This pane shows the XML data for this part, including its symbols and and packages. This is what gets downloaded if you click the download button.
[[_formatXml(device.xml)]]
This pane shows the description data extracted for this part. Descriptions are sometimes in html, but it's not always consistent, so we do our best to show it nicely.
These URLs point to where our crawler found this part. The source may contain many parts in addition to this one. Our crawler engine makes individual library files for each part found.
Lots of work on cross-browser support, and optimizing for download speed. HTML's flexbox is really cool but getting it to work cross-browser is a neat trick. We also fixed a few rendering problems in the symbol viewer.
Also spent some time debugging the crawlers. Crawling the internet is kind of an unbounded problem, so it takes diligence to find URLs that break us and fix them.
Re-launched the site with a new approach to advertising. We added affiliate links that offset our costs when you follow through and buy something, so by all means, if you need something from one of our sponsors, please click through to their sites using our ads!
The new responsive design means you don't need to scroll the page; everything you need is scaled to fit. This more modern approach means we are a bit on the bleeding edge of browser functionality, so apologies if there are rough edges with some browsers. We design and test with Chrome first, then debug as best we can on the others. Do let us know if something is really out of whack and we'll take a look.
Completely rewritten in node.js and using webcomponents for the UX. Webcomponents lets you modularize your html, css, and javascript code to encapsulate functionality in a way that I found to be very powerful. Once you've built a component with as a webcomponent, you can instantiate it anywhere in your html. It also allows you to build declarative structures to populate html using data binding. No more jQuery to manipulate the DOM to populate fields.
The basic library I used is Google's Polymer http://www.polymer-project.org. However, I'm not a fan of the paper design stuff so I brought in bootstrap CSS and components wherever possible, and used polymer's non-UX components like iron-ajax, iron-list, etc. and its support for making my own components.
I also changed the layout to be as responsive as possible. Note that the main screen doesn't scroll anymore, rather the elements inside it that overflow do. This makes it work more like you would expect a native application to.
For hosting, the site is built into docker components and managed using Rancher. This is a lot more flexible than my previous deployment and allows me to scale up the web crawler.
I've completely moved my hosting to Digital Ocean. It not only saved me a bit of money, it also allowed me to get to know some of the key technologies I'm working with (mongodb, elasticsearch) better. I'm hosting using separate VPSes for load balancing, web apps, database, and search index, and it should be enough to handle a lot of traffic. Should be fun.
A lot of work lately to make the site work well around the world. I've been trying out lots of monitoring tools that tell me what the delays are from different countries, and in the process I've scaled the servers up a bit and fixed a few bugs that were causing trouble.
I'm still chasing down an intermittent problem hitting the database. Every once in a while I'm logging an error when someone is clicking on a device in the search results. I haven't yet reproduced it so I can't tell if it's affecting users or not. It may be just a transient error from which I'm recovering automatically, or it could be that you find yourself having to click on a search result a second time to get it draw the symbol and package. If this is happening to you, I'd love to get email from you at the feedback link.
Schematic Pal is a tool that allows you to search for publicly available schematic symbols and PCB footprints for Autodesk Eagle and compatible CAD tools.
If you don’t have Eagle, download it here.
Did you ever find yourself happily designing a board when you realize you don't have a schematic symbol or footprint for a part you want to use, and you suddenly dread the hour or so you're about to spend making it by hand or searching the Internet for a library that someone else gratefully made already? It turns out a lot of parts you want to use have been used by someone else on their boards, often by creating beautiful, elegant library files better than you'd ever make, but it's often hard to find them.
This site hopes to alleviate some of that pain. Behind it is a background task that is continuously walking the Internet looking for files that are in the EagleTM xml format (sorry, we haven't gotten around to the older binary format). When it finds a file that has parts in it (a .lbr, .sch, or .brd file) it extracts the parts from the file and puts them in a searchable database so the lazyopportunistic among us can find them more easily.
When you find a part you're looking for, you have two options to get it for use in your design.
You can download the original file from the original location using the url shown in the "source" box on the results page. This will give you the entire file that contains the part.
Your other option is to download just the part you are looking for, by clicking on "download". This will download a file containing just the part you have selected along with all compatible symbols and packages from the original file. This is a nice option when the original part comes from a very large library.
Of course, the accuracy of stuff you find on the "series of tubes" comes with no guarantees or warranties. Be sure to double-check every part you find on the Internet (here or elsewhere) for accuracy before you spend money having a PCB made.
Subscribe to get news updates (we won’t bombard you). Let us know what works for you, what doesn’t, and how we can make it better.
Enjoy the site. Happy board-designing!
We'd love to hear from you. Email us at info@schematicpal.com.