Hey There!




You're probably looking for Schematic Pal, a website I made several years ago to scan the Internet for Eagle™ CAD libraries, parse them, index them, and make them easy to find and use.

I primarily built this website to hone my programming skills, writing the backend first in Scala, then in Node.js. The front end went from vanilla Bootstrap to Google Polymer. Fun.

I've been hosting Schematic Pal for about 6 years now. The original idea was to bring in enough money from the ads on the page to cover the hosting costs, but while there's a decent amount of traffic, the ad revenue has been near zero.

At the same time, hosting this beast is a bit expensive. The backend includes a mongodb database and an elasticsearch instance, in addition to the node.js servers. All told the hosting costs over $100/month. That's without running the crawlers.

I decided that while I'm very proud of the site, I can't keep running it at a loss, so I'm taking it down.

I know there are a lot of people who use the site. I'm considering setting up a patreon page or something similar to allow people to donate to cover the costs. Before I do that, I would like to hear from some of you to see what you think. If enough people are interested in chipping in, I'll set it back up and for an added bonus, I'll remove the ads that weren't generating any revenue anyway. If we raise enough, we can run the crawlers again to keep the content fresh.

If you want to help, or just want to say "hey", or "thanks for the memories", send me a note and tell me your ideas, suggestions, or any offers to help.

Thanks for enjoying the site! -Jim



I Want To Help!