Show HN: InstaPart – Build circuit boards faster with instant parts

Dear HN Community,<p>I wanted to introduce our startup SnapEDA to the HN community. We recently completed Y Combinator, and have been quiet about the platform while we&#x27;ve been improving it. With that said, we’d love to get feedback from the HN community!<p>Our goal is to build a canonical library for making circuit boards: one trusted, centralized place to get digital models. These digital models include PCB footprints, schematic symbols, and 3D models. The library exports to a growing set of popular EDA tools: EAGLE, Altium, KiCad, Cadence OrCad&#x2F;Allegro (Beta), &amp; Mentor PADS (Beta).<p>The library is free because we believe in making this data widely accessible to enable innovation. The purpose of this new feature, InstaPart, is to give designers an option to &quot;skip the queue&quot; and get a part quickly if it doesn&#x27;t yet exist in the free library. Once that part is made, it is then made available for the entire community to download for free. Growing the library is a top area of focus, so we hope to eventually render the InstaPart feature obsolete and just have everything available natively. :-)<p>In terms of standards, all new libraries are being made to IPC, and we also source models by partnering with component manufacturers. To ensure quality, we have an automated verification checker on each part page that provides a pass&#x2F;fail result on common manufacturing issues that we plan to expand with additional checks.<p>Thanks HN!<p>Natasha

I&#x27;m a professional hardware engineer, and doing this kind of work is something I do frequently and begrudgingly. Having this kind of service available will be a huge help. Some thoughts:<p>- Who writes the style guide? How do you make aesthetic decisions?<p>- Will you support multiple symbol styles? Would it be possible to upload stylesheets or specially annotated schematics and then regenerate already-extant parts in that style?<p>- Is there any intention of making the file writers open-source? Altium, in particular, has a stupid and annoying file format and it would be a gift to the community to be able to write good PcbLib and SchLib files. It would make it easy for me to write a linting and style-casting tool.<p>- Is there any chance of bringing down the latency, possibly with the application of more money? My rule of thumb is that it&#x27;s worth spending about a hundred dollars to save myself an hour. A typical smallish library part takes me about five or ten minutes if I have to do both schematic and footprint, so waiting a day isn&#x27;t really attractive at any price. But if I could throw money at you to get a result turbospeed, that&#x27;d be worthwhile.

Shocking that it&#x27;s 2016 and the component manufacturers aren&#x27;t providing this data free and online, right next to the datasheet link.<p>Then again, after working with these companies, it&#x27;s not so surprising! Congrats on the launch.

<i>Not an EE</i> Am I correct that you replace this lengthy process? <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;learn.sparkfun.com&#x2F;tutorials&#x2F;designing-pcbs-smd-footprints" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;learn.sparkfun.com&#x2F;tutorials&#x2F;designing-pcbs-smd-foot...</a>

Bookmarked this site. The database seems super useful.<p>I have mixed feelings about the custom footprint service -- I&#x27;ve worked with ~900-pin BGA SoC-type parts, and paying $30 to do that would be a no brainer, but paying the same for a 8-pin LDO would be a tougher sell -- maybe scale prices with part complexity?<p>The tougher sell to me is trust &#x2F; verification of the InstaPart models before the community can vote them up or down. For most teams that I&#x27;ve been on, the most time-consuming part isn&#x27;t really the pinout generation, but rather the checking of large parts (often 2 engineers checking pin-by-pin to ensure that footprint matches data sheet). I&#x27;d be much more comfortable using it if you outlined how pinouts are verified before sending them out to the customers.<p>I hope this works out! Making footprints is a huge PITA, and I&#x27;d love to be rid of it.

I just created an account with the LinkedIn login option.<p>When I get back to the front page, it shows for everybody to see with my full name that I just joined snapeda.<p>Why???

I think your footprints should be shown with dimensions, because before I drop hundreds or thousands of dollars on a run of PCBs, I&#x27;m going to have to check your footprints to make sure they are correct, and that could actually take me longer than drawing them from scratch.

As a designer, this looks like a great convenience since making a symbol and footprint usually takes a half hour on average. The 3D feature is the most useful part as a proper model takes much longer but at $79 dollars it could be expensive for people like me who design boards with many ICs and and unique components. With that said, in a very time constrained project with a lot of new components which we have no symbols for, if I could select and buy everything I need in a packaged deal, that would be appealing.

This is actually quite useful, as an occasional user of a variety of layout packages, once in a while run I into that one rare part which isn&#x27;t in a library, and end up wasting an hour finding the specs&#x2F;measuring the part and figuring out how the component editor works.

Awesome! Making footprints is the single most annoying part of PCB design. Looks great!

Very cool! I can&#x27;t seem find any links to click on to actually order parts from manufacturers when I find a part - e.g. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.snapeda.com&#x2F;parts&#x2F;MCP23017-E&#x2F;SP&#x2F;Microchip&#x2F;view-part&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.snapeda.com&#x2F;parts&#x2F;MCP23017-E&#x2F;SP&#x2F;Microchip&#x2F;view-p...</a><p>There&#x27;s the whole section at the top about availability and average price, but no link to go buy it? In addition to the InstaPart revenue, are you also going to make money with affiliate sales to parts sites (a la Octopart)?

Is this where people should go to make a production level PCB&#x27;s for products that are prototyped on something like a raspberry pi? Or is it serving a different market?

Why? Making schematic symbols and PCB footprints is not time consuming, and at least you&#x27;ll have the proper paste mask. Altium has an IPC footprint generator wizard, and 3Dcontentcentral has lots of user contributed parts in STEP format.

Seems like an interesting service. I&#x27;m kind of confused by the site though.<p>On the landing page it says, &quot;Get any schematic symbol and PCB footprint delivered in 24 hours. Just $29.&quot; Then I did a search for a part and clicked request and, after signing up for an account, it said that to get it in 24 hours I need to pay $79 and $29 was for 5 days service. I also somehow ended up on a page at one point that said that you could request any part for free. So which is it really?<p>I also found the social network aspect of the site off putting particularly since there was no mention of that and then after I signed up for an account to give the request a part service a try I see my user name plastered on the sites front page in a feed of recently signed up users and deactivating my account doesn&#x27;t remove that.

What&#x27;s the liability situation if you deliver an incorrect footprint?

Your terms and conditions site has a third paragraph twice: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.snapeda.com&#x2F;about&#x2F;terms&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.snapeda.com&#x2F;about&#x2F;terms&#x2F;</a>

Anyone who cant spend a few minutes in their EDA tool of choice to create a symbol or footprint and instead chooses to pay $29 here should not have a job (or a hobby) making electronics.

What license are the footprints provided under? I couldn&#x27;t see this on the main page?

Looks great, someone had to do this :-) Can&#x27;t wait to give it a try!

Sounds great, someone had to do this :-) Can&#x27;t wait to try!

I mostly use Fritzing. Will it be supported at some point?

you should producthunt this!

Nice.