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.

[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.