Is Your BOM Missing Half the Product? Connect Altium Designer to OpenBOM

Open the drone’s BOM and it looks complete: frame, arms, motors, the motor mount you locked and changed last week. Then there is one row that says Flight controller, with nothing under it. Dozens of components live on that board, from resistors and capacitors to the microcontroller and connectors. None of them are in the BOM.

They are in Altium Designer, on the electronics engineer’s computer, or in a spreadsheet someone exported last month. When purchasing needs the full list, a buyer merges the two by hand, and the merged file starts going stale the day the board changes. An Altium Designer BOM that lives apart from the mechanical BOM is how teams end up ordering parts for last month’s board.

At OpenBOM, we think a product’s BOM should hold the whole product. Engineers keep designing where they design best, mechanical parts in SOLIDWORKS and electronics in Altium, and OpenBOM brings both into one structure. The board becomes an item with its own BOM, and that BOM appears as a level of the drone’s BOM, right next to the mechanical parts.

How do you combine an Altium BOM with a mechanical BOM?

Make the board an item with its own BOM. Create the board’s BOM in OpenBOM from Altium Designer, and give the board the same part number it has in the mechanical assembly. OpenBOM links the two by part number, so the board’s components appear as a level of the product BOM, with designators, quantities and manufacturer part numbers.

It is the same idea that joined a spreadsheet BOM to a SOLIDWORKS assembly in Don’t Rebuild Your BOM: OpenBOM recognizes an item by its part number, wherever it comes from. There is one flight controller item, not a copy in each file, so the board’s BOM shows up wherever the board is used.

Install the OpenBOM extension once

Everything starts inside Altium Designer. Install the OpenBOM extension, restart Altium, and sign in with your OpenBOM account.

Don’t see OpenBOM among Altium’s extensions? Ask OpenBOM support to enable it for your Altium account. Like the installation itself, you only do this once.

Map your component parameters once

Before the first BOM, tell OpenBOM how to read your components. In the OpenBOM settings inside Altium, map the parameters your library already uses, such as Manufacturer, Manufacturer Part Number and Description, and choose the catalog where electronic parts should go.

This small step pays off every time a board is ordered. The manufacturer part number is what a buyer orders and what a supplier quotes, so it should arrive in OpenBOM as data, not as text someone retypes. A catalog of its own keeps the electronic parts library tidy as the number of boards grows.

Create the board’s BOM

Open the flight controller project in Altium Designer and select Create BOM. A moment later, the board’s BOM is in OpenBOM: every component, with its designators, quantity, manufacturer part number and a thumbnail.

Look in the catalog and you will find each component as an item, and the board itself as an item too. That is what makes the next step work. The same capacitor used on three boards is one item with three uses, so a sourcing change is made once, not three times.

See the electronics inside the product BOM

Now go back to the drone’s BOM and expand the Flight controller row. The board’s components are there, one level down. Because the board item has the flight controller’s part number, its BOM is part of the drone’s BOM.

Mechanical and electronics, in one place. The buyer sees the whole product in one structure, the motors next to the microcontroller. Engineering can follow a part from the top of the drone down to a single resistor. And when the board changes and its BOM is updated from Altium, there is no merged spreadsheet to redo.

The board item gets updates from both sides, too. The mechanical engineer can update its thumbnail or description from SOLIDWORKS, the electronics engineer from Altium, and OpenBOM merges the data into the one flight controller item. The thumbnail can come from the board model in the drone assembly, and the manufacturer part number from Altium. One tip: agree which tool owns each property, so everyone knows where to make a change.

Can you create a BOM from Altium 365 without Altium Designer?

Yes. If your team works in Altium 365, you can import a board’s BOM straight from OpenBOM, with nothing to install. In OpenBOM Design, select Altium 365, sign in with your Nexar account, pick the project, open Releases, choose a release and select Export. The BOM is built from that released version.

That last point matters. A BOM built from a release carries the authority of the version your electronics team released, not whatever happens to be open on someone’s desktop. Variants are handled too: OpenBOM imports the variant you select. Read more about building BOMs from Altium 365 releases.

Your path from Altium to the product BOM

1. Install the extension. Add OpenBOM to Altium Designer and sign in. If you don’t see it, ask OpenBOM support to enable it.
2. Map parameters once. Manufacturer, Manufacturer Part Number, Description, and a catalog for electronic parts.
3. Create the board’s BOM. Open the project and select Create BOM.
4. Check the catalog. Each component is an item, and so is the board.
5. Expand the product BOM. The board’s components appear under the flight controller.
6. On Altium 365? Import a release from OpenBOM Design instead, with nothing to install.

One product, one BOM: the frame, the motors and every resistor on the flight controller. Next in this series, we add your own properties to items and BOMs.

Start an OpenBOM free trial to explore Altium BOMs and the full product structure with your own designs.

Best, Oleg