benjamind's comments

The Crew Displays do not use Knockout.js. As far as I am aware this is possibly used in some other asset management software developed in-house for manufacturing teams but definitely not onboard Dragon.

Yup.

Good luck everyone. Will be interesting to see the community try and solve some real problems.

Totally fair point, the product itself is somewhat....over designed ;-)

Having played around with 3d printers for the last couple of years I have to say that they are an indispensable tool for makers/hackers/inventors/artist types. However for mass market as many here have said we are just not there yet.

To get there we really need to have a few innovative large manufacturers start publishing replacement part CAD models for their products. Making that leap is obviously a big deal for a lot of manufacturers who make outstanding margin on their replacement parts, but that is the kind of thing we need in order for a printer to be useful to the truly mass market.

Additionally, and I think we're seeing this already, we need a lot more 3d printable products to come to market. For example, I just recently finished printing a Clug bike rack for a friend (https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/834664305/clug-cycle-st...). This is a prime example of bringing 3d printing to the general public - they provide a high quality version you can buy, or a cheap 3d printable version which you can pay a lot less for just the 3d files. We worked out that with the model cost and the material cost you could print somewhere in the region of 30 replacements before it was more economical to buy the mass produced high quality version. Thus far the rack hasn't broke yet either!

I don't know about that. I think I'd take the flight, then launch a kickstarter off the back of the publicity :-)

Who's going to be first to enter and what are you going to build?

We just released a new version with user upload support. Hope its useful for you.

Hey all, looking for some feedback on our new site. A lot more detail about what we're trying to do can be found on our blog at http://blog.datasheet.net

Would love to hear what you think.

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.

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.

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?

Not so much sadly. Its rather limited in terms of design area, and the technology probably wouldn't scale to larger schematics anyway since its SVG based and currently SVG performance scales rather badly in most browsers.

Likewise there is no PCB editor, nor any import/export formats that would enable you to use your designs in a more practical fashion.

Having said all that however, its a great tool for creating diagrams for App Notes and technical articles / blogs. Works really nicely for the simple designs and examples that are so common when writing about electronics design. They've actually been fairly careful to market it on their site as a schematic drawing tool, not a schematic editor and this is a distinction that needs to be made since the two are not the same use-case at all.

Still, good to see more companies innovating in this space!

Do you have a reference for this? I'd love to see the stats.

Interesting. I have often wondered about the peak traffic and post churn times on HN. The 9am period you hit would logically be a fairly low traffic time given that the bulk of HN readers are US based (I am assuming here, correct me if I am wrong).

This is the approach we have been taking at CircuitBee (http://www.circuitbee.com). We have Eagle and KiCAD importing, with versioning on the way already.

We're not aiming to replace the tools you already use, just make it easier to share your work on the web. I do love the idea of a web based EDA tool, but I'm yet to believe it can be done with performance characteristics that will work for any reasonably complex circuit.

Haha! Never saw that site before, but man are those some upset employees!

It certainly is a hell of a place to work as a developer. I was almost grateful for it in a way, it was my first professional developer job (they tend to hire fresh meat). But it taught me a lot about what not to do, and was a proving ground for my ability to work under pressure.

I'd almost recommend doing a stint in a place like it, makes you appreciate all your jobs afterwards. :-)

Yes, the complete package is what they can offer big business. There are so many pieces to it now that they can turn it to a huge range of different uses.

The problem they have (well at least had when I was there a few years ago) is that nobody understands it all anymore. They've acquired so much technology and have such a high turn over rate of developers (barring a few extremely well rewarded key seniors) that its a constant uphill struggle to change anything or improve significantly, so developers have to just patch things up as best they can.

That burden will eventually catch up with them I would think, but I'm always surprised at how long a bad code-base can be kept alive.

Not sure how true that is.

At their most basic they do text classification and extraction, as well as document comparison. So you can index a whole load of documents, then train the system to recognise a particular type of document (based on any number of other training documents) and give it a specific classification.

The marketing spin is that you can extract 'meaning' from a whole load of text and deduce what a document is 'about'. Its not strictly true, but you can get a close approximation of that idea with decent training sets and classifications.

That is quite likely. They have a huge range of contacts amongst government, educational, financial and just about every other large organisation you can think of. If you wanted to get into retailing software to large business, they would be the people to talk to.