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by meaty 4900 days ago
It's basically datasheets.com but somehow even more annoying.

I wouldn't trust a 3rd party footprint database either - the amount of times I've seen people fuck up their first prototype by throwing some footprint they found on the board and then realising the pins were wrong etc is insane. Saw 5 on the same board once!

2 comments

What would it take to make a footprint database you can trust? I would imagine that community ranking/flagging of content could surely clean up inconsistent or invalid designs making the database more reliable.

Would approved manufacturer accounts that contained all the parts from a manufacturer make them more trustworthy?

To your second paragraph, 100% yes :)
Well lets hope that the CircuitHub team can get the traction they need to get the attention of the big manufacturers then.

There's certainly a chicken and the egg problem happening with this kind of innovation right now. I know for a fact that there are many people at the large manufacturers that know that symbol and footprint library management is a major headache. They all want a good solution to the problem, but nobody is willing to take the plunge on an as yet unproven system.

Hi Ben, I hope your well. Ideally we would like manufacturers to setup their own accounts and approve their own lib's, that would be a big win for users. Basically i think this problem has slipped between the cracks, the semi co's, engineers, EMS houses, EDA vendors etc all palm it off to each other!
Yeah I think that's definitely been the problem thus far.

There's a wind of change in the air though, I would definitely encourage you to try contacting the large manufacturers directly and see if you can get some buy-in. We've had some very encouraging discussions with some of them recently.

Let me know how it goes, if you don't get any joy perhaps we can hook you up.

exactly, creating everything yourself from scratch is no panacea though, it's easy to make mistakes.

We think that the first time somebody makes a mistake with their library is the only time that mistake should be made. I.e everybody get's the fix automatically.