6 ms·

I always found it strange how datasheets are distributed over random websites and ftp servers usually covered in watermarks and could go offline at any time. Is

I always found it strange how datasheets are distributed over random websites and ftp servers usually covered in watermarks and could go offline at any time. Is there any effort at archiving and distributing these pdfs?

lwhsiao 8y ago
In addition to the archiving challenge, just the fact that PDFs are the de facto standard in distributing datasheets makes it very challenging to build knowledge bases like FindChips since it is so unfriendly to parse. There is a huge amount of data variety in these documents in terms of structure, formatting, and language.
- bb88 8y ago
  For whatever reason footprints, pinouts, and dimensions have been distributed via pdfs as the de facto standard, leading to a bunch of wasted work as people have to create their own foot prints, symbols, and 3d models over and over again.
  - henrikeh 8y ago
    It might seem wasted, but the reality is that a “standard” footprint does not really make sense. Soldering and assembly is not a perfect craft and it requires hundreds of considerations to methods used, environment of use, desired reliability etc. for example look up the footprint differences for wave soldering compared to hand soldering. For aerospace use reliability is king, for mobile devices space is a premium. Furthermore, there aren’t really any standards for packages and hence it is difficult to trust foorprints. A TSOP package from one manufacturer manufacturer is not necessarily the same as a TSOP package from another. This is not a hypothetical — I’ve been bitten by this. There are tools to assist in and automate a lot of this, but since most of the time is spend on other parts of a product it simply isn’t very critical.
    - kennywinker 8y ago
      I think OP was maybe hinting that footprints could be distributed in a machine-readable format, rather than pdfs with diagrams on them.
    - henrikeh 8y ago
      An appendix. A lot of good stuff has begun to happen in this regard. At least KiCad has a large and pretty decent quality collection of footprints; I think other tools are making similar efforts. However, I wish they would make it easy to adjust these footprints or make derivatives of them, without having to essentially redraw them. For a looong time I’ve wanted to apply geometric constraint solving to drawing footprints. This would allow for having a base footprint which defines the constraints and then parameter files could introduce the specific dimensions needed. I’ve been working on it at https://github.com/henrikh/footwork-ecad https://github.com/henrikh/footwork-ecad and the parts are there, but I’d love to collaborate on it with someone :-)
      - Kliment 8y ago
        Hey, I'd be up for collaboration, what are your plans for this?
      - marcosdumay 8y ago
        For a long while geda's pcb used mostly parametrized footprints written in M4. People mostly hated them. If one is wandering into that path, the hardest problem to solve is defining a good language/library in what people can describe them.
    - adamweld 8y ago
      A standard footprint might not make sense, but a standard format for distributing component pad placement definitely does. Most ECAD systems already have tools in place to generate proper landing pad offsets from footprint. And you're right that one can never fully trust downloaded libraries, but a lot of the issues could be mitigated if manufacturers distributed their own files. TI does this for most of their devices and it's a big draw for a lazy designer like me. I'm really surprised there isn't a better solution in the industry - building a library might not take as much time as the rest of electrical design work but it's still a large sink, to where many teams (even as small as 6 engineers or so) result to hiring a full time "librarian" to manage footprints and component libraries.
  - pininja 8y ago
    My friend and I built a project to see how much we could automate symbol and footprint generation from drawings. We got busy and never polished it off, but it’s avalible at https://pinpoint.parts https://pinpoint.parts in case anyone wants to try. Sorry in advance, I just noticed our cert expired (I thought we set up automatic rotation, hmm..)
    - solarkraft 8y ago
      Fancy, fancy website! Definitely a link submission candidate ... as soon as you get your cert renewed.
  - tyingq 8y ago
    Opaque product details, pricing, etc, is often done on purpose. Airlines, for example, are pretty notorious for that.
  - 5v 8y ago
    This is exactly the industry-problem SamacSys are trying to solve with their ECAD content (Symbols / Footprints / 3D Models). They are independent and offer their ECAD Models unlimited for free to Engineers. All the leading EDA formats are supported like KiCAD, Eagle. Their website (ComponentSearchEngine.com) where you can download the content also offers builder tools and a free fast turn around request service, so you can get models for almost every part you want quickly even if its new. SamacSys are distributing their ECAD Models to Findchips.com, Mouser, RS etc and behind all the leading EDA tool companies like Mentor, Zuken etc. Currently over 15,000,000 parts have CAD models. Hopefully this industry challenge is finally solved! - full disclosure i have worked with SamacSys, hence having the knowledge but they are really about fixing this problem for engineers so wanted to comment.
- kartikkumar 8y ago
  PDF datasheets are the bane of my existence. Within my domain of expertise (space engineering), the problem is even worse. Not only do suppliers provide haphazard information about parts through PDF documents, there's very little, if any, real convergence on what to actually provide to the engineer. I'm confident that these highly unstructured PDF datasheets are going to go the way of the dinosaurs, but it's quite challenging to integrate any smarter solutions into the business chain. My domain of expertise is the space industry, and it's stunning how much of a mess datasheets are. As an engineer on different missions, I couldn't understand why I was spending so much time trying to "undo" all of the work the suppliers had done to create these documents, to be able to get the data into into the tools that I needed to use and actually start my real work. In the space industry at least, there's a concerted effort going on to try to replace these PDF documents with electronic, machine-readable equivalents. Through the European Cooperation for Space Standardization (ECSS) [1] and work being done by agencies like ESA [2], and private industry [3], but really it's not yet taking hold for a lot of operational reasons. We're actually working on trying to digitalize the entire global supply chain by converting PDF datasheets into something that allows more intelligent engineering work. We're currently serving "level-1" through our website: https://satsearch.co https://satsearch.co. We've also prototyped a way to cast the datasheets into something more usable with ESA and a number of other partners. We've currently serving this digitalized data through our API: https://api.satsearch.co https://api.satsearch.co, which is being integrated into industry tools. The real dream for me is to get to the point where the engineer can work with this kinda data natively within their tools and skip the entire PDF datasheet fiasco. Ideally, the data can then even be operated on my multi-objective optimization algos to speed up the entire design process. Disclaimer: I'm one of the co-founders at satsearch and we started our startup precisely because I was just sick of dealing with PDF datasheets. [1] http://ecss.nl/glossary/eds/ http://ecss.nl/glossary/eds/ [2] https://indico.esa.int/event/252/contributions/3844/attachments/2942/3699/02_-_SAVOIR_EDS_Definition_Overview_and_Status.pdf https://indico.esa.int/event/252/contributions/3844/attachme... [3] https://indico.esa.int/event/22/contributions/1997/attachments/1658/1950/SOIS_EDS_ADCSS_2013_v1.0.pdf https://indico.esa.int/event/22/contributions/1997/attachmen...
segfaultbuserr 8y ago
> how datasheets are distributed over random websites and ftp servers usually covered in watermarks and could go offline at any time. There are simply too many vendors' products on the market, only a handful of vendors have a systematic way of providing searchable datasheets online, like Microchip or ST, others simply come and go, so it's extremely hard to obtain an official one.
leggomylibro 8y ago
I always got the feeling that developers were expected to maintain their own caches of datasheets and reference manuals. But then again, errata are constantly being updated. That evergreen http link might end up being the best resource. What do?
- baroffoos 8y ago
  I usually look up chip names while cracking open electronics to fix issues. The chips could be 5+ years old by then and it seems like its only by chance that some random website has a copy of the datasheet hosted.
lvs 8y ago
I usually used Octopart. It's been around for awhile.
retSava 8y ago
Worst are the ones that add protection on their pdfs so I can't highlight and add notes to the datasheet. What are they afraid of? In any case, here's how to bypass that (quoting myself): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16448044 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16448044
dkersten 8y ago
I'm maybe not experienced enough as I only do small electronics projects with a limited set of components which I always use, however, in my limited experience I see typically see datasheets in two places: on the manufacturers website and on the distributors website. For example, if I buy an Microchip EEPROM from Mouser, then the datasheet is typically available both on Mouser's product page and on Microchips documentation page. I guess this isn't always the case?
- zrobotics 8y ago
  Very much so, especially for the types of parts you will find avaliable from the Chinese sites listed. Finding a data sheet for an AVR or a MSP won't be a problem, but finding a data sheet for a super-cheap off brand micro can be a real challenge. For hobby electronics projects, the only time you may run into this is if you are using recycled components, since datasheets for older parts that aren't current stock may be very hard to find.
  - dkersten 8y ago
    Aha, thanks. That makes sense.
taneq 8y ago
I don't know if there's a centralised one (and I'm keen to find out!) but this is why I always save a copy of any datasheet I find at first opportunity and now I have hundreds, filed by manufacturer.
roland35 8y ago
I wish! I always download and stash every datasheet I can since you never know what website may be down when you need to check something.
- voltagex_ 8y ago
  I wonder if you should upload them to archive.org?
- rfdave 8y ago
  You also want to be able to version data sheets to see where errata creeps in.

lwhsiao 8y ago

In addition to the archiving challenge, just the fact that PDFs are the de facto standard in distributing datasheets makes it very challenging to build knowledge bases like FindChips since it is so unfriendly to parse. There is a huge amount of data variety in these documents in terms of structure, formatting, and language.

bb88 8y ago
For whatever reason footprints, pinouts, and dimensions have been distributed via pdfs as the de facto standard, leading to a bunch of wasted work as people have to create their own foot prints, symbols, and 3d models over and over again.
- henrikeh 8y ago
  It might seem wasted, but the reality is that a “standard” footprint does not really make sense. Soldering and assembly is not a perfect craft and it requires hundreds of considerations to methods used, environment of use, desired reliability etc. for example look up the footprint differences for wave soldering compared to hand soldering. For aerospace use reliability is king, for mobile devices space is a premium. Furthermore, there aren’t really any standards for packages and hence it is difficult to trust foorprints. A TSOP package from one manufacturer manufacturer is not necessarily the same as a TSOP package from another. This is not a hypothetical — I’ve been bitten by this. There are tools to assist in and automate a lot of this, but since most of the time is spend on other parts of a product it simply isn’t very critical.
  - kennywinker 8y ago
    I think OP was maybe hinting that footprints could be distributed in a machine-readable format, rather than pdfs with diagrams on them.
  - henrikeh 8y ago
    An appendix. A lot of good stuff has begun to happen in this regard. At least KiCad has a large and pretty decent quality collection of footprints; I think other tools are making similar efforts. However, I wish they would make it easy to adjust these footprints or make derivatives of them, without having to essentially redraw them. For a looong time I’ve wanted to apply geometric constraint solving to drawing footprints. This would allow for having a base footprint which defines the constraints and then parameter files could introduce the specific dimensions needed. I’ve been working on it at https://github.com/henrikh/footwork-ecad https://github.com/henrikh/footwork-ecad and the parts are there, but I’d love to collaborate on it with someone :-)
    - Kliment 8y ago
      Hey, I'd be up for collaboration, what are your plans for this?
    - marcosdumay 8y ago
      For a long while geda's pcb used mostly parametrized footprints written in M4. People mostly hated them. If one is wandering into that path, the hardest problem to solve is defining a good language/library in what people can describe them.
  - adamweld 8y ago
    A standard footprint might not make sense, but a standard format for distributing component pad placement definitely does. Most ECAD systems already have tools in place to generate proper landing pad offsets from footprint. And you're right that one can never fully trust downloaded libraries, but a lot of the issues could be mitigated if manufacturers distributed their own files. TI does this for most of their devices and it's a big draw for a lazy designer like me. I'm really surprised there isn't a better solution in the industry - building a library might not take as much time as the rest of electrical design work but it's still a large sink, to where many teams (even as small as 6 engineers or so) result to hiring a full time "librarian" to manage footprints and component libraries.
- pininja 8y ago
  My friend and I built a project to see how much we could automate symbol and footprint generation from drawings. We got busy and never polished it off, but it’s avalible at https://pinpoint.parts https://pinpoint.parts in case anyone wants to try. Sorry in advance, I just noticed our cert expired (I thought we set up automatic rotation, hmm..)
  - solarkraft 8y ago
    Fancy, fancy website! Definitely a link submission candidate ... as soon as you get your cert renewed.
- tyingq 8y ago
  Opaque product details, pricing, etc, is often done on purpose. Airlines, for example, are pretty notorious for that.
- 5v 8y ago
  This is exactly the industry-problem SamacSys are trying to solve with their ECAD content (Symbols / Footprints / 3D Models). They are independent and offer their ECAD Models unlimited for free to Engineers. All the leading EDA formats are supported like KiCAD, Eagle. Their website (ComponentSearchEngine.com) where you can download the content also offers builder tools and a free fast turn around request service, so you can get models for almost every part you want quickly even if its new. SamacSys are distributing their ECAD Models to Findchips.com, Mouser, RS etc and behind all the leading EDA tool companies like Mentor, Zuken etc. Currently over 15,000,000 parts have CAD models. Hopefully this industry challenge is finally solved! - full disclosure i have worked with SamacSys, hence having the knowledge but they are really about fixing this problem for engineers so wanted to comment.
kartikkumar 8y ago
PDF datasheets are the bane of my existence. Within my domain of expertise (space engineering), the problem is even worse. Not only do suppliers provide haphazard information about parts through PDF documents, there's very little, if any, real convergence on what to actually provide to the engineer. I'm confident that these highly unstructured PDF datasheets are going to go the way of the dinosaurs, but it's quite challenging to integrate any smarter solutions into the business chain. My domain of expertise is the space industry, and it's stunning how much of a mess datasheets are. As an engineer on different missions, I couldn't understand why I was spending so much time trying to "undo" all of the work the suppliers had done to create these documents, to be able to get the data into into the tools that I needed to use and actually start my real work. In the space industry at least, there's a concerted effort going on to try to replace these PDF documents with electronic, machine-readable equivalents. Through the European Cooperation for Space Standardization (ECSS) [1] and work being done by agencies like ESA [2], and private industry [3], but really it's not yet taking hold for a lot of operational reasons. We're actually working on trying to digitalize the entire global supply chain by converting PDF datasheets into something that allows more intelligent engineering work. We're currently serving "level-1" through our website: https://satsearch.co https://satsearch.co. We've also prototyped a way to cast the datasheets into something more usable with ESA and a number of other partners. We've currently serving this digitalized data through our API: https://api.satsearch.co https://api.satsearch.co, which is being integrated into industry tools. The real dream for me is to get to the point where the engineer can work with this kinda data natively within their tools and skip the entire PDF datasheet fiasco. Ideally, the data can then even be operated on my multi-objective optimization algos to speed up the entire design process. Disclaimer: I'm one of the co-founders at satsearch and we started our startup precisely because I was just sick of dealing with PDF datasheets. [1] http://ecss.nl/glossary/eds/ http://ecss.nl/glossary/eds/ [2] https://indico.esa.int/event/252/contributions/3844/attachments/2942/3699/02_-_SAVOIR_EDS_Definition_Overview_and_Status.pdf https://indico.esa.int/event/252/contributions/3844/attachme... [3] https://indico.esa.int/event/22/contributions/1997/attachments/1658/1950/SOIS_EDS_ADCSS_2013_v1.0.pdf https://indico.esa.int/event/22/contributions/1997/attachmen...

segfaultbuserr 8y ago

> how datasheets are distributed over random websites and ftp servers usually covered in watermarks and could go offline at any time. There are simply too many vendors' products on the market, only a handful of vendors have a systematic way of providing searchable datasheets online, like Microchip or ST, others simply come and go, so it's extremely hard to obtain an official one.

leggomylibro 8y ago

I always got the feeling that developers were expected to maintain their own caches of datasheets and reference manuals. But then again, errata are constantly being updated. That evergreen http link might end up being the best resource. What do?

baroffoos 8y ago
I usually look up chip names while cracking open electronics to fix issues. The chips could be 5+ years old by then and it seems like its only by chance that some random website has a copy of the datasheet hosted.

lvs 8y ago

I usually used Octopart. It's been around for awhile.

retSava 8y ago

Worst are the ones that add protection on their pdfs so I can't highlight and add notes to the datasheet. What are they afraid of? In any case, here's how to bypass that (quoting myself): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16448044 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16448044

dkersten 8y ago

I'm maybe not experienced enough as I only do small electronics projects with a limited set of components which I always use, however, in my limited experience I see typically see datasheets in two places: on the manufacturers website and on the distributors website. For example, if I buy an Microchip EEPROM from Mouser, then the datasheet is typically available both on Mouser's product page and on Microchips documentation page. I guess this isn't always the case?

zrobotics 8y ago
Very much so, especially for the types of parts you will find avaliable from the Chinese sites listed. Finding a data sheet for an AVR or a MSP won't be a problem, but finding a data sheet for a super-cheap off brand micro can be a real challenge. For hobby electronics projects, the only time you may run into this is if you are using recycled components, since datasheets for older parts that aren't current stock may be very hard to find.
- dkersten 8y ago
  Aha, thanks. That makes sense.

taneq 8y ago

I don't know if there's a centralised one (and I'm keen to find out!) but this is why I always save a copy of any datasheet I find at first opportunity and now I have hundreds, filed by manufacturer.

roland35 8y ago

I wish! I always download and stash every datasheet I can since you never know what website may be down when you need to check something.

voltagex_ 8y ago
I wonder if you should upload them to archive.org?
rfdave 8y ago
You also want to be able to version data sheets to see where errata creeps in.