| From a guy who surfs for electronic parts on a tablet while falling asleep at nights. Most vendor sites get painfully slow for this. First impressions: The pop-over splash screen makes me want to reach for the 'close tab' button reflexively. If it's "the worlds fast free univeral parts library" I expect to see some part pr0n right when I pull up the site. I don't want to click [microscopic white-on-gray X] to close the popover, I don't want to "Connect with Dropbox", and I don't want to click a magnifying glass to "Browse the library". Then on the main page I'm presented with a GitHub-like dashboard. I see big videos for expensive CAD packages I don't own. I see 'LATEST ACTIVITY' which is a long list of entries that are all like: ibelimb updated domain template HTSSOP to var documentType = "/template/footprint/0.9" 24 minutes ago Where are the parts?! Show me some parts! OIC, there's a little grayed-out word "parts" at the top. Maybe that takes me to some parts. Yay! A list of parts! While writing this, I find Firefox can't select and copy the text from this list. That's a pain, because often I have to paste part numbers into other search boxes. I click on the first entry: Microcontrollers NXP Semiconductors LPC1768FBD100,551 IC ARM CORTEX MCU 512K 100-LQFP OK, a datasheet on the left, cool! Something on the right about dragging-and-dropping to add a symbol and a footprint. "Add components to this part" "Drag and drop domain models here to form components." I don't get it, but maybe it makes sense if you're a heavy CAD user. I learn that I can expand the right-hand pane to cover where the datasheet was on the left. I'm a little annoyed that I can't expand the datasheet on the left to cover the section on the right. But I learn that I can move the datasheet to the right and expand it to cover the left. It seems the datasheet pages are just images? I can't Ctrl-F and search them. But I find the 'download pdf' button on the first try. The 'summary' section looks useful. It would be even more useful with a parametric search. Looks like a good start! Bookmarked. |
Perhaps this will help until then: (1) You can click anywhere that isn't the splash screen (any dark area) to dismiss it. (2) You can jump straight to parts by URL https://circuithub.com/parts or (3) by the big button on the splash screen in the lower right.