5 ms·

Show HN: SnapEDA Plugins – Find parts inside your circuit board design software

29 points by natashabaker 10y ago

natashabaker 10y ago
Dear HN community, I posted last month about our startup SnapEDA which makes free symbols and footprints available in multiple design formats when we released InstaPart: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12571200 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12571200. We just built new plugins so that you can search SnapEDA right inside your design tool and thought I'd post again to share it (hope that's ok with everyone). These new plugins are for Altium and Eagle. The plugins allow you to search models without having to leave your design environment. This is a beta, so would love any feedback you might have. One thing on our roadmap is to add cloud-syncing of the libraries and user authentication right from the plugin. Would love to hear your thoughts on other features to add next!
- laveur 10y ago
  I want to personally thank you! This I feel will quickly become a very useful tool for me when I design projects for Burning Man. The libraries for Eagle can be very very lacking.
robert_foss 10y ago
I feel like the KiCad support is lacking. As the community EDA of choice, support for it is quite important. What I would really like to so is a repository of 3D models. Footprints are a dime a dozen and faster to churn out than 3D models. Also, most EDA suites support creating footprints/symbols but few/none support 3D modeling. Also I've had SnapEDA provide me with footprints of similar parts that in actuality were not similar enough. A fair chunk of time was wasted on that.
- natashabaker 10y ago
  Hi Robert, thanks for this feedback. We'd definitely like to add a KiCad plugin next. About 10% of our users use KiCad so it's definitely a community we want to focus on. Over the past few months, we've made a lot of changes to how parts are linked. In addition to no longer showing related parts (this is where a lot of confusion was), we have also added notifications when a part hasn't yet been validated. As a startup, our team is constantly improving this too! In terms of 3D models, you can toggle to the 3D model tab to see an example of the 3D models we're starting to incorporate. Example here: https://www.snapeda.com/parts/ATMEGA328P-AU/Atmel/view-part/ https://www.snapeda.com/parts/ATMEGA328P-AU/Atmel/view-part/ (toggle to the 3D view). These are currently a premium feature, but our goal is to make these also free at some point too.
  - dmritard96 10y ago
    Since you guys are doing things with 3D models, I would love to throw out my 2c. My team (flair.co) sorta splits electrical and mechanical design along people lines (even though we are comfortable with both sides). I don't end up doing much board layout but in terms of vetting a relay or some Caps for fit, being able to drop them into my mechanical design would be great. My flow right now is, go to the internet (if in the states) or sometimes the market (if in shenzhen), measure the parts with calipers or look at the data sheet, build a model in Fusion360 and then import that part into my design. If you made a plugin for Fusion360 and perhaps a few of the other popular mech e packages(solidworks, onshape, etc.) that would be fantastic!
    - natashabaker 10y ago
      Great idea, thanks! Will definitely consider this as a next step.
- bsder 10y ago
  > What I would really like to so is a repository of 3D models. Footprints are a dime a dozen and faster to churn out than 3D models. Actually, most footprint maker plugins now happily generate 3D models for you. They're almost always good enough.
- spott 10y ago
  I have a question: Why do you want 3D models? What is the use case? Are you doing a lot of really space-constrained boards? KiCad has spent a lot of effort on making it possible to view 3D models of boards. Upverter has recently spent a whole bunch of time on making this available (time that could be better spent on a lot of other things). And I don't get why. Outside of a small contingent of space-constrained parts, I just don't see what the use of 3D parts is.
  - StavrosK 10y ago
    I've personally spotted many mistakes in the 3d view, mainly spacing ("oh, I thought this would fit but it doesn't look like it would"). It's not my first priority, but it would be nice to have.
    - robert_foss 10y ago
      Me too, the 3D viewer is developmental tool. I also use it for marketing. It is especially nice with the ray traced 3D view of KiCad.
      - StavrosK 10y ago
        Raytraced view? How!?
  - HeyLaughingBoy 10y ago
    An awful lot of boards have to fit into a small gap in a machine somewhere, or parts are being stacked (maybe it's under the brick power supply), and you need to be sure everything fits.
  - dmritard96 10y ago
    we make devices (flair.co) and regularly ran into making our boards and our mech-e components aligned/fit etc. we used eagle and altium and fusion and especially without 3d parts it was a lot of extra lifting on our part to model everything and check for fit/alignment etc. it is fairly contrained in terms of size
bsder 10y ago
Sigh. I don't need yet another plugin for my generic parts--that you're going to try to monetize on me eventually if you achieve lock in. Let me be blunt. I don't need extensions or features to my PCB tools. Certainly not "Yet Another Database Frontend(tm) You Can Rent". I my tools to fscking WORK. I need a tool that runs, fast, on Windows, Linux, and even OS X. I need bug fixes for the features that they actually have. I need a tool that lets me script things in a modern programming language. I need an autorouter that doesn't suck. This will never happen because our algorithms don't like to work with PCB limitations of small numbers of layers and obstacles that penetrate multiple layers. ALL the PCB software tools are buggy piles of garbage because the amount of money in that industry is now fixed. Charitably: everybody is trying to extract rent instead of innovate. Uncharitably: nobody actually in development actually knows how the board designers use their tools anymore. If you want to go chase a field, go chase Cadence, Mentor and Synopsys up into the real EDA market where algorithms matter. Creating $10000-level tools that can do actual VLSI design to take advantage of the fact that transistors are stupidly cheap in volume would kick off the custom silicon revolution everybody has been promising.
- natashabaker 10y ago
  Actually our parts library is free and will always be free for designers. As an EE, I'm committed to this. We launched with this vision in October '13 and haven't wavered. Tens of thousands of hardware designers already use it, so if we wanted to switch to that approach, we would have done it by now. We do have Premium features for things that we can't give away for free (ex: on-demand requests for things like complicated connectors) but otherwise we have not wavered.
- dang 10y ago
  Please read the Show HN guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html. They say: "Be respectful. Anyone sharing work is making a contribution, however modest." Your comment is a mixture of dismissiveness and helpful (though perhaps tangential) information. It would be much better if you took out the dismissiveness.
  - 10y ago
blackguardx 10y ago
My feedback as an EE with 10 years experience: I think your InstaPart feature looks cool. Lots of big companies have CAD teams that just make component libraries for designers. It is nice to get a bit of that on the small side of the industry finally. That being said, limiting it to 5/month is very constraining. Can you accrue InstaParts? I think most designers typically need more than that per project, but not necessarily each month.
- natashabaker 10y ago
  Sure. The way it works is if a part is already in our library it's free and you can download unlimited models. If not you can get it in 24h with InstaPart, and then that model is included for everyone in the free library. You are correct that we have heard from customers who subscribe that they want more than 5 (right now they don't accrue because it's an add on to the other features). We are considering making these special requests available via a credit system. Would something like that work? Approximately how many do you use per project and what is the complexity of the designs?

29 points by natashabaker 10y ago

Dear HN community, I posted last month about our startup SnapEDA which makes free symbols and footprints available in multiple design formats when we released InstaPart: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12571200 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12571200. We just built new plugins so that you can search SnapEDA right inside your design tool and thought I'd post again to share it (hope that's ok with everyone). These new plugins are for Altium and Eagle. The plugins allow you to search models without having to leave your design environment. This is a beta, so would love any feedback you might have. One thing on our roadmap is to add cloud-syncing of the libraries and user authentication right from the plugin. Would love to hear your thoughts on other features to add next!

laveur 10y ago
I want to personally thank you! This I feel will quickly become a very useful tool for me when I design projects for Burning Man. The libraries for Eagle can be very very lacking.

robert_foss 10y ago

I feel like the KiCad support is lacking. As the community EDA of choice, support for it is quite important. What I would really like to so is a repository of 3D models. Footprints are a dime a dozen and faster to churn out than 3D models. Also, most EDA suites support creating footprints/symbols but few/none support 3D modeling. Also I've had SnapEDA provide me with footprints of similar parts that in actuality were not similar enough. A fair chunk of time was wasted on that.

natashabaker 10y ago
Hi Robert, thanks for this feedback. We'd definitely like to add a KiCad plugin next. About 10% of our users use KiCad so it's definitely a community we want to focus on. Over the past few months, we've made a lot of changes to how parts are linked. In addition to no longer showing related parts (this is where a lot of confusion was), we have also added notifications when a part hasn't yet been validated. As a startup, our team is constantly improving this too! In terms of 3D models, you can toggle to the 3D model tab to see an example of the 3D models we're starting to incorporate. Example here: https://www.snapeda.com/parts/ATMEGA328P-AU/Atmel/view-part/ https://www.snapeda.com/parts/ATMEGA328P-AU/Atmel/view-part/ (toggle to the 3D view). These are currently a premium feature, but our goal is to make these also free at some point too.
- dmritard96 10y ago
  Since you guys are doing things with 3D models, I would love to throw out my 2c. My team (flair.co) sorta splits electrical and mechanical design along people lines (even though we are comfortable with both sides). I don't end up doing much board layout but in terms of vetting a relay or some Caps for fit, being able to drop them into my mechanical design would be great. My flow right now is, go to the internet (if in the states) or sometimes the market (if in shenzhen), measure the parts with calipers or look at the data sheet, build a model in Fusion360 and then import that part into my design. If you made a plugin for Fusion360 and perhaps a few of the other popular mech e packages(solidworks, onshape, etc.) that would be fantastic!
  - natashabaker 10y ago
    Great idea, thanks! Will definitely consider this as a next step.
bsder 10y ago
> What I would really like to so is a repository of 3D models. Footprints are a dime a dozen and faster to churn out than 3D models. Actually, most footprint maker plugins now happily generate 3D models for you. They're almost always good enough.
spott 10y ago
I have a question: Why do you want 3D models? What is the use case? Are you doing a lot of really space-constrained boards? KiCad has spent a lot of effort on making it possible to view 3D models of boards. Upverter has recently spent a whole bunch of time on making this available (time that could be better spent on a lot of other things). And I don't get why. Outside of a small contingent of space-constrained parts, I just don't see what the use of 3D parts is.
- StavrosK 10y ago
  I've personally spotted many mistakes in the 3d view, mainly spacing ("oh, I thought this would fit but it doesn't look like it would"). It's not my first priority, but it would be nice to have.
  - robert_foss 10y ago
    Me too, the 3D viewer is developmental tool. I also use it for marketing. It is especially nice with the ray traced 3D view of KiCad.
    - StavrosK 10y ago
      Raytraced view? How!?
- HeyLaughingBoy 10y ago
  An awful lot of boards have to fit into a small gap in a machine somewhere, or parts are being stacked (maybe it's under the brick power supply), and you need to be sure everything fits.
- dmritard96 10y ago
  we make devices (flair.co) and regularly ran into making our boards and our mech-e components aligned/fit etc. we used eagle and altium and fusion and especially without 3d parts it was a lot of extra lifting on our part to model everything and check for fit/alignment etc. it is fairly contrained in terms of size

bsder 10y ago

Sigh. I don't need yet another plugin for my generic parts--that you're going to try to monetize on me eventually if you achieve lock in. Let me be blunt. I don't need extensions or features to my PCB tools. Certainly not "Yet Another Database Frontend(tm) You Can Rent". I my tools to fscking WORK. I need a tool that runs, fast, on Windows, Linux, and even OS X. I need bug fixes for the features that they actually have. I need a tool that lets me script things in a modern programming language. I need an autorouter that doesn't suck. This will never happen because our algorithms don't like to work with PCB limitations of small numbers of layers and obstacles that penetrate multiple layers. ALL the PCB software tools are buggy piles of garbage because the amount of money in that industry is now fixed. Charitably: everybody is trying to extract rent instead of innovate. Uncharitably: nobody actually in development actually knows how the board designers use their tools anymore. If you want to go chase a field, go chase Cadence, Mentor and Synopsys up into the real EDA market where algorithms matter. Creating $10000-level tools that can do actual VLSI design to take advantage of the fact that transistors are stupidly cheap in volume would kick off the custom silicon revolution everybody has been promising.

natashabaker 10y ago
Actually our parts library is free and will always be free for designers. As an EE, I'm committed to this. We launched with this vision in October '13 and haven't wavered. Tens of thousands of hardware designers already use it, so if we wanted to switch to that approach, we would have done it by now. We do have Premium features for things that we can't give away for free (ex: on-demand requests for things like complicated connectors) but otherwise we have not wavered.
dang 10y ago
Please read the Show HN guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html. They say: "Be respectful. Anyone sharing work is making a contribution, however modest." Your comment is a mixture of dismissiveness and helpful (though perhaps tangential) information. It would be much better if you took out the dismissiveness.
- 10y ago

blackguardx 10y ago

My feedback as an EE with 10 years experience: I think your InstaPart feature looks cool. Lots of big companies have CAD teams that just make component libraries for designers. It is nice to get a bit of that on the small side of the industry finally. That being said, limiting it to 5/month is very constraining. Can you accrue InstaParts? I think most designers typically need more than that per project, but not necessarily each month.

natashabaker 10y ago
Sure. The way it works is if a part is already in our library it's free and you can download unlimited models. If not you can get it in 24h with InstaPart, and then that model is included for everyone in the free library. You are correct that we have heard from customers who subscribe that they want more than 5 (right now they don't accrue because it's an add on to the other features). We are considering making these special requests available via a credit system. Would something like that work? Approximately how many do you use per project and what is the complexity of the designs?