Auditing a library with the Health Check

A read-only audit of a workspace library. It reports what is wrong and deliberately not how to repair it — the repair is a separate conversation, and a report that also proposes fixes is a report nobody trusts.

It is written for the first conversation with a customer or a prospect.

When to use this

• Opening a conversation about library quality, where you need a number rather than an opinion.
• Every quarter, as the recurring report a governance agreement rests on.
• Before a migration, to know what you are about to carry across.
• After a library owner has left, to find out what state things are in.

What you need first

• Altium 365 — a sign-in is enough.
• Excel — for the report.

That is the whole list. No component database, no Altium Designer bridge, no SiliconExpert contract of your own. It runs against a bare workspace sign-in, which is what makes it usable at an organisation you have just met.

What it looks at

• components without a part choice
• part numbers without a manufacturer
• the same part number on several components
• duplicate component names
• parameters a folder expects but a component lacks
• the same value written several ways — 100nF against 100 nF
• through SiliconExpert: lifecycle, years to end of life, RoHS and datasheet availability

What you get

One Excel file containing a summary, a breakdown per finding type, and a sheet per severity. At the top of it, a single Library Health Score out of 100.

That score is the thing to lead with. It turns "your library could be better" into a number someone can be accountable for, and it is comparable against the same library next quarter.

Two constraints that are built in

These are not options on the action, and that is on purpose:

• part_details() is never called. A report therefore costs nothing and carries no billable SiliconExpert data, which keeps it inside what may be shown to an organisation that has no SE contract.
• Nothing is written to the workspace. A Health Check cannot damage anything, so it needs no approval to run.

Large libraries

On a big library the check looks at the most widely used part numbers first, so a partial run still tells you about the components that matter most. Set Part numbers to check to 0 to do the lot.

Notes

• Where the manufacturer on a component differs from the one SiliconExpert returns for that exact part number, the pair is reported with a verdict — same, succeeded, likely, distributor or different. Confirming a pair into manufacturers.yaml settles it for every customer from then on.
• A manufacturer is never rewritten on a component by this action or any other. The library records what was designed in; the report records who sells it today.

Related actions

• Matching manufacturer names to Octopart and SiliconExpert — for the spelling findings
• Syncing a library with SiliconExpert — keeping the supply data current after the audit