

Octopart releases free API for developers - andres
http://octopart.com/blog/archives/2009/10/octopart-api

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andres
Some background - We think that hackers with hardware experience are the best
people to build engineering design tools. Unfortunately, it's quite difficult
to get startup capital for design tools so there hasn't been much innovation
in the space. The end result is that only large well funded companies have had
the resources to build design tools. We hope that by sharing revenue generated
by the API, we can democratize design software by enabling hackers of all
stripes to build new tools.

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acgourley
Do you have any specific ideas in mind that you guys just don't have time to
tackle?

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andres
We'd love to step aside to let developers build on top of the API. I'd even
like to see someone revamp the Octopart UI! Here are some other ideas:

    
    
      - a really good project manager (with collaborative features and publishing tools)
      - browser plugins/toolbars
      - ajax circuit simulator
      - an AdSense-type widget to help engineering forums monetize their sites
    

Finally, I think that each node in our category map needs a specialized UI.
Since we have 1000's of categories there's endless room for improvement there.
Top of the list are:

    
    
      - power supply picker
      - capacitor picker
      - opamp picker
    

Any other ideas???

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tlb
A power supply designer would be super-useful. I've designed at least a dozen
onto PCBs in the last several years, all pretty similar to a few reference
designs. It's a constant pain in the butt to keep up with obsoleted
capacitors. I'd love to see a fully general-purpose power supply designer,
where I enter a voltage & power and it spits out a working schematic complete
with intelligently selected minimum-cost part numbers.

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tesseract
Several of the big voltage-regulator manufacturers (National, Linear, ST come
to mind) have software along these lines already, some of which is fairly
good. A unified and less cumbersome application would be great, especially if
it could pick out passives (caps, as you suggest, but also inductors and
freewheel diodes for switchers). National's Webench already does this, but its
library of passives is very limited compared to Octopart and many of the parts
it suggests are either expensive or hard to find in low quantities.

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tlb
This looks great! I'm already imagining some quick Python scripts I want to
write to help automate component selection

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natemartin
This looks fantastic. This could actually work well with a project I've had
floating around in my head for a while.... I better get going on it!

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blackguardx
Is there any guarantee on the accuracy of this information? I've run into
wrong technical info numerous times, even on datasheets themselves.

Is this info scraped from datasheets or is it just entered into the database
by hand?

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andres
We have 9M+ parts in our database so we use algorithmic methods to parse and
normalize technical information. In general, the data comes from many
different sources including increasingly from the manufacturers themselves.
We're not parsing pdf datasheets though so datasheet errors won't affect the
accuracy of our database.

As you can imagine, it's impossible to guarantee 100% accuracy on 9M+ parts
since we can't verify each part by hand. If you spot an error, please send us
an email and we'll fix it.

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blackguardx
I wasn't really worried about datasheet errors making into the database. I was
more worried about OCR problems and human error. It is nice to know that the
manufacturers are starting to give you this stuff.

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leej
your search engine is very quick and thinking that you're doing faceted search
it's incredible. do you use sphinx, lucene or custom search engine
implementation?

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andres
haha! Thanks! We recently switched from a hacked-version of sphinx to solr.
We're using some custom solr features (including some that we're contributing
back) but most of the speed comes from solr faceting. It wasn't trivial to
setup though - Harish did a lot of work performance tuning solr.

