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by napowderly 863 days ago
For sure, the way I see the component library is ability to capture progress. In the current paradigm how many times have schematics, symbols and footprints been drawn up for common ICs/circuits? I would expect 100s or in some cases many thousands of times. Our hope is by providing an open source and shareable format we can reduce this. If people really hate code and want to write a tool to convert to altium/kicad/cadence format, go for it! At the same time, I think the way we share component data is pretty dated, PDF datasheets do not adequately capture component information in a way that can be apples to apples compared in any automated fashion, best we have is something like a digikey search. In the future I would like to be able to have much more sophisticated requirements that automated search tools can use to help me find the best components for my use.

Not personally a fan of the readability of lisp, but that is just a personal preference. Our assumption is that python is going to be the most familiar language to our users and following a python like syntax will make picking it up easy. Our language is definately still quite immature and we are still figuring out exactly what it should look like.

There is definitely a little bit of a learning curve at the moment, we do have some getting started videos that walk you through the whole process. If there is anything missing or confusing, please point it out! We do want to make it as approachable as possible. It will only get better from here, I promise!

On the downloading, currently we have the package on pypi, which does make it pretty easy to install from a command line, but I can appreciate that will be new to alot of people. In the future we might do an executable download version.

We have a getting started video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7aeZLlA_VYA

We are very active on discord also if you get stuck or have any questions/feedback, hope to see you there! https://discord.gg/PBq4pS4K3p

1 comments

For what it's worth I'm very happy you didn't go with lisp. I abhor s-expressions and think it shouldn't be used for anything except machine reading.