Designing around what's in stock
Updated v2.4.4At a glance
- JLCPCB and PCBWay stock, Basic-vs-Extended class and a qty-100 price sit on every row in the picker
- Basic vs Extended is real money — an Extended part carries a per-unique-part loading fee on a small run
- Filter the picker to what's actually stocked, at either house or at one
- Type a value on a discrete class and the vendor part number resolves live as you type
- Nothing is ever blocked — an unstocked part is a decision, and it's flagged "source yourself" on the BOM rather than silently matched
- Pin a specific orderable part on any component and the automatic match steps aside for good
- Values are normalised before matching, so 10k, 10000 and 10K are one lookup, not three near-misses
The most expensive moment in a hobby-scale board run is the one where you upload a bill of materials and find out a dozen parts need swapping. eCAD's library is built to move that moment forward to where it's cheap: the picker.
In the picker
Every row shows, before you commit:
- Whether JLCPCB and PCBWay stock it.
- Its Basic or Extended class. That distinction is real money — an Extended part carries a per-unique-part loading fee, which on a run of five boards can cost more than the parts.
- A qty-100 price.
A filter narrows the list to what's in stock anywhere, or at one house specifically. It never blocks a pick. An unstocked part is a decision, not an error — plenty of designs deliberately use something you'll hand-solder from your own drawer.
Live resolution as you type
For a discrete class — a resistor, a capacitor, an LED — you type the
value and choose the footprint variant, and the orderable part number resolves underneath as you
type. A 10k in an 0805 that nobody stocks tells you so at placement.
Matching happens on a normalised value, so 10k, 10000, 10K and 10 kΩ are one lookup
rather than four near-misses that each fail differently. The same normalisation runs when the
library is built and when the lookup happens, so a match is exact rather than approximate.
Resolution goes: your exact value and footprint → your value in any package → unresolved. The last one is flagged, never guessed at.
Pinning a real part
Any component's properties let you pin a specific manufacturer and part number — typed in, or chosen from a picker of the actual orderable rows for that value. Once pinned, the automatic match steps aside permanently: "improving" on a part you deliberately chose is a wrong order.
Pinned lines stay visibly distinct from matched ones on the BOM, because only the matched ones carry live stock and price data.
Why it's in the library at all
Vendor data lives inside the library file alongside the symbol, the footprints and the simulation model. Two consequences:
- The data travels with the part into your document, so a bill of materials is producible on a machine with no libraries installed at all.
- The snapshot date is recorded in the library, so you know how old the numbers are. Live stock APIs are a future addition; today the data is a snapshot, and it's honest about being one.