sam

Yeah, but it's probably expensive. The pricing isn't even public: http://www.solidworks.com/sw/purchase/quote.htm

This is a small step into a big open field. Collaboration in the hardware design space is moving slowly. It's not even at the SVN/CVS level now.

Has an architect ever forked an open source building? Has an biomedical engineer ever forked a open source prosthetic hip implant? Has a civil engineer forked an open source bridge? They will.

Thanks, these will be useful for next time. Hopefully AWS will add the capability to migrate the EBS snapshots to the console soon.

Interesting. I wonder if they use an undocumented AWS feature or are snapshotting the volumes and copying them. My guess is the latter.

Yes, indentation is done just with spaces. Tabs are not used. Typically you set your text editor to have the tab key print 4 spaces.

I'd love to get feedback as to why you prefer findchips. You can email me at sam@octopart.com.

We're listing about 65 distributors right now. Early on we did remove listings from distributors who didn't want to pay. Usually they would call back the next day to make a deal. Sometimes it took longer. From what they tell me now, we're providing a good return on investment.

These aren't quadrotors, but they're relevant: http://www.makanipower.com/

Assuming the fee as a function of users is linear and started at zero, the average user is paying 1/2 of the current price. So if the current price is $9.25, the average user is paying $4.625 per month. So they have made 9250*$4.625 = $42,781.25.

You raise a valid point. While we don't have every part, we're constantly increasing the number of distributors and manufacturers who send us data. We have about 60 distributors on the site now which is about double what we had this time last year. We're always going to be getting better.

As for the part you mentioned, I didn't find a capacitor with those specs from TDK, but there are 12 alternatives here: http://bit.ly/hWnqhP

If you know of a supplier of the TDK part, let me know and I'll contact them.

It was a combination of a few things:

- Building a relationship

- Having users that were vocal about wanting Digi-Key listed on Octopart

- Time

I've not used chef, but I'm in the process of setting up a new infrastructure using puppet and I've found the documentation to be pretty good.

The equivalent to chef-solo in puppet is "puppet apply". It's very handy for developing puppet recipes on an offline virtual machine.

50 * $500 = $25,000. This is about what I would expect a restaurant to pay for a single server in a year. It seems like it might pay for itself quickly.

If the iPad doesn't work under glass, then a cheaper alternative touch sensor could be used, as suggested by others in this thread.

A better application would be to bolt iPads below glass at every seat. Then ordering would require no server interaction. Nor would the payment (think PayPal, Google Checkout, etc). The cost savings to a restaurant owner in terms of hiring waitstaff would be significant.

We'd love to get Digi-Key on the vendor list but they've chosen not to list with us yet. Please let them know you want to see them on Octopart: webmaster -at- digikey.us

Maybe you could handle 17 WageMachine threads simultaneously.

Yup, you might be interested in checking out our part search API: http://octopart.com/api .

In general there a some hard parts to component search:

- getting complete and accurate data

- setting up a system to store that data in a smart way

- setting up search on arbitrary attributes (text and numbers)

- creating a UI on top of all that

We've been working on the problem of part search for the past few years and we'd be happy to talk.

Does it let you "flag" emails? That's my biggest beef with the default mail app.

Yup, we all did.

It's still going well! That was our first blog entry, you can catch up the rest of them here http://octopart.com/blog .

Wow, we've come a long way from then. When that blog was posted, Octopart was running off a desktop computer that I bought for $50 at a yard sale. And I was sleeping on a couch in Andres room in his apartment in Berkeley.

Can you spend the night at the storage place? Are you worried about having the door locked behind you?

Dealing with supply chain issues is difficult. Especially when you throw in to the mix the HUGE problem of counterfeit parts in the electronics industry. I know there are some startups working in the PLM (Product Lifecycle Management) space. Feel free to get in touch over email if you want to talk more about this.

We list parts from Premier Farnell which is in the UK and we'd like to get part data RS Components. Who else would you like to see? If you let distributors know that you'd like to see them on Octopart when you make purchases, that would help greatly.

Nice UI.

There is a bug on the price slider limits where there are no results, it shows "+/- Infinity".

Wow. Since clicking on any search result brings up the warning page, Google is unusable. Everywhere. I never thought I'd see this.

I wonder how much this is costing the global economy per second...

Nope.

I signed up in order to send a message to someone outside of my network.

This is a joke, right?

I just set it up, it looks quite good.