Feature Announcement: Universal Part Pages and Component Update

Image by Pipe Yanguas

Great news! Today were releasing an overhaul to our parts library that hopefully clears up a lot of confusion about how parts work, how edits affect designs, and how you find parts in the Upverter system. This release comes with 2 big improvements: universal part pages and component update.

How Parts Work

For any of this to make sense you need to know a little bit about how parts work in Upverter. You can think of a part as a version controlled repo where each edit to the part is actually just a commit to the version control system. Parts used in designs point to both a part and a specific version which means it’s never possible for a user to “break” your design by editing a part you’re using. Each complete manufacturer part number (including package options, etc, etc) should show be in the Upverter library once and only once. And lastly every edit to a part in the library should be an improvement to the model of the thing that actually exists in the real world.

Universal part pages

All versions of a part’s history are now stored in one place with a UPN (universal/upverter part number) that identifies the whole lifecycle of the part. This means it’s no longer possible to accidentally edit an old version of a part or to accidentally create duplicate parts with the same manufacturer part numbers. It also allows us to begin to de-duplicate the library. And it comes with a diff tool and revision commit messages so you can see what changed between the different versions of a part.

To see a UPN page in action go here.

Part Update

Because a part is now just a collection of commits tied together by a UPN it’s now possible to easily update a part to the latest version when it has been improved. We added a button to the part inspector that allows you to painlessly update the part to the latest in 1-click. There is also a design rule check that will warn you when you have parts that are out of date (and turn them yellow!).

To see part update in action, double click on any part in your design.