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Could you explain this for someone without any hardware experience?

by Eridrus 10y ago

mastax 10y ago
So you're designing a little board in KiCad and you want to add an LPC1768 to it to do some processing. You need to get a schematic representation and a physical footprint of the part into your CAD software. You could spend an hour carefully reading the datasheet and recreating all of the pins and landing pads, but this is the 21st century! You look at the manufacturer's website, SparkFun's part library, google a bit, and you can't find premade files for the part. So you go on InstaPart and pay $29 and someone at SnapEDA does the work for you and then releases the files for free. Now they're listed on the SnapEDA database for anyone to use, and you know that they're going to be correct.
- DiThi 10y ago
  IMHO this should be the description in the landing page. With this (and the new KiCad) I'm considering going back to PCB design.
natashabaker 10y ago
Imagine you wanted to build a spaceship out of lego but first needed to mould each block. If you wanted to build a circuit board, you would need a digital model of each component, and these are often made from scratch because designers can't find one readily available. Likely someone at a nearby company, or even a nearby cubicle, has already made that model. So this wasted effort hinders innovation and is a huge productivity drain. SnapEDA makes a huge database of these models available that hardware designers can drag-and-drop into their designs.
analog31 10y ago
Just adding a bit to what the others have said, you could almost think of the "parts" in a CAD program as being akin to the templates in a header file for a C library, i.e., they provide a symbolic representation plus an interface definition that are joined together. In the case of electronic CAD, a "part" is what the part looks like in the schematic diagram, typically a box with numbered and labeled connections, and a representation of its physical dimensions and the location of its connections. Somebody has made sure that the physical details are correct, and that pin 23 on the schematic is pin 23 on the physical board. Creating these parts is kind of a form of costly drudge work for designers, and errors in those parts can be hard to correct when your prototype doesn't work for some mysterious reason.

Could you explain this for someone without any hardware experience?

by Eridrus 10y ago

Could you explain this for someone without any hardware experience?

So you're designing a little board in KiCad and you want to add an LPC1768 to it to do some processing. You need to get a schematic representation and a physical footprint of the part into your CAD software. You could spend an hour carefully reading the datasheet and recreating all of the pins and landing pads, but this is the 21st century! You look at the manufacturer's website, SparkFun's part library, google a bit, and you can't find premade files for the part. So you go on InstaPart and pay $29 and someone at SnapEDA does the work for you and then releases the files for free. Now they're listed on the SnapEDA database for anyone to use, and you know that they're going to be correct.

DiThi 10y ago
IMHO this should be the description in the landing page. With this (and the new KiCad) I'm considering going back to PCB design.

natashabaker 10y ago

Imagine you wanted to build a spaceship out of lego but first needed to mould each block. If you wanted to build a circuit board, you would need a digital model of each component, and these are often made from scratch because designers can't find one readily available. Likely someone at a nearby company, or even a nearby cubicle, has already made that model. So this wasted effort hinders innovation and is a huge productivity drain. SnapEDA makes a huge database of these models available that hardware designers can drag-and-drop into their designs.

analog31 10y ago

Just adding a bit to what the others have said, you could almost think of the "parts" in a CAD program as being akin to the templates in a header file for a C library, i.e., they provide a symbolic representation plus an interface definition that are joined together. In the case of electronic CAD, a "part" is what the part looks like in the schematic diagram, typically a box with numbered and labeled connections, and a representation of its physical dimensions and the location of its connections. Somebody has made sure that the physical details are correct, and that pin 23 on the schematic is pin 23 on the physical board. Creating these parts is kind of a form of costly drudge work for designers, and errors in those parts can be hard to correct when your prototype doesn't work for some mysterious reason.