SnapEDA (www.snapeda.com) YC S15 | Redwood City, CA | Full Time
Electronics design tools. We help 1.5 million engineers to design faster. We are a team of 25, mostly all engineers of some sort (mechanical, electrical, software, industrial).
Hi this is Natasha, the founder and CEO of SnapEDA. Sorry to hear you had a bad experience. Search is a hard problem for components because there are so many interpretations of terms, and the need to have such a large database of parameters.
We created SnapEDA to be a free service for users like yourself, so this kind of feedback is helpful. We’re definitely making progress on that front, but we know there’s a long way to go and will continue to improve that!
This is referring to WIT's funding. As per the post:
In the short term, I will continue working on KiCad while pursuing as many avenues as possible to generate enough revenue to allow me to continue to work full time on KiCad.
This is what I love about the C256 project (https://c256foenix.com/). From an interview with her:
By limiting its resources, future developers will have to be clever to find new ways to create amazing things that early on we thought we could never do. Memory is cheap, so I could easily spend the same amount of money on a single chip that could have given me the chance to fill the memory space with RAM. But instead, I am choosing to use many chips with much lower capacity. It’s more limiting, but that’s the point."
SnapEDA | Director of Software Engineering | Full-Time | San Francisco
Help us build great data products for electronics designers and the global electronics component industry.
About Us
We are a small product-focused team that has built engineering tools relied upon by over 110,000 registered engineers to build their products more quickly. Whether it’s drones, airplanes, medical devices, and lots more, we break down the barriers in bringing new products to life.
We are currently looking for an experienced software engineer who can also help manage and mentor junior developers and bring greater maturity to our product and processes.
When designing circuit boards, engineers waste days making digital models (like symbols & footprints) for each component in their circuit board designs.
Some components such as connectors, are particularly challenging to create models for due to their non-standard shapes, pitches, pads and cutouts. Just one of these components could take hours to create, and requires deciphering complex computer-aided design (CAD) drawings, which can be very tedious and error-prone.
Today we’re excited to announce that we are making over 25,000 new free electromechanical models available to electronics designers, including connectors, switches, relays, and sensors, through a collaboration with TE Connectivity.
They can be downloaded for nearly every PCB design format, including Eagle, KiCad, Altium, Cadence OrCAD & Allegro, Mentor PADS, DXDesigner, PCB123, and more.
Unlike other models you might find scattered across the web, or even within your PCB design tool, we do things a bit differently:
1. We show which standards the model was made with (IPC or datasheet recommendations)
2. We run each model through our automated verification technology to catch common manufacturing issues before they cause costly prototype iterations
3. We allow engineers to discuss potential issues on each part publicly for the entire community to see.
For any hardware designers out there, we’d love to know what formats, features, or part categories you'd like to see next!
When designing circuit boards, engineers waste days making digital models (like symbols & footprints) for each component in their circuit board designs.
Some components such as connectors, are particularly challenging to create models for due to their non-standard shapes, pitches, pads and cutouts. Just one of these components could take hours to create, and requires deciphering complex computer-aided design (CAD) drawings, which is a very tedious and error-prone process.
Today we’re excited to announce a new partnership that is making over 25,000 new free models available to electronics designers. By partnering with TE Connectivity, we've been able to bring thousands of elecromechanical models to designers for free, including connectors, switches, relays, and sensors.
Best of all, we've made them available in nearly every PCB design format, including Eagle, KiCad, Altium, Cadence OrCAD & Allegro, Mentor PADS, DXDesigner, PCB123, and more.
Unlike other models you might find scattered across the web, or even within your PCB design tool, we do things a bit differently:
1. We show which standards the model was made with (IPC or datasheet recommendations)
2. We run each model through our automated verification technology to catch common manufacturing issues before they cause costly prototype iterations
3. We allow engineers to flag potential issues on each part publicly for the entire community to see.
For any hardware designers out there, we’d love to know what you’d like to see next!
Signed up for Loom last week and it's pretty awesome! I like the fact that it's one click to record/upload/host. The embedded video of the speaker is cool too. My team is currently working on a set of internal training videos using it.
Thanks. OCR isn't 100% accurate but does a pretty good job. So we recommend double-checking before generating. Is your second point to be able to re-use a symbol for another part in the same family but that uses a different package type?
We find that it saves at least 30 minutes for most parts, since it automatically configures the symbols, defines their electrical characteristics, completes the symbol-to-footprint mappings, and links them to verified footprints.
That being said, InstaBuild is just a small feature of SnapEDA, a website used by over 60,000 registered electrical engineers around the world to download ready-to-use symbols and footprints. Our goal is that InstaBuild will become obsolete as our database or ready-to-use models becomes comprehensive.
User-generated content is supported due to popular demand, but we deprioritize it in favor of semiconductor-generated, or SnapEDA-generated content. We also have an automated verification checker that exposes the quality of UGC on each part page.
Yes for sure! Challenge there is standardization across datasheets in terms of which parameters are listed and how. Increasingly chip companies are seeing the need to make their data more accessible and standardized so I'm sure it will get easier.
The good news is that we've already done the work to extract pin dimensions, and then applied IPC calculations to them to make the footprint. So for standard ICs it's not necessary.
Everything uploaded is licensed under the Creative Commons with Design Exception upon download. This means engineers need to credit the source/author when reposting the content online, but as soon as it's integrated into a design it becomes the downloader's IP. This way, if you're working at a big company, you can license the product under the terms of your choosing.
We have a great product called InstaPart (https://www.snapeda.com/instapart) to help with that, or if it's already in our library you can download it free!
Is this being professionally assembled? We make all new footprints to IPC standards and take into account the tolerances of the lead width, toe, etc. And these differ between manufacturers even for something as simple as an 8-pin SOIC. If you're just hand soldering, then it may not be a concern to get this specific.
Engineers can contribute their own models on SnapEDA. They are then available to download in all formats. However, for quality reasons, we create the vast majority of models.
Electronics design tools. We help 1.5 million engineers to design faster. We are a team of 25, mostly all engineers of some sort (mechanical, electrical, software, industrial).
Hiring:
- AI Engineering Lead (Onsite)
- Backend Engineer (Onsite)
- Account Executive (Onsite)
- Fullstack Engineer (Onsite)
- Platform Engineering Lead (Onsite or Remote)
- QA Engineer (Asia)
- Product Growth Lead (Onsite or Remote)
Email us at [email protected] if interested.