Very interested, keep us posted!
I will!
Sounds interesting and good luck with your effort
Just curious though as to how you avoid obsolescence when Altium change things radically? Or, does the internal design remain somewhat stable?
Many possible answers:
* I don't expect Altium to change how the DBLibs works radically, if not at all. It has been supported for years, and it's widely used by almost all big corporation buying from them.
* If they move to a different dblib structure, porting is not hard. The data structure is complex within the app, but everything is joined dynamically and compiled into a flat table for Altium stupidity's sake. This latter part can be easily changed if required.
* dblibs can be converted to IntLibs in the worst case scenario
sounds cool!
Hopefully it can still be deployed in a cloud hosted VM, though. Plenty of people work in teams that aren't all located in the same building.
Is it open or closed source?
is it going to be a paid product?
where are you in the development, and what's your expected availability date?
Cloud VM would be the preferred way of deploying it. Alternatively, a local Linux VM using hyper-v on windows for companies that are Windows-only. The app runs on Linux exclusively nonetheless.
Cannot comment on open or closed source nature for now. Currently awaiting some feedback from enterprise customers. Personally, I prefer open source, and would gladly like to find a way for the software to be free for entusiast. Main issue, for now, is that we're based in Europe, and most of the market is US/Asia, with no judicial continuity, so we need a licensing model that is solid in practice more than on legal terms.
It's going to be paid for business customers. Not planning to make money off individuals.
Alpha by end of year.
If possible, could the app also support SVNDbLibs? I use those, and find they help sync up library management across multiple machines.
Yes. Could possibly become a requirement, as synchronizing files is not a trivial task, and it appears by recent tests we need to do it in order to have an good workflow.
What do you mean by "Automatic parsing of PcbLib and SchLibs to retrieve the list of components"
Are you takling about the PcbLib and SchLib used in the DbLib structure of are you talking about old libraries (like IntLibs etc.)?
Otherwise it sounds like a great idea!
Keep us updated!
The one used in DbLibs.
When you make a DbLib/SVNDbLib, it links to SchLibs and PcbLibs that may contain more than one symbol/footprint. Unfortunately, discovering the symbols/footprints inside is quite impractical. SVNLibs usually have one-file-per-symbol/footprints, but even then naming in those must be manually matched between symbol/footprint and library filename. Duplicate symbol/footprint names are also a mess.
The app does all the tedious heavy lifting of matching components in the database with Symbols and Footprints.
Davide