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Sharing Electronic Schematics
derGoldstein writes with a blurb in Make about Circuit Bee. From the article: "CircuitBee is like YouTube for your circuit schematics. You upload your Eagle or Kicad schematics, we crunch the numbers and create an online embeddable version of your schematic."
soon to be declared IP violators and terrorist tools of-course by the closest to you government.
I thought these were on the side bar?
Why would you want a service that takes the crap out of your browser (it is slow) for something that you can do so easily with a common "export" function?
What is wrong with a png image? Or what about a pdf file? At least those would be easy to print.
I guess I miss to see the purpose of that web2.0 thingy and prefer plain old formats.
I do hardware and firmware work and have lately been doing some eagle board level layout.
a lot of people don't use just one pkg. eagle is not bad for pcb layout but some friends I work with use another pkg to draw the schematic. your system would probably not handle this kind of split development.
the javascript - well - not a big fan of it, to be honest. more and more, JS gets caught in adblock/noscript filters and its too much work to unblock you. just being candid about J. just don't like it. its usually overly complex, a support headache and not at all friendly to static style postings.
people want to download the eagle files (or other) and use them directly. this works ok enough; I'm not sure I see value in a 'pan around' read only kind of web extension. to do anything real, you HAVE to load the file (source) into the editor and use the actual program.
I also want to be able to click on an image and save-as easily. JS code just fights that.
sorry, but I can't get behind a JS solution when its not at all needed. its just getting in the way and I see no need to have to fight with websites just to do circuit and board level collab.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
In true YouTube fashion, I just can't wait to read the witty comments of 10 years olds on why my choice of microprocessors is worse than theirs and that's why I fail at live.
Why do you hate America so much?
More on topic, for hobby level stuff why is PDF so hard for sharing? Now, understand I don't do EE. When I do, it usually involves a pencil and graph paper, and some really ugly wirewrapped stuff that's probably going to end up on the wrong end of something exploding or accelerating from zero to near the speed of sound (or visa versa) over very short time periods. There are plenty of free CAD programs, and plenty of free PDF printers.
*call off the DHS, I'm a high power rocketeer, not a terrorist or a redneck
I know a schematic has to be out there, and I don't want to make one myself. Where do I go? Now I'll check Circuit Bee before wasting time searching for one on google or making one myself.
OrCAD has about 60% of the schematics entry market in the professional world, according to friends who work at Altium, so it'd be awfully nice to add OrCAD to this. Likewise, I use gschem (which I believe can interact with KiCAD) so what I'd love to see is a way for this to be turned into a schematic exchange site.
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
It's a hosted service, not just a file format. You have to sign up for their service, which comes with an overreaching EULA, one which includes both "circuitBee reserves the right, at its sole discretion, to modify or replace any part of this Agreement" and "Optional premium paid services such as extra storage or additional editing features are available on the Website." So more features may become pay services over time.
All it lets you do is look at the schematic. Looking at the examples, there doesn't seem to be any way to extract a netlist, board layout, or a bill of materials. You can't even get the original file that was uploaded. So it doesn't help you make the thing. (But you can "share it on Facebook" or "send it in a tweet".) The system seems to reflect a complete misunderstanding of what schematics are used for. "Order all the parts from Digi-Key" or "design and order PC board" features would make sense. "Share on Myspace", which they actually have, indicates complete cluelessness.
What would be more useful would be a Javascript viewer for some standard netlist formats. Then you could take your existing Eagle file, or whatever, and make it easier to view.
Once they add some more features like the download of the original files and stuff this could be a great tool for DIY electronics bloggers.
In the meantime, if I weren't such a terrible coder, I'd make a Wordpress plugin that: uploads your Eagle files to your site, creates a Circuitbee embeddable, and places the embeddable and download links right there in your post. (Or something like that.)
Friend: "The NIC is misconfigured..." Me: "No prob, I'll just telnet in and fix it." *Silence*
The description reminded me of Upverter, which is a web-based circuit design tool that lets you collaborate and share schematics. CircuitBee's less interesting as it's display-only, but has its place.
You can't print the schematics, you can't download the schematics.
You will be at the mercy of the service.
Furthermore the service may prevent you from seeing something. They have the control.
It's very bad to restrict your stuff to this service. They'll just hold your data captive and will be in control of it.
This started with a good idea (share schematics), but ended up being an evil data sink with you providing them with free work. Allow print/export and it's OK.
I can go for uploading your "stupid" video to youtube and making an ass of your self, because, at least you were not trying, you were just caught in a bad moment. If I am going to upload a schematic to some website, it is going to be something that I have thought about, and the thought of beeing flamed in the same way as in here is enough to keep me from posting anything.
Hi all,
Wow, quite a lot of discussion here. So many things to say.
Just to clarify one thing, this is an Alpha release. We're really early days, and I'm the only coder on the project thus far.
This project is really aimed at hobbyists right now, professional level tools aren't really in the hands of people learning electronics or playing around with it during their spare time. CircuitBee is really aiming to make it easier to actually discuss and iterate circuit designs so all the makers and hobbyists out there can effectively teach each other.
We're planning to add hot linking to components and specific points within the design from within our comment stream, so you can write about something and actually show people what part of the circuit you are discussing (rather than having to tab around looking at a giant PDFs or JPEGs to find the component that was mentioned). We're also hoping to implement annotation features, version history of schematics and perhaps project forking and comparison. We will of course be offering download of original source files as well.
For those of you mentioning the other schematic tools out there, such as OrCAD, gschem, Altium and all the other pro tools. We would love to support them, just as soon as we can find specifications for the file formats, or have the time and money to buy them and work with their scripting languages. We don't aim to replace the tools you work with, just make it easier for you to share and discuss your work with anyone - no matter the tools they work with.
I hope that answers some questions for people. As the comment subject says though, Ask Me Anything.
Shameless self promotion here, but since my project exists for some of the same reasons and because it's also in a javascript, I feel it's considered relevant to this article.
It's an an attempt at a schematic editor and simulator for Minecraft's redstone circuitry, written in javascript: http://mordritch.com/mc_rss/#1166
The goal was to make it easy for people to share their ideas or solutions to problems easily on forums, as one can just link directly to schematics. It supports uploading and downloading schematics in a standard format which many existing tools can import into the game's save file.
The reason for doing it in javascript was that people with a few spare minutes, even at places like their work, could look at and play with the schematics, without needing to download the file and open it separately in some program which they may not even have installed. It "just works" on any browser which has support for the canvas HTML element. Although it's not very friendly to them yet as I have made no attempts to optimise it yet, it actually already works to an extent on iOS's Safari and reportedly on Android devices as well.
What I found interesting about the project in the article is that they made it embeddable, something I have already considered for my own simulator. One merely includes a javascript file reference on their forum's HTML, and users on that forum could embed schematics which could be fiddled around with right there in the forum post, in much the same way Youtube videos can be viewed right there in a forum post.
My personal little amateur project is immensely simple by comparison and needs a lot more work, but interesting to see other people have similar ideas.
Thingiverse does it MUCH better