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Welcome, Andrew Seddon of CircuitHub.com!
- Founded the company with Jonathon Friedman, from across the Atlantic!
- Andrew went to school in Leeds but left for a design position.
- Previously worked for companies such as Turnsafe and Active RF and in his spare time worked on model rockets. Check out all of his past work on his personal site.
- London is barren, but outlying areas of the UK do electronics. Hardware is stronger in Cambridge, with companies such as ARM and Cambridge Silicon Radio.
- There is also the M4 corridor, west of London
- Amateur electronics is growing in London. Shared spaces, Makerspaces and Hackerspaces allow for shared tools, which are a premium in expensive real estate areas.
- Andrew and the team needed to learn web software and currently use CoffeeScript, a JavaScript stack
- CircuitHub uses an online interface to create parts and then allows users to find and sync with the footprints and schematic symbols using Dropbox. The site creates parts compatible with 3 of the top PCB CAD programs available today and more are planned for the future.
- Circuit hub is sponsoring hackathon along with yCombinator and Upverter (and more!)
- How parts are handled depends on workplace culture and software packages. Altium and EAGLE handle associating footprints different and big companies might have a librarian whereas smaller companies may not.
- Companies likely won’t be revealing any information by pulling and sharing footprints from a central database, but trust will be an issue with larger companies.
- They will be open sourcing all possible code and feeding it back to the community. You can view the team’s work on GitHub.
- The main tool will always be free. Revenue will come later by integrating with manufacturing.
- The project started because Jon and Andrew were “scratching their own itch”. They submitted a yCombinator application on deadline day.
- Because it’s strikingly difficult to get a visa for the US, even if you’re a founder of a startup, they are operating out of Playa del Carmen for the next few months. The US has only recently considered any kind of legislation in this area (!?)
- Andrew reluctantly agreed to some kind of gamification in order to encourage participation (“we’ll see,” he says). Chris cited the awesome Adafruit badges as a good example of this in action.
Be sure to head over to CircuitHub.com and start an account. You can start pulling in designs to your projects and submitting new footprints to the community.
You can follow Andrew on Twitter at @seddonandrew and can also follow @CircuitHub.
So, I suppose you don’t read comments over one day old. My question (in the previous show) was:
“Is it possible for you to make some sort of “markers” for the mp3 file, so I can jump from topic to topic that I am interested in, instead of neading to listen for the whole show?”
Do you know how to do easily this? Have you seen this in other podcasts?
We will continue to look at doing more transcription services, which do timestamps, but there would be a significant lag between the show being published.
Unfortunately, I don’t know how. Could you at least write those “time stamps” in the list (next to the topic, in the text), so I can manually skip to the topics that I am interested in? For example:
topic 1 – 00:01:43
topic 2 – 00:09:11
topic 3 – 00:23:42
…
and so on.
I think this can be done with soundcloud .
http://soundcloud.com/101/podcasts
Shouldn’t this show be with Mike, from Mike’s Electric Stuff?
It was supposed to be but Dave’s last minute travel plans meant that Dave wasn’t going to be on the show. Since Dave’s fans and Mike’s fans have been asking for them to do something together for a long time, we thought it would be better to wait for them to both be on in the near future.
(Correction=>) Coffeescript is a language that one can compile to Javascript.
Have you all tried Auphonic yet?
https://auphonic.com/
I heard about it last week on the FLOSS Weekly Podcast.
Andrew’s attempts to get into the US along with the rest of the CircuitHub team are discussed in the show. I am curious why they wanted to get into the USA. I don’t mean this sarcastically, ! sorry if I missed the explanation.
My hope is that they have deemed the US the best place to work on and launch such a startup, but is that the reason? Is it some other technicality of operating the site?
I believe it was because most of their funding came from the US
Hi Mark,
The US is still the easiest place to get funding which is why we are based there.
I guess what i didn’t mention on the show is that i’m not really bothered about not having a Visa, it would simply be convenient. In my personal opinion Silicon Valley is not the best place to operate a web startup anymore (way too expensive) and it’s not a place i would want to live full time (not a fan of urban sprawl, i prefer cities)
Cheers!
I went to CircuitHub and got it set up. I did this because I really like this concept although I have to admit I am not knowledgeable enough to see potential pitfalls.
I think the CircuitHub team is going to need more written and video tutorials. I got lost in the site and after about 40 minutes grew frustrated that I couldn’t figure things out. One problem I noticed is that some parts with entries didn’t seem to have valid parts underneath them.
Somewhat related, I really wish CircuitHub had import capabilities or else an incredible drawing tool. Even with this good general concept for a library it will be tough drawing people into it if the editor is hard to use. A parametric editor such as Pro-E and Solidworks use would be really helpful.
To address quality a system of obsoleting bad footprints and parts could be employed. At first stage a part could be flagged as deprecated, then as being superseded by a preferred part and then finally eliminated from the database. Of course gross errors have to be corrected but I am guessing there will be other more subtle errors in the library. Might a system like this calm fears of a persons library changing all the time?
You were not sure what an Artic (Articulated Lorry) was well it translates to American directly as a Semi or Rig. What Andrew describes as a lorry with a trailer behind it is a tractor and drawbar trailer unit in the UK not sure what that is in the US but in Australia it is a roadtrain often with more than one trailer as well.
With regards to mp3 bookmarks, One option might be to convert it to a static video format and upload it to YouTube. YT allow you to embed “go to” time codes in links, which can be placed in the show details. This happens quite a lot in Q&A podcasts.
A big hello to a fellow Leeds Uni alumnus! I was a postgrad student there, studying Radio Communications and High Frequency Engineering. I can see why they beat the enthusiasm out of you though, all the classroom theory is horrible and grindy. Having said that, I still miss my time there.
With the best will in the world, I don’t see the UK catching up to the US culture of business innovation, which is a shame because the one thing we still do well here is technical innovation.