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.
I've had to use a few parts that claimed to follow a standard footprint, but where subtly off. Another part I've used if you read the datasheet carefully you ended up with a completely different footprint than what first glance would suggest which is my biggest problem with upverters part concierge as they helpfully "fix" my footprint to the incorrect one.
Will we be able to comment on the footprints or leave reviews on how well that footprint worked?
1. You can upvote or downvote the part
2. You can leave a comment on the part
3. We have automated algorithms that uncover common defects in parts on the Validations tab. This is a patent-pending technology we developed that we plan to expand further to include more checks.
Shiiiiiiiiiiit, this is awesome. I spend quite a bit of time trying to find components, and you never know whether the footprint is correct or whether you're in for an unpleasant surprise.
Thanks for this! I'm especially loving the fact that you do KiCAD exports.
Oh wow, I hadn't thought of this, but it's so obvious!
I personally haven't dealt with hardware since college, but if you pull this off, you will be the go to source for every single student working on a project or lab that's wondering why the part they just bought is not working according the datasheet. It would have saved me many hours, and that's just as a student, can't imagine for those that depend on those datasheets professionally.
Wish you the best of luck, this sounds very promising.
"Upvote" should mean more than "I liked it". It's too easy to get likes. Something that says "I used this footprint to make a board, and the part soldered into place OK" would be helpful.
I hope this is constructive, but that chat invitation on every freaking page drove me off the site. By time I'd logged in and searched for two parts, the incessant chirping and popups of Clippy were too much.
Very constructive, thanks. We recently installed the app (Intercom) and it has really helped provide a channel for feedback which we have then used to prioritize improvements. I'll talk to my team about reducing the number of pages the automated pop up shows up on though.
One of the ways I've seen it done, and done it at previous companies is to not present it to every user on page view. Pop it up for only 10%, even if you have a button/link/menu to bring it up for everyone. That way you can solicit feedback while still gaining a lot of the benefits of having live interaction. It'll also still give you some insight to where the chat is most useful, but it'll take longer to gather useful data on what pages it gets used the most.
I'm cool with a cookie and an [X] or a Close button on warnings / notifications / advertisements / popups / music controllers so you know that I have seen it, and do not want it displayed to me again.
I think a callout the first couple of times is fine (still not my preference, but I think this is a cultural thing - the US style "how can I help you" in retail rubs me up the wrong way too).
But I think after that it'd be very much preferable to taper off - especially the sounds. As another commenter said, know your audience - your icon is obvious and descriptive, so we don't need to be told 20 times what it does.
> and verified using proprietary patent-pending verification technology
Is "proprietary patent-pending technology" really necessary? It's the kind of phrasing seen on uninteresting product trying to pretend they're interesting (ex: "Our Proprietary Patent-Pending Technology Makes Our Product So Great This Single Mom Can't Even Talk About It. Discover Now For $99.99")
Here's our motivation for that wording: We know how important verification is and we spent a ton of time building an automated verification system (still in Beta) that provides transparency into common issues with CAD models. It can uncover and display defects, such as the centroid not being at 0,0 which will cause issues with pick-and-place machines, eventually pin mapping issues as well. We were trying to find a way to succinctly communicate this focus & investment into verification technology which differentiates us from any other library in the market. Apparently that was not communicated well and we'll re-word to make this more clear. :-)
Lookw great! I used many footprints from SnapEDA before.
In many cases I prefer to draw the schematic symbol myself though. I like organizing the pins in a way it fits nicely in the schematic. It takes a bit more time to start but it makes the schematic cleaner and easier to maintain.
That's awesome to hear! Would love to chat at some point and learn more about your preferences with symbols. We'd definitely like to see if we could incorporate more user preferences there.
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.
"You can sign up for a 10-day free trial of SnapEDA premium. During the trial period, you can cancel any time in your Account Settings. After the trial ends, you will be charged $297 ($99/month, billed quarterly)."
This stinks of dark patterns and maximizing the amount you can hit people who forget to cancel for before they notice. It's rather unlikely that someone would actually want to pay quarterly at the higher monthly rate.
If you don't want to sign up for a subscription, you can purchase individual parts for the $29. Also, our free version is really powerful so if you're not in a rush, you can stick with that one. :-)
That doesn't answer the dark pattern concern at all and you're just dodging the issue. When people hear trial they think "free time to make my decision" not "10 days for $300" which is what this will be for anyone who forgets to cancel (hint: any EE on a deadline but I guess you know that). This is just predatory.
Isn't that standard practice? For example, after the Netflix free 1-month trial, you immediately get charged for the upcoming month. So isn't it up to the customer to make sure he/she doesn't break the terms of the trial i.e. try it for "too long"?
being standard practice doesn't make it any less of a dark pattern. it's just that tons of companies have decided it's fine to cheat users for an extra revenue stream
Exactly how is it cheating? As long as the service clearly states upfront that your card will be charged at the end of your trial, it's the user's decision whether or not to proceed.
I'd argue that it would add some amount of inconvenience to the user, and lower conversion rates as a result, if the user has to pay to continue using the service.
put it this way - if you asked users up-front "when your trial expires, should we convert you to a paying customer and automatically start billing you?", what fraction of them would say "yes"? i'd guess it's pretty low, and most companies know it. the fact that they're deliberately taking advantage of people's tendency to forget to cancel counts as cheating in my book.
Thanks for the feedback. It might make sense to remove the free trial then because the main feature in it is just parts requests which people can now test with this new InstaPart feature.
At $DAYJOB we run a SaaS with a free trial, and immediately start billing for the following month after the trial expires.
However, we don't ask for credit card details until the first payment, so, there's no risk that a user would be charged accidentally. It also reduces onboarding friction as a credit card isn't required for signup. If a user doesn't want to continue after the trial, we advise them to disregard the invoice.
I would suggest you to continue with this.
There is another reason that is done - evaluation is done by engineers and purchase decisions needs finance. What you want to do is move the process upfront where the approvals are in place by the time the trial ends.
This is why this is pretty standard practice - keep sending reminders every week and also the day before you are going to charge.
I (an engineer) have gotten subscriptions for things that would never have gone through if I had to go through and file a report on why this should be bought.
Also, not making a credit card mandatory for sign up will get you non-serious customers. You will need to have infrastructure costs to support a large number of these.
If you have other killer features in the trial then just provide discounts for parts (say $19 during the trial) and remove the dark pattern instead of removing trials all together. I actually do need this service now and $29 per part is a drop in the bucket, especially since a lot of parts I need have nonstandard footprints. I can check and correct a footprint against a datasheet much faster than I can draw it so there's little risk to my deadline but the trial dark pattern is very off putting even if $300 is nothing compared to revenue. I'd love a service like this but it won't save me more than 2-4 days of work during a 2-3 month long contract so soft concerns like this can easily keep me from paying for a product.
From [1]: "A Dark Pattern is a user interface that has been carefully crafted to trick users into doing things, such as buying insurance with their purchase or signing up for recurring bills."
Yes there is trickry. A "Free Trial" does not mean 10 days for $300 which is what it essentially is whenever someone forgets to cancel. This is the same technique slimy online businesses (i.e. credit reporting agencies) use all the time along with making it hard to cancel. They even made it quarterly so that they can make three months off of you instead of one.
If you think I'm being obnoxious you should perhaps reflect on your own behavior. Others in this thread clearly agree that this is a dark pattern.
I think they are wrong just like I think you are. That's no argument.
You're defaming one of the most beautiful services that has ever come out of YC. A service that will help the life of so many hardware hackers and professionals. The pricing model for InstaPart is the most noble I've ever seen and you're complaining about them being predators and dark pattern practioneers?
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.
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.
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.
Is there any way to get support? I've been having problems trying to login or do anything since yesterday, but your support (or contact) email is bouncing...
Ah sorry we switched our email servers yesterday afternoon. Info@snapeda.com is back up and running, or you can also contact us through the chatbot in the lower right corner of the website.
still bouncing... I'll try the chatbot. You might want to remove the email from your page. It's very frustrating to try to contact a company, but all the info on their website points to a non-working email :(
We haven't tested it yet but if Proteus supports P-CAD then you can try downloading an Altium format which we export currently to P-CAD file format. Let us know how it goes.
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