How to generate BOM and CPL from Fritzing?

After finishing your PCB design in Fritzing, next step is to prepare and export files for manufacturing. Depending on the requirements, different kind of files will be needed for the PCB manufacturing. If you just need PCB's to be produced, Gerber files are going to be enough. In the other hand, if you want your PCB's to be assembled by the manufacturing house, BOM and CPL files are going to be required.

Let's have look on how to export BOM and CPL files from your Fritzing PCB design project!

BOM from Fritzing

Step 1. Open Fritzing and go to “File”-> “Open”-> “Your project”

Step 2. Go from "Breadboard" to "PCB" directory. Check if everything with your design is alright.

Step 3. Go to "File"-> "Export"-> "List of Parts (Bill of Materials) as CSV". Select output folder directory and click to generate file.

Step 4. Go to the Output Directory Folder, you can see that files have been successfully generated. If you used a generic libraries, you will have to manually add “LSCS Part number” in the excel file. If you go a step further, and create your own component libraries for the project, make sure to add “LSCS Part number” value, so that a whole project will be automated when generating files. Verify files and upload them to JLCPCB.com.

JLCPCB standard BOM look:

CPL from Fritzing

At the moment of writing this article, automated process of generating CPL file suitable for JLCPCB service isn't supported by Fritzing. One of the ways to solve this issue, is by creating a Template Excel file suitable for JLCPCB and inserting required values from exported file.

After exporting "PNP" file from Fritzing, go to Output Directory folder.

Here's what you need to edit in exported file, to make it suitable for our service:

- Convert exported file to Excel formmat

- Add titles to each column

- Y coordinates need to be negated

- Remove vias, labels and images from PNP file

- Correct wrong rotation of components, or let JLCPCB engineers do it for you

Below this text, you can see how default CPL file should look: