We plan to work with component manufacturers to make sure their parts are well-represented on SnapEDA. We also have Premium versions for users who need more functionality. You can learn more at https://www.snapeda.com/pricing.
564 karma · joined October 9, 2014
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.
I wanted to introduce our startup SnapEDA to the HN community. We recently completed Y Combinator, and have been quiet about the platform while we've been improving it. With that said, we’d love to get feedback from the HN community!
Our goal is to build a canonical library for making circuit boards: one trusted, centralized place to get digital models. These digital models include PCB footprints, schematic symbols, and 3D models. The library exports to a growing set of popular EDA tools: EAGLE, Altium, KiCad, Cadence OrCad/Allegro (Beta), & Mentor PADS (Beta).
The library is free because we believe in making this data widely accessible to enable innovation. The purpose of this new feature, InstaPart, is to give designers an option to "skip the queue" and get a part quickly if it doesn't yet exist in the free library. Once that part is made, it is then made available for the entire community to download for free. Growing the library is a top area of focus, so we hope to eventually render the InstaPart feature obsolete and just have everything available natively. :-)
In terms of standards, all new libraries are being made to IPC, and we also source models by partnering with component manufacturers. To ensure quality, we have an automated verification checker on each part page that provides a pass/fail result on common manufacturing issues that we plan to expand with additional checks.
Thanks HN!
Natasha
SnapEDA (http://www.snapeda.com) is building the canonical library for circuit board design -- think "GitHub for Electronics" -- but more centralized design repository, and less version control. Tens of thousands of engineers use SnapEDA to design hardware faster, whether they're making robots, medical devices, or drones. SnapEDA is funded by Y Combinator and angels in the hardware industry.
We’re looking for: A software engineer who loves creatively solving problems that involve massive amounts of data. As a Data & Algorithms Engineer, your focus will be on building and expanding our automated data creation and verification systems, implementing new import and export functionality, and other creative data-related initiatives.
Please email info@snapeda.com if you're interested!
To learn more: - Job description: https://www.snapeda.com/jobs - Website: https://www.snapeda.com - Intro to SnapEDA (Video): https://vimeo.com/135199450
Here are other free/low-cost tools (considering it's a side project) that might be helpful: - KiCad (http://kicad-pcb.org/download/) is a free tool made by CERN that is gaining adoption quickly (Mac & Windows). - CircuitMaker (http://www.circuitmaker.com) is a new free tool from Altium (Windows only). A lot of people like Altium's user interface, so might be worth trying this if you're ok with your designs being public. - Quadcept (http://www.quadcept.com) - haven't tried it but have heard good things; it's a pretty new free web-based PCB design tool out of Japan