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Comment by patrickyeon | Hacker News Reader

As a current EDA user, I hope these guys (or something similar) take off, I really do. It's ridiculously painful working with current EDA tools and not having access to tools I take for granted as a programmer (version control, diff, even text-based data that I can beat up in my own scripts).

But I think they're coming at the wrong end. Their schematic capture was painfully slow when I tried it a couple weeks ago, and I (and I suspect nearly every other electrical designer) rues having to change tools. If someone wants to become the 'github of electronics', I strongly recommend working on getting some sensible versioning and sharing going without also tackling the problem of creating EDA tools.

Having said that, a shared crowdsourced library is a big help, and some others have already noticed the good it can provide: https://github.com/adafruit/Adafruit-Eagle-Library

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This is the approach we have been taking at CircuitBee (http://www.circuitbee.com). We have Eagle and KiCAD importing, with versioning on the way already.

We're not aiming to replace the tools you already use, just make it easier to share your work on the web. I do love the idea of a web based EDA tool, but I'm yet to believe it can be done with performance characteristics that will work for any reasonably complex circuit.

Hey patrickyeon, its Zak one of the Upverter founders. Thanks for the comment.

We just pushed a major update publicly yesterday that had some incredible performance gains (50 - 100x faster). We have also done a bunch of selective rendering updates which make it feel a ton faster to use.

You should give it a try again and let me know what you think! Hopefully we are a lot closer!

I'm glad to hear you're not ignoring performance, but please keep in mind that you're putting a big stumbling block in the way for people who would want to use a similar service. github would've gone absolutely nowhere if they forced programmers to re-type everything into HTML forms, or even into extremely well-written web apps.

Github would have also gone nowhere if they only supported code written in one text editor.

Most EDA software is written by companies who have no interest in letting you see how their proprietary formats work.

> Most EDA software is written by companies who have no interest in letting you see how their proprietary formats work.

Oh boy, I know it, and it's been a pain in my side. However, EAGLE (lots of hobbiests use it) is migrating to a fully-documented XML-based format [1], and there are two open-source projects for schematic capture, kicad and geda, which would give someone a head start on parsing their design files, at least.

[1] http://www.element14.com/community/message/15751

Hey rcfox, Zak from Upverter here. We are planning to release import/export and an open file format by the end of the month. We have altium, eagle, kicad and geda converters in the works too!

Do you guys have a plan to make a revision control system here? I really think it would be great to be able to fork projects, look at diffs of projects, and so on. If you already have this, I would suggest highlighting it on the tour page, as I have this suspicion that such a feature would make you guys a killer app.

Other than that, this looks really awesome!

We already have forking, both for the current version of your design and previous versions. We cover it on the community tour page.

Diffing has been talked about internally and it would be pretty awesome.

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