Comment by exmadscientist | Hacker News Reader

Comment by exmadscientist | Hacker News Reader

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This is a puff piece for SnapEDA.

SnapEDA is terrible.

It can handle the easy cases (at least, I hope it can; I'm experienced enough not to need help with the easy stuff), but it's useless for the harder cases. I just asked it for help finding an op-amp that I spent a while searching for earlier today: I need a VFB (not CFB!) op-amp with at most 100nA input bias currents (so FET or very fancy bipolar inputs) and at least 200MHz gain-bandwidth product, capable of running on 10V total supply, and preferably available in SOT23-5 (or SO-8 as second choice).

SnapEDA didn't come up with anything when I tried the most natural search. That's not much of a surprise, because there are only a few such parts out there. But it also means that it wasn't too hard a request: there were a few options!

If it can't help me when I want the help, what good is it?

(Aside: I also came across a SnapEDA "article" on the 10 most popular op-amps. It was risible. I think only four of them were actually distinct parts....)

Thanks for your feedback, we're always improving our search algorithm. Sometimes if you enter too many terms and we don't have a relevant result you may get an irrelevant result instead, but it's definitely something we're working on.

I've never really used their search in general, can't comment on it. I feel like most "piece part" searches are pretty terrible. I would just use Digikey and slowly set all the filters you asked for. Every other "pretty" tool (Octopart, SandSquid, SupplyFrame, it goes on and on) still doesn't help me too much with design exploration.

However, I have used their libraries many times over and they are absolutely not terrible. Altium's IPC generator is nice, but that's only for at the office. Personal stuff at home? SnapEDA + Kicad makes my personal projects actual projects and not just lessons in database management. I spent like 20-30% of my time just making symbols and footprints. That's not the actual fun or interesting design work, it's just the boring stuff in between. Very glad SnapEDA gets rid of that tedious step for me.

Hi this is Natasha, the founder and CEO of SnapEDA. Sorry to hear you had a bad experience. Search is a hard problem for components because there are so many interpretations of terms, and the need to have such a large database of parameters.

We created SnapEDA to be a free service for users like yourself, so this kind of feedback is helpful. We’re definitely making progress on that front, but we know there’s a long way to go and will continue to improve that!

This is absolutely a PR piece and the other glowingly positive comment on this page is from an account created 2 minutes before posting.

I've also never had much luck with SnapEDA and prefer to use SamacSys for footprints and models.

As others have stated, there are many operators in this space (findchips, octopart, etc) with varying levels of integration with the major component suppliers.

They're all just trying to insert themselves into the middle of the transaction between designer/manufacturer and supplier.

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