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Comment by compumike | Hacker News Reader

Shocking that it's 2016 and the component manufacturers aren't providing this data free and online, right next to the datasheet link.

Then again, after working with these companies, it's not so surprising! Congrats on the launch.

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I'm surprised this is a retail business. Doing this in conjunction with Digi-Key, Mouser, or Hamilton/Avnet would seem to make more sense. They already distribute the data sheets for the parts they sell. Also, it would be far cheaper to make footprints if you did them in bulk, working your way though long catalogs of similar parts.

Maybe the retail thing is to get some credibility so they can deal with the major distributors.

We'd love to work with distributors to help proliferate this content. And yes internally we prioritize development of content in bulk. But sometimes there's a model that is needed that is outside of our development efforts. This is where InstaPart fits in. It's an option to 'skip the queue' and get any model quickly if it's outside of the models we are prioritizing internally.

Agree. Imagine if c/c++ library developers didn't provide header files and everyone had to generate them from documentation or symbol listing.

Some of them do, for instance:

http://www.microchip.com/development-tools/resources/cad-cae...

But you're right, it would make sense for them all to do so.

Well, the difficult part still remains to get the actual devices! And in the quantities you need them in, and before you need to ship!

Having those symbols for circuit design is nice, but really a trivial problem in comparison.

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