Comment by zbrozek | Hacker News Reader

Comment by zbrozek | Hacker News Reader

I'm a professional hardware engineer, and doing this kind of work is something I do frequently and begrudgingly. Having this kind of service available will be a huge help. Some thoughts:

- Who writes the style guide? How do you make aesthetic decisions?

- Will you support multiple symbol styles? Would it be possible to upload stylesheets or specially annotated schematics and then regenerate already-extant parts in that style?

- Is there any intention of making the file writers open-source? Altium, in particular, has a stupid and annoying file format and it would be a gift to the community to be able to write good PcbLib and SchLib files. It would make it easy for me to write a linting and style-casting tool.

- Is there any chance of bringing down the latency, possibly with the application of more money? My rule of thumb is that it's worth spending about a hundred dollars to save myself an hour. A typical smallish library part takes me about five or ten minutes if I have to do both schematic and footprint, so waiting a day isn't really attractive at any price. But if I could throw money at you to get a result turbospeed, that'd be worthwhile.

Re: Style - As a starting point we follow IPC-7351B for footprints and our own internal standard as outlined here: http://snapeda.com/standards. Over time we'd like to allow for more customization to account for different styles and preferences.

Re: Symbol styles - that's really interesting and is an awesome idea. Will think about how we can do this. Definitely have thought about storing user preferences. For example, some people like NC pins on symbols while others like them hidden.

Re: Open Source - Haven't thought about this side yet but will consider it. We have made open our API and maybe we can expand that to include the exporters.

Re: Faster turn - Anything available on the site already is obviously free and instantaneous. I think it's worth exploring with my team if we can do a faster turnaround on InstaPart. We definitely have ideas on how to do this. Our part creation is a mix of automated and manual work. The longest part of the process is verification. But again, hopefully eventually this stuff just all exists readily available without requiring a special request.

I second the speed requirement. The most I've ever spent is an hour on making a schematic symbol and two hours for a footprint, both when I was very inexperienced with Altium and using a ~500 pin part. Now that I'm comfortable with Altium's IPC templates and batch editing features (you can pull up a copy pastable spreadsheet that allows you to quickly edit all shapes on a footprint without the UI), even the most complex parts take under a half hour. $29 is nothing for 20 min of work but depending on your workflow, waiting a day is unacceptable. I can rarely predict the kind of part swapping that will happen before PCB layout so footprints are the first step that has to happen in the first few days after schematic capture. Since the footprints are a blocking concern for part placement, I don't have much patience especially on a deadline since I can just draw all the parts myself while waiting for the first footprint to come in.

The other problem is that the vast majority of professional engineers check the footprints meticulously before fabrication even if they made the footprint for a previously successful project. It only takes a day or two and must be done regardless so it removes a lot of the added value InstaPart can provide.

Although most of this doesn't apply to the more hobbyist market, they generally aren't willing to pay $29 for anything let alone a single footprint.

snapeda altium export comes in the form of .LIA (protel ascii), which is a pretty simple to follow text-based format. Not much to opensauce here.

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