
Upverter - Hardware design tools for the web - potomak
http://upverter.com/
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ChuckMcM
Hmm, love the concept but $19/month if you want to keep up to 3 of your
designs 'private'. So that's $228 a year. And no PC layout yet. If you buy
something like Proteus [1] for $1000, it has a $250/yr service agreement
(which is to say keeps you at the current release, gives you support, etc) and
it does PC layouts and you can have unlimited private projects.

So in perspective the product is interesting, a collaborative tool. The
pricing model seems a bit broken from an actual use case standpoint. Perhaps
they could go to a 'price per private design' kind of thing.

[1] <http://www.labcenter.com/index.cfm>

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zakhomuth
Hey Chuck, Im one of the founders at Upverter.

We based the pricing on our pilot users, and what they were willing to spend
to be able to collaborate. We would love to chat if there is a different price
you are willing to pay!

And for what its worth, we are working hard on PCB layout right now, and with
any luck will be able to launch it in the next few months.

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ChuckMcM
Pricing in the ECAD space is weird (you're probably aware) because it goes
'free' -> $1K -> $10K. with very few intermediate points. What is more, the
number of people who have been burned by having something 'in the cloud' from
a smallish supplier is growing. So having private designs that would be 'gone'
if your servers were offline would be an issue. And lastly the biggest thing
most people pay for these days is simulation anyway, and that is something
easily charged for. You might consider 'free schematics' private or public,
but $20 to generate a PCB from one. You could work out a scheme where if I
publish a schematic using upverter and someone comes along they can 'buy' a
PCB for it and you split the revenue share with the schematic creator. You can
work a partnership with one of the PCB houses so that it 'just works' or you
can send them a zip file of the various bits (gerbers, drill file, tool file,
etc).

Something you might offer for 'free' would be something like Google's
ChartServer API but 'schematic server' API. That is something I've been
building in my spare time off and on. You are a lot closer than I am and I've
yet to figure out if I want to use HTTP POST or a split URL syntax.

Can you imagine something like:

    
    
      <img src="http://upverter.com?sch=dropbox.com/chuck/schematics/foo.sch" height=200 width=300>
    

A way to embed the shared schematic in web pages or blogs, or whatever. Feel
free to contact me offline for ideas on ways to monetize this kind of stuff.

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zakhomuth
Agree with you on the pricing, its a hard one. Lets chat sometime! Were
totally on the same wavelength.

We are actually working on a transcriber
(<https://github.com/upverter/schematic-file-converter>), dropbox integration.
And behind the scenes were doing "print" button style manufacturing for our
more enterprise users (ie. click print and we get a one-off manufactured and
mailed to you)

Every upverter schematic has an embed code and a ton of our traffic is driven
from people importing their schematics and sharing them on their blogs.

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microarchitect
So, is there money in this? Doesn't it make more sense to go after the HDL
synthesis design flow? I can see a few hobbyists and PCB makers interested in
this. But the market for those interested in digital design but not wanting to
fork out a fortune to synopsys/cadence is huge, right?

I suspect you can innovate quite a bit on the HDL front and then doing
everything server-side should really give you a cost advantage as well. I can
also see the open source aspect of this taking off - a high quality of library
of plug and play cores that can be seamlessly integrated into your designs
might prove to be a significant competitive advantage.

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nkoren
Very neat to see this! For the past year, I've been working on a very similar
collaborative-design tool in an entirely different field (an aspect of
transport planning). Probably won't have anything to show until the summer,
but it's reassuring to see others pursuing similar business plans, interaction
models, etc. Helps to validate my feeling that the cloud and the browser are
fundamentally the future of design.

My own application provides relatively high-level collaborative design
functionality, and does not attempt to replicate the functionality of existing
tools that are capable of very low-level simulation, analysis, and
engineering. I imagine that it's a similar situation for hardware design,
although probably with fewer tiers of software -- presumably Upverter users
are working at a level that's much closer to the end result of the hardware-
production process. Still, there must be existing (offline) design platforms
with low-level functionality that you don't want to replicate in its entirety;
these are presumably embedded in the workflows of existing hardware design
houses in a way that will be difficult to supplant. Have you considered
eventually producing plugins for these 3rd-party platforms, which would keep
their designs in sync with the cloud-hosted model? This way, high-level design
could be done in the browser, and low-level simulation etc. can be done in
existing applications, while still taking advantage of Upverter's
collaboration functionality.

This, of course, is my own long-range plan, although the web application is
very much the initial focus. Just wondering if you've had similar thoughts,
and if so, whether you've found such a strategy to have any particular merits
or flaws that you'd care to discuss?

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femto
The schematic is a small part of a full design flow. What hooks does it have
to be integrated into a full design flow? Without such hooks it will be
limited to rudimentary circuits.

What support is there for hardware description languages? HDL is good for
large projects and is more reusable than a schematic.

One suggestion is to have a component library that is shared among all users.
Each person adds components as they need them, and the library grows, as a
community resource over time. Maybe you have that already? If you do have it,
what license covers the library? Is it covered by the same open source license
as the schematics of the users that generated the library? In that case, is it
free for any user to export and reuse in full? Such a feature would negate
some of the "vampire" accusations leveled by the dangerousprototypes review.

What's the advantage over gEDA, gHDL or similar? Most people with the
knowledge to design a circuit would also have the knowledge to set up a tool
chain and repository. Who's the market?

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zakhomuth
Zak from upverter again...

Our HDL support is non-existant right now. We do have an open file format
which can be created from or parsed to HDL. Do you work in HDL right now? I'd
love to chat about this with you sometime - we come from the world of very
large system design and there is almost no HDL usage at the system design
level.

We do have a common library, all community entered and more than half edited
by someone different than the creator. The library is free and public. We have
a number of users of the library who havent yet adopted the rest of the
upverter tool chain.

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fieldforceapp
Don't want to discourage you guys, but coming from an EDA background myself,
you didn't answer the question: > What's the advantage over gEDA, gHDL or
similar?

I think your answer is, "we're focused on design & community." But I wonder if
you might reconsider yourselves the "Codecademy of hardware" instead?

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mazsa
FYI: Editorial: Upverter, another closed source vampire exploits open hardware
for ventrue capital, PR, and profit
[http://dangerousprototypes.com/2011/09/21/editorial-
upverter...](http://dangerousprototypes.com/2011/09/21/editorial-upverter-
another-closed-source-vampire-exploits-open-hardware-for-ventrue-capital-pr-
and-profit/)

~~~
mdwrigh2
While I agree that companies that rely on open source software should give
back to the community (new projects, bug fixes to things they're using, etc.),
we have to admit maintaining new open source projects costs time and money.
When you're a startup trying to get a beta product off the ground, I suspect
you'll prioritize having a better product first, and open sourcing things
later.

(Note: I'm not in any way, shape or form related to Upverter)

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proee
We worked on a similar tool with Digi-Key called Scheme-it. It does not offer
RTC, but it's free.

The goal with Scheme-it to be an electrical engineering "Visio" type
application.

<http://www.digikey.com/us/en/mkt/scheme-it.html>

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lien
I have to say, your product is amazing.

one thing though - since you guys are after hobbyists and small design firms
and it seems like it's a fairly small market with very little money to be
made.

but it's very likely that you guys will be acquired by one of the larger CAD
tool companies.

hardware design is not like software design because plenty of companies are
already sell hardware building blocks that can be tweaked with software to
develop an application. Very rarely you have to redesign hardware from
scratch. These companies provide their customers (which include
hobbyists/small design firms) with schematics. Their customers may tweak the
schematics rather than designing everything from scratch, so collaboration may
not be the highest pain point here.

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jmsduran
Wow, looks promising, this would have made team/design projects much more
manageable if I knew about it in college.

I wonder though, does Upverter currently support low-level logic/CMOS circuit
simulation? I know that's asking a lot out of a web app, but using Cadence for
simulation is often overkill for most hobby projects, and I have yet to see a
modern web app/startup that serves this niche.

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MCompeau
I met one of the founders of Upverter this week and was pretty impressed by
the polish of the product during his demo. I ended up signing up myself and
I've already used it for a couple of my hobbyist electronics projects. I like
the product and I'm looking forward to the road ahead with options to layout
PCBs and have them printed.

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rmrm
if it isn't there, you might think about some way for people to advertise
they're looking for a design review. It would be neat to put together a
circuit and set a flag for hey, everybody (or anybody), come take a critical
look at it please.

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mwoodworth
I like that idea, putting it on the whiteboard. I really thing that having a
way to get help from the community would help all designers.

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hcarvalhoalves
That seems very interesting, and shows the "GitHub" approach to collaboration
can work on other realms other than code. I wonder if it could work for
product design, too?

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savrajsingh
awesome! very useful. we need a tool like this for general purpose CAD
drawings as well!

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mwoodworth
we would love to chat with you about what you need it to do! shoot us an email
@ support.

p.s. I am one of the founder of Upverter

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mkramlich
So the market is folks who are technical enough to design electronic hardware,
yet not technical enough to swap files over the web? Hmmmm...

