Over the past month, a small group of open-source hardware folks have started building a web site to help the community search, share, and manageall of our EAGLE parts libraries. We’ve been motivated by the fact that it’s difficult to find libraries that contain parts we’d like to use, and even if you do find a library, there’s no way to know whether the part is correct without wasting a lot of time examining and verifying it yourself.
SparkFun has done an amazing job sharing their own in-house library, but we think there’s a lot more that can be done to increase the quality of library sharing and reduce the amount of duplicated effort in the community.
In short, we want to make it easier for everyone to be building awesome designs without wasting time in the minutia of drawing up every part from scratch.
With this goal in mind, we’d like to hear from you, the community, to find out what sorts of features you’d like to see (and if you’re interested at all).
- Users upload EAGLE parts libraries they would like to share.
- Users can search for parts and add them to their own "collection"
- The site builds a custom library from your collection for you to download and use
- You can keep your collection updated easily through GitHub
- Each part will have a web page where users can provide feedback about that particular part from the library. Commenting and rating the quality and correctness of the library part, whether they've used it in a working design, etc.
- Library providers can also keep their parts updated/bug fixed through GitHub (like SparkFun currently does)
Further down the line, we will probably tackle the sharing of DRC and CAM files (with specs for various fab houses and processes).
Right now we’re just serving a landing page where you can put yourself on the mailing list. We’re still working on the mechanics of the site, but we’ll be launching in June.
I like this and would use it. It would be a huge help if you could search for parts by package type, partial or full, some manufactures have different names for the same package, or they have very slight differences, so when you upload your part, it would be good to have a few boxes where you can include as much information as possible. In Eagle a SOIC-8 part might be named 8SOIC, SOIC8, SOIC-8, just depends on the person who made it. Maybe once the person uploads their part, your website could scan the file, and if it is unclear about something, it could offer suggestions to the user who uploaded it to rename that questionable name for the user. So your website could scan the file, count 8 pins, see the user named the part just plain “SOIC”, and offer a drop down box with a list of probable types, like SOIC-8. I noticed many DFN’s have the same pins, but possibly different sizes, 3mmx3mm, or 5mmx5mm for example.
Just another thought I had, maybe have your website scan the file and include the dimensions of the part as a searchable feature. It should not be too hard as long as the user used the correct layer name for the part (dimension? or tdocu? I have seen it both ways).