Comment by usamaabid | Hacker News Reader

Comment by usamaabid | Hacker News Reader

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> This is a great space to be working on - I've wanted tools like this as a HW engineer for a long time. Enabling remote work as an EE seems like a powerful advantage to grant to EE contractors

Definitely its has been a huge need and as an EE contractors it makes things much easier to share and handover work to your clients. Documentation gets much easier for others who join the project or extend it later on.

> nother business I've seen pop up in this space who appears to compete with you is Allspice - they're my neighbors here in Massachusetts. What do you do that they don't?

They have done some great work and its interesting to see other people trying to solve this problem too. I really liked their simple approach.

If we make the comparison; They just offer diffing on Altium schematic file and they are download only.

Whereas, we are cloud based VCS you can view your projects and view changes on the go. But on top of that we offer visual annotation, documentation tools. Not just that we are building a part database and many other features to make it an experience for an HW engineers. So, you focus more on your designs/projects with efficient process in place and tools that take care of repetitive and time consuming stuff.

Also we have support for EagleCAD, KiCAD, Altium (schematic and layout) support is under development and will be soon rolled out.

I hope this answers your question.

It does indeed. Thanks for your reply.

As an aside - one thing I find interesting is that Altium seems to be the premier SCH/PCB format supported by companies like yours. Guessing that's because Altium is a more open SW standard, and is used by more business of the size a company like yours would prefer to target. More succinctly: Altium seems like where the money is at.

Do you have any theories as to why more companies don't choose KiCAD or other open tool in lieu of Altium? It seems to me there is a lot KiCAD can do, and there's very little Altium does that KiCAD does not. Do you choose to support KiCAD with the thought that the market will eventually move to free tools like that?

>Do you have any theories as to why more companies don't choose KiCAD or other open tool in lieu of Altium? It seems to me there is a lot KiCAD can do, and there's very little Altium does that KiCAD does not. Do you choose to support KiCAD with the thought that the market will eventually move to free tools like that?

I have two things to say about this;

First to answer your question precisely, that wasn't my theory. We supported KiCAD because it is most popular in community. We figured this based on user surveys and feedbacks while being in private beta. Though KiCAD is my personal favorite tool for ECAD designs as it gives me freedom to code tools for myself with its programmable utilities (that wasn't the criteria for choice). They two main goals of InventHub are to empower open-hardware community and help small startups build hardware products fast so we see more innovative hardware products coming out everyday.

Yes I agree the money is at Altium as all big companies use it and we are definitely working on to add support for Altium because that will help us sustain so we can empower the open-hardware community.

Second thing: My personal theory is that world is a better place when we work together. I truly believe in community and DIY GEEKS or InventHub both were started on the idea to build and empower the community. I have a hope that open source will be commercially viable soon and will get bigger than enterprises(Just the things I keep on thinking about: how will we moderate the infrastructure for security) - Well I can keep on talking about this, but I guess its a conversation for another thread.

Thanks for being so generous with your replies.

Wishing you all the success with InventHub! I hope I can get to a point where I can considering becoming a client! (Currently slugging it out in an Orcad shop. Bleck.)

No problem :) Thank you for taking out time for looking at product and asking such questions.

Thanks for your kind wishes. We will make sure to provide you support and new features that you’ll switch to Inventhub.

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