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

[bdelarre]

Hey danny,

I think you might have misread what I was suggesting. I was pointing out that with a live document you could actually have it show you less, more specific information, rather than what we have now where a single datasheet can cover dozens of variations on a part or part family.

[zapta]

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

+1

I would not event bother to enter a mailinator email address ;-)

[Alex]

Hi bdelarre,

I will review and speak from the perspective of a 'serious hobbyist' only. I have not read all other replies, but repetition would be good in this topic.

I signed up and created 3 snippets for the 1n4148 and adding a couple of annotations. One observation is that once I collected all the snippets I wanted to view everything I had, even from other datasheets. I had difficulty finding a button to 'dashboard' to see all my snippets, I believe there should be a big fat button for that. There is no link in my profile either. I had to click on the DS icon to be taken to the dashboard (homepage if you are logged in I believe).

I could then share snippets via email. In the past I have needed to direct people to a part of a datasheet and I have done so descriptively which is not a problem at all. So that's good, but the time it will take me to lookup the datasheet on your engine, login, make a snippet and email it will be much longer than just saying page 3, table 3, max fwrd voltage.

There is also an option to make the snippets public? Is that correct? Why would you do that? Also there is a comment section below each snippet. Intuitively I would use that to keep notes about the snippet but it felt a lot like a social media comment section. Is that the case? On the same topic, is the 'Activity Stream' personal?

I created a test 'Collection' and added snippets. You can improve the method of adding snippets to a collection. Currently I have to go inside a snippet to add it. A drag and drop facility from all your snippets would be much much better.

I am a little bit disappointed, as I was expecting a way to throw all the snippets on an A4 page and print it. This will be an extremely useful feature. One scenario is designing something and wanting to compare components. Another scenario is configuring a peripheral in a micro controller and needing to have instant access to the interrupt registers, peripheral registers, IO registers etc. In fact I can see this being a major selling point for datasheet.net.

It just occured to me that I can do that in Microsoft OneNote that I use anyway. I would however turn to a lean online tool to do this for quick and dirty projects. Something that just takes a link to a pdf of the datasheet and creates snippets. Maybe a widget? A toolbar addon?

I get the feeling that when conceiving this you/the team was greatly influenced by social media. I can almost hear 'let's do it like facebook' being said. I'm sceptical. Why so much effort on making snippets social?

About your comments on 'adaptive datasheets', I think it's not a good idea. Thinking of myself and how I use datasheets, I will very quickly home in to exactly what I need, using the big titles or sometimes even the units of measurement. Datasheets tend to be formatted in the same way with standardised sections. Especially within a product line and manufacturer. If I can't find what I need reasonably quickly it can be because I don't know enough about what I am looking for.

About 'adaptive graphs', I more frequently use them to see the values over a range of conditions, rather than a single point. So entering say the x axis to get a y axis will be misleading and I would not use it.

In general I think datasheets do not contain enough information. Frequently I will look for the same part's datasheet from another manufacturer just to have that extra I-V plot. Recently I contacted Vishay as I could not find the parallel resistance (should be included IMO) for the widespread BPW34 photodiode.

Overall I like it, it has potential and I appreciate your effort even if it is trying to improve something that already 'works better than the operator'. 

Alex

[bdelarre]

Hey Alex,

Thats awesome feedback, very useful thank you.

You are dead on about the button for the dashboard, it has largely been a UI space issue that has prevented me from putting one there, but I think its becoming clear its really needed. We are also going to speed up the process for sharing a link to a snippet within the UI so hopefully making it easier.

Making snippets public is really so you can share knowledge just generally. My initial thinking was it would be very useful for support engineers at manufacturers so they could add additional information to datasheets that anyone would immediately be able to see. We spoke to some FAEs at various companies and they said that 90% of their job was pointing people repeatedly to the same bits of a datasheet and then adding some additional explanation. Hopefully this will be very useful for them, and others who are in a more 'teaching' role (think EE lecturers).

Comments and activity stream were really created with the learning use-case in mind. Not so much to be social, but to make it easier to communicate back and forth over a period of time. For instance a student could create a snippet, share with their professor and then a discussion could ensue in the comment stream. Similarly this could work for a senior / junior engineer relationship. The activity stream needs a bit of a rebuild and was largely added as an afterthought at this point, so I'm open to suggestions on how it could be made better, but really its so I can keep track of things I did recently giving me faster access to the snippets and datasheets I used.


The collections UI is probably the part I am most unhappy with, it definitely needs some work.

A simple output page of your snippets in a collection or datasheet could be good. We're actually discussing syncrhonizing the snippets and datasheets with services like Dropbox and Google Drive, so you can manage snippets and datasheets in the web interface and then have it immediately on your local device, with a web page for each datasheet showing all the snippets.

We're definitely not going for a Facebook model here, this isn't a social network, its a tool for engineers and I always conceived it as such. People of course do associate comment and activity streams with Facebook but thats not really where they came from. Its not 'social' that drove those features, its the desire to make it easier for us to communicate around content. Engineers thus far are so isolated in our work, we all have a tendency to horde information and live in our own little worlds. This changed massively in the software development world with sites like StackOverflow, we're hoping we can do something similar for engineers (albeit less game-y perhaps), but really the intention here is to get us all communicating more freely.

Fair point on the adaptive graphs, this was largely just an idea for something that might be useful. The key thing is to try and drive some innovation though, datasheets haven't changed in 30 years, I think it might be time we took another look at them and asked ourselves what would make them better and how could they make our lives easier?

Anyway, thanks for the great feedback, exactly the sort of thing I was hoping for.