate a BOM that can be produced without additional data (from your database), or is the house part numbers from your assembly house?
I would like to do as little manual work as possible between the BOM is generated and the documents is sent to the assembly house, as the risk for human error increases.
The reason i use an external database is that it makes it easier to exchange non critical parts (like resistors). I don’t want to be forced to order the exact same part every time. (The part might not be in stock, there might be one that fits my requirements better, …)
Talk to your assembly house. If they have their own part numbers then this will make it extremely easy for you.
If you then still use house part numbers with some system that converts them to the assembly house numbers it will be possible to switch assembly house later on.
If you enter their information directly into the schematic this will become much harder and will probably lock you into using them for ever. Even if somebody else would offer a better service for you.
I hear a lot of fab houses accept DigiKey part numbers, even if they don’t order parts from DigiKey, it is a reference for the component properties. Probably they have in house parts they can immediately match to DigiKey numbers.
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