To the current and future Fusion 360 users

Now, this is a cool update…

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I’m sure everyone that has used F360 for free has received notices that their subscription will change when they come to the end of life for it and if you don’t pay a yearly fee you still can use F360 but it will not be the full blown version you have been using. In other words it will be crippled.
Does anyone know just how “watered down” this will be?

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I’ve received this one: " As of January 7th, 2020, [Autodesk EAGLE will now be included as a part of a Fusion 360 subscription]). You’ll maintain access to your existing Autodesk EAGLE software while gaining access to Fusion 360 at no additional charge."

There were some changes late last year around reswizzling the various free versions, but I’ve received no notice that I’m losing any major functionality (the organic design tools were really cool, but I can live without it, being in shared teams would be nice, but understand the reasoning). The education version, the hobbyist version, and the startup versions are now non longer identical - and that doens’t bother me - they’ve been very open (and have specifically told me to!) create a separate account if I wanted to use a feature in a different edition. None of those have actually had the “full blown” version for quite some time as features came in, then were removed.

What are you referring to as “watering down?”

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I’d guess it’s less watered down per se, but old and stagnant.

Where the pay to play versions get all the shiny new features and toolpaths while the free version gets left in the dust. I’m ok with that as long as they keep free version bug free and stable :slight_smile:

Interestingly, I have yet to receive any email from Autodesk about my Fusion360 account. Maybe they are rolling out the licensing changes slowly one country at a time, or maybe the French market is so insignificant that they did not bother.

IIRC, it depends on the type of license you have (free, education, full commercial, etc) and what the rules are in your region. Some venues restrict license conditions and changes.

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I have now had a bit of time to work with circuit design in Fusion360. I produce a fair number of milled boards on my Nomad, and an Eagle tool in the process, as I have for maybe 20 years.

At this point, I think I will forgo the Fusion PCB tools. I have found a few issues.

Bug? incompletely/inconsistently implemented features? I am not sure, as the behaviour does not match the documentation. For example, dropping a polygon for a ground fill was quite difficult, and once the polygon was named, it ratsnested automatically (the docs say the command must be invoked), which made further progress on the layer difficult.

The layout of the windows and subwindows is sleek, modern looking, and awkward, as there are not clear borders demarcating the panels, and there are a LOT of panels.

The parts library is minimal (Eagle shipped with a very complete library of common parts and generic parts)

This is a two hour test flight, not a complete and thorough test, but the current product still has the feel of ‘work in progress’. So much recent software NEVER leaves that state, and Fusion is at a point where it long should have.

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I’ve found the library to be quite extensive, though you need to go into the library manager and download the ones you want and add them to the project which is new behavior - what’s enabled initially is as you say really small. Old libraries are also imported easily.

Unfortunately, this has not been my experience. I have a lot (several hundred, not thousands) parts defined in the old stand-alone Eagle. Fusion crashes when trying to import the libraries. I gave up mid Feb, as AD was no help. This was in addition to the other crashes with the PCB module.

There are a fair number of common components that I can not find in these libraries. A lot of vendor specific libraries are there, but when I need a 1W Dale resistor, and need to spend 20 minutes building it myself (should be 5, which is still too much), I can’t. I just can’t. Add to that, many of the library components are improperly defined, so setting value isn’t possible (the caps I needed for a project, for example), and the errors bringing existing projects in for revision, I pulled the plug.

As of a month to two months ago, as far as I am concerned, not ready for prime time. I can not do quality work with a product that is eternally somewhere between alpha and beta.

I want this to be good. The integration with the CAD would be awesome. The coupled simulation capability stupendous. I want to be able to use it. But it is a step back from Eagle in everything that matters, and buggy to boot. When my existing Eagle license expires, I will need to migrate unless a LOT of improvement occurs. This is only a minor part of what I do, but it is critical when a project calls for it. On a 45day project last year, roughly 10 were devoted to the electronics package (6 revisions to final, if I recall, milled prototypes hand soldered) That would have been 30 with FUsion. If it would even do it-- roughly 200 components, about half of which were not available as models and needed to be made up for the job.

(sorry for the long rant. Tired. Dealing with the same worries everyone else is right now, job one being an environment where no one will make a decision and 2500 people spinning in the wind)

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All fair concerns. Eagle has at least traditionally been pretty good about letting you use an older version with a newer license, and Autodesk has done the same for it’s products (supplying new “old” licenses), so I would think continuing to use the old one with a renewed license is likely to be a path worth exploring?

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