I created a new tool to make datasheets better - would love feedback

[bdelarre]

Hi all,

Long time lurker, but I finally have something to post.

I recently launched a new product called Datasheet.net (http://www.datasheet.net) with the aim of kickstarting some innovation in the datasheet space. I personally hate datasheets as they stand, they're large, unwieldy and usually full of information I don't care about. But they're also essential, and I spend a lot of time nosing through them to find the nuggets of information I need.

So I built a tool to make it easier for me to do this. It launched on Wednesday and you can read more about it here http://blog.datasheet.net. This is just a first step, hopefully it will lead to major innovation in datasheets, but for now I'm working with what we have to make datasheets better using the PDF content we have.

I would love to hear you feedback.

[BravoV]

Needs signing up just "to view" a publicly available datasheet ?  ... FAIL ... 

[bdelarre]

Oh I completely agree, unfortunately there's a financial reason for that, let me explain.

In order to do all the things we're doing (snipping, deep linking etc) we need to convert the datasheet to a HTML format for delivery in the browser. This isn't an easy thing to do well, there's lots of tools out there that claim to work but very few actually deliver reliably. So we use a 3rd party service to do this for us. At the moment this costs us for every datasheet we convert, its not much a few tens of cents each, but that adds up.

What makes it really painful for us is that the datasheet.net domain has been around for years, and gets hit by bots on a massive scale every day. We opened it up originally for viewing without login, but we racked up over $600 of fees overnight. There's millions of datasheets in the system, so it could get really expensive for us. Since we want the site to be free for the engineer we have to keep our costs down.

So for now we've made it login required to view, this is the only way we can reliably filter out the bots. We're working on alternatives that will cost us less, but we haven't got any working alternatives yet.

[jaxbird]

Hard to compete with the major search engines, I usually just enter the part number, then get a list of available manufacturers with datasheets I can just click on to load a datasheet.

I usually don't even save them anymore, faster to search and find online than locate them locally.

Not sure that can be done much better. It's a lot better than the old fax back services from before the internet took off.

[bdelarre]

Hey Jaxbird.

I agree its hard to compete with google, and we're not specifically going after a better datasheet search.

What we're trying to do is improve the datasheets themselves. In this first instance I'm trying to solve the problem I have most often, which is that I only refer to one table, or a diagram, in a datasheet over and over again. That pin out diagram, or footprint, or the table that tells me what my register mappings are. I'll use that stuff a lot, and every time I load the datasheet I have to go find it again, that gets even worse when I'm checking data from multiple datasheets at once.

To solve that we created snipping, so I can just quickly mark up that section of the sheet and save it for later then quickly access it from my dashboard. Saves me loads of time. Better still I can then share that with others to help answer questions or add more information.

[Bored@Work]

The company behind this, the "we", is Supplyframe, the same one owning Findchips. Strange that they are a bit shy to state their affiliation and try to make it look like a kind of a startup.

[bdelarre]

Heh, yeah I forgot to mention that.

This is a reflection of a change at SupplyFrame. We're now running a lot more smaller projects with smaller teams that have complete ownership of the project.

In this case this was a tool I built in my own time over the course of a few months, the company liked it and decided we'd take it forward. But yeah, we're running each project like a little startup - its a lot more fun for us devs that way! :-)

Edit: This is why you'll find me doing most of the promotion for this around the web, I even voiced the demo video. Check out the reddit for more discussion too - http://www.reddit.com/r/electronics/comments/1s41d8/i_created_a_new_tool_to_make_datasheets_better/

[Jon86]

Meh, I don't really care too much about going through datasheets, it might take me a minute or two but I know I'll always be able to find anything I want to know in there, doesn't bother me too much.
The thing that gets me is the ability to save snippets for later, now that might be useful. 

[Jon86]

Well I've just given it a little trial and so far so good, love the UI!
The only big problems I've got with it is how facebook-like it is. Don't try and make a datasheet website like a social network, that's just stupid. No one wants to comment on 'snapshots' or talk about them. Just make it look more like an application for yourself, rather than a community. It's annoying seeing my username pop up everywhere and seeing that things are posted by me. Just add it to the snapshot list without the dialog and be done with it.
Get rid of all the social stuff, it's all shit in my opinion.

Other than that, good job! 

[bdelarre]

Interesting feedback Jon.

The reason I did all the comment and sharing stuff is really for teams and projects.

Say I make a design decision based on some data I find in a datasheet, I can snip it and send it to my colleagues and they can then comment and give me feedback about it. If its just isolated to just my account then it doesn't help document things for the future. No social features is certainly good for the individual, but you need them in a team. Not really aiming for a social network, but I definitely want collaboration to be a part of this.

I'm also interested in it as a tool for helping people learn how to more effectively use a component, there's lots of little tricks on a wide variety of chips that I don't know about. If someone more capable took the time to annotate a snippet with this stuff then it would act as a great learning aid for me.

[fable]

I just played with it for a couple of minutes and i must say its great tool for me.
Can u do the same for schematics ? 

P.S
Sorry for my bad english.

[bdelarre]

Hey fable,

Interesting that you suggest that I actually built CircuitBee http://www.circuitbee.com/ back in 2011 to solve a similar issue for schematics, but I didn't really pursue it very much since then.

However we've just started looking at possibly integrating Datasheet.net with Altium PDF export (since its got a great PDF format export), and we will be enabling users to upload any PDF they want at some point in the very near future so if you have a PDF of a schematic you'll be able to do all the same stuff there. Someone over on reddit actually asked for some basic IEEE symbols to make it easier to annotate circuits as well, so perhaps there's a need here.

I'm open to any suggestions at all, so if you have any other thoughts like this please let me know.

[Jon86]

Interesting feedback Jon.

The reason I did all the comment and sharing stuff is really for teams and projects.

Say I make a design decision based on some data I find in a datasheet, I can snip it and send it to my colleagues and they can then comment and give me feedback about it. If its just isolated to just my account then it doesn't help document things for the future. No social features is certainly good for the individual, but you need them in a team. Not really aiming for a social network, but I definitely want collaboration to be a part of this.

I'm also interested in it as a tool for helping people learn how to more effectively use a component, there's lots of little tricks on a wide variety of chips that I don't know about. If someone more capable took the time to annotate a snippet with this stuff then it would act as a great learning aid for me.

That makes more sense now, I kind of see it being useful to share things with other people maybe, but the comments and all the other stuff is a little silly really.
When I'm working with people I find it easy enough to send them links, I don't ever find myself needing to post comments on one of their datasheets or whatever. It's a very nice system, but I think in terms of ease of use for the application, it just makes things more difficult and it's kind of distracting.

[bdelarre]

Perhaps it needs to be more specifically encouraging to note taking on the topic of the snippet rather than 'comments' in general if that makes sense?

User interface design is always so hard.

[sleemanj]

Requiring login is going to hurt more than help.

Just have a CAPTCHA to view a datasheet if the conversion cost is an issue, that will cut out the bots. 

Login to get extra features is fine.

[bdelarre]

Not a bad idea, I'll see if we can put this together soon. Thanks for the suggestion.

[marshallh]

IMO there are no problems with datasheets as they stand. They can be long and unwieldy, but after reading enough you will notice patterns and trends - it becomes trivial to figure out what you need to do.
If you suck at piano, do you build a robot to play for you, or do you just practice more?

[dannyf]

So I built a tool to make it easier for me to do this.

I still have no clue just exactly what you are trying to do and how it is going to make datasheets better.

[c4757p]

Played around with it a bit, and this is the conclusion I have come to:





Am I missing anything?

[bdelarre]

If you want to keep all your knowledge to yourself, then yeah, paper and marker will do you fine, assuming you are organized enough to keep your paper all neatly indexed so you can find the thing you did 6 months ago.

Personally, I'm keen to share what I know, and I suspect most engineers of the hacker and maker culture are the same. The aim here is to make tools that make it easier for people to do that. Show someone how to do something by taking a quick snippet and adding your knowledge. Ask someone else to explain a confusing statement or graph in a datasheet by taking a snippet describing what you don't understand and sharing it with them.

But this is just a first step, the longer term aim here is to make datasheets a 'live' document.

Wouldn't it be better if you could just select from a dropdown and say "I'm using the atmega168pa" and then the datasheet updates and only shows you the content that's relevant to that chip? What if you could input your operating voltages and have all the graphs and tables update to show you how the component will behave in those conditions? There's loads of potential in making datasheets more readable by machine, and more interactive for engineers. That's where we're going with this, what we've done so far is just what is possible with the content as it stands, its an attempt to show that datasheets could be more than just PDF versions of dead tree documents.

[Bored@Work]

Am I missing anything?

Maybe the comment and annotation feature in Acrobat Reader since Reader version 7. Or maybe http://www.mendeley.com/download-mendeley-desktop/ if you drown in PDFs.

[c4757p]

Wouldn't it be better if you could just select from a dropdown and say "I'm using the atmega168pa" and then the datasheet updates and only shows you the content that's relevant to that chip?

Tables?

What if you could input your operating voltages and have all the graphs and tables update to show you how the component will behave in those conditions?

Graphs?

[TerraHertz]

Any design team is already going to have channels in place for group discussion and note taking. They are NOT going to shift that to an online datasheet source (one of many) no matter how great the interface. It would be an unacceptable outside dependency.

I hate this 'make everything like Facebook' mentality. Ebay recently did that with their site search and saved search terms facility, and now it's literally unusable (or rather, unbearable to use.) I've had to fall back to keeping ebay search terms in a text file on my PC, and cut-pasting them when I need. As for search hit notification by email - it's effectively gone, apart from old saved search terms that still survive from before the site changes.

The ebay changes are so unbelievable retarded and detrimental, that one has to consider it's possibly a deliberate cripple of some capabilities as part of a long term plan to morph ebay into something much more suited to large stores, much less usable by ordinary people to trade freely among themselves.

[bdelarre]

Yes I agree professional design teams certainly should have something in place like this (though from what we've heard from talking to engineers this is quite often not the case).

But what about everyone else? What about the opensource hardware projects, and the makers and hackers who just do it as a hobby?

[dannyf]

What if you could input your operating voltages and have all the graphs and tables update to show you how the component will behave in those conditions?

A big reason that datasheets are useful is that they provided limited but vital information.

If datasheets were what you wanted them to be, there would be a severe information overload. In this case, less is more.