I’m at the stage where I would like to get circuit boards assembled using PCBWay. My project started with an earlier version of LibrePCB, and I’ve now upgraded to 1.0.0.
I need to add MPNs for all my components. I think they didn’t exist for the previous version? So none of my components have them.
I’ve been following through the User Manual, and I’ve added MPNs for all my larger components one by one. Double-click on a component in the Schematic Editor, double-click on the Part Number and paste it in, then double-click on the Manufacturer and paste that in.
I’m now up to the small components. I have lots of resistors, but only two values. Do I have to manually add the information in the way that I described above for every individual component? Or is there a way that I can update them all at once?
At the moment there’s no way to assign MPNs to multiple components at once. As you correctly mentioned, MPNs are completely new since LibrePCB 1.0.0 and there are still lots of improvements needed in the upcoming releases to make MPN handling easier.
Btw, for general purpose resistors and capacitors, many assembly houses don’t need exact MPNs since they have their own stock of standard components and can assemble you something from their stock. In this case, just specifying the value (e.g. CAPACITANCE=100nF) is good enough and the MPN can be left empty. However, I don’t know if this also works with PCBWay (maybe you just need to try, they will probably tell you if they need exact MPNs).
This makes sense. It would be good to be able to specify the tolerance and power of the resistor as well, but that doesn’t look like it would be any easier than putting in the MPN. It’s probably easiest to add in a ‘comments’ column in the BOM file after I generate it.
