They do have this, its called EasyEDA. In my experience its not as good as kicad and definitely not as good as the 'professional' tools like cadence and altium. Our tool does basically do that though! We have a big library of kicad components that can be used in your designs as well as an import just about any JLC component just using its JLCPN. We love their service, would love to see that model proliferated to other companies also, so hard to beat having parts available and in stock.

I learned kicad fairly quickly. I've tried several times to learn blender and failed. Then again I'm bad at art.

Kicad is not that difficult to use. Sourcing parts can be though.

They do! EasyEDA, and have used it to make custom keyboard PCBs. It's pretty handy and I found the learning curve to be much easier than KiCAD, etc.

this resonates. i will share that i'm trying out and having luck with flux.ai. it's not perfect, but for a small hobby project and someone with little experience and not getting far quickly in kicad, it works. i have a pcb in-hand from jlcpcb right now and it works. it also introduces some of the shared features discussed above. (i don't work for them, just looking for something that would let me do a fairly fast PoC)

Oh now this one is interesting, I've given it a short try and the UX is just on another level compared to the usual, I might actually be able to get something done with it. This is what EasyEDA should've been, not the terrible KiCad web clone that it is.

For us hobbyists there's no point in investing years learning something proper like Altium because we won't ever be shipping to production or doing stupidly complex multilayer boards. We need the Tinkercad for PCBs, not Fusion360. Something that can be crude and oversimplified, but quick to use and also simple enough that even middle schoolers can learn it.

i've even figured out how to create a component that didn't exist in their library - a lot of the manufacturers/related appear to provide the symbol, footprint and 3d files to recreate it on flux. this is one for example - https://www.flux.ai/centplaids0u/oki-78sr-51p5-w36-c-1480 - a 12v to 5v voltage regulator. got files from here: https://www.snapeda.com/parts/OKI-78SR-5/1.5-W36-C/Murata%20.... Got it built into the board and it works! holy heck.

hope it works for you!

They did and there's even tools to import their component library into Altium or Eagle.

> Yeah, trying to learn KiCad is worse than learning Blender.

I dunno. I've used others, and KiCad was no harder to start with than the others (Horizon, LibrePCB, Lepton/gEDA, some others I forgot).

I asked for recommendations a week ago on HN for EDA products, and tried them all.

You know which one I eventually settled on? The one with the most components (symbols + footprints).

Turns out, features are nice (rules checker, etc) but not having to f*&^ing create my own symbols for a mass-produced part, then design the footprint for the same part is a huge timesaver.[1]

For many of us non-professionals designing a board, the UI just isn't as big of an issue as having to create our own components.

[1] At any reasonable hourly rate, having to create a library of just 1 component costs more than whatever you think you'll save with a slicker UI.

This. By FAR the most annoying thing of creating a simple PCB is dealing with symbols and footprints. Why the hell is this is not a solved problem.

Because every CAD, which has traditionally been dominated by commercial solutions invents their own file format for lockin.

On top of that semiconductor vendors don't want to hire people to draw symbols in every possible cad solution.

So you instead have them release symbols in some preferred tool, maybe they also outsource to third party services like UltraLibrarian. There problem with the third party services is they do the laziest conversions possible between format using scripting and often do a horrible job.

> Because every CAD, which has traditionally been dominated by commercial solutions invents their own file format for lockin.

This doesn't really explain why creators of new CAD programs (Horizon and LibrePCB are new) invent new data formats.

We've seen time and time again, in every digital domain ever invented, that the most important thing is the dataset.

It doesn't really matter how nice the library manager is if what it manages has limited availability - and no, asking for a community to pitch in and help with the duplicated work is not a solution.

The solution is to pick the largest library and use its format.

In our tool, just give it a part number and it will find and download the footprint and create an ato file for the component.

We currently support components on JLC, but eventually plan to build out a pretty substantial library. We will also capture a good fraction of information that you would currently need to go to the datasheet for.

I wanted to give your tool a good look before I responded, hence why I am responding so late.

Anyway, my 2c worth:

1.

> In our tool, just give it a part number and it will find and download the footprint and create an ato file for the component.

I don't think this is scalable (although, for my use, probably sufficient). There are just too many parts that are in existence, and the rate of new part creation is probably higher per day than your staff and/or community can handle.

It's fixable if you have plugins for each EDA tool's format (KiCad, Eagle, etc).

2. I'm very surprised at the language used - it's very unlike what is normally used (s-expressions) in EDA. Lisp-like languages tend to be highly used in CAD applications, so it would clear a lot up if you were to explain what the advantages ato are over a minimal Lisp-like language.

3. The dependency list (in terms of knowledge required) is a dealbreaker for me[1]. I need to know how to manage Python environments, the ato language and YAML?

Since all of the constructs in all of those languages are a subset of (or can be represented by) s-expressions, perhaps it would have been best if you switched to s-expressions only. Then a) there's only one language to learn, b) that language is already syntax-highlighted and c) it's flexible enough for any future features you want to add in (rules definition, rules-checkers, etc).

From what I can see here and now, the ato language would have to see significant changes if it needs to be used for some serious stuff.

Sorry for the negativity, but I wish you all the luck nevertheless.

[1] I looked for a download link, couldn't find one, read a few of the installation instructions, then gave up.

For sure, the way I see the component library is ability to capture progress. In the current paradigm how many times have schematics, symbols and footprints been drawn up for common ICs/circuits? I would expect 100s or in some cases many thousands of times. Our hope is by providing an open source and shareable format we can reduce this. If people really hate code and want to write a tool to convert to altium/kicad/cadence format, go for it! At the same time, I think the way we share component data is pretty dated, PDF datasheets do not adequately capture component information in a way that can be apples to apples compared in any automated fashion, best we have is something like a digikey search. In the future I would like to be able to have much more sophisticated requirements that automated search tools can use to help me find the best components for my use.

Not personally a fan of the readability of lisp, but that is just a personal preference. Our assumption is that python is going to be the most familiar language to our users and following a python like syntax will make picking it up easy. Our language is definately still quite immature and we are still figuring out exactly what it should look like.

There is definitely a little bit of a learning curve at the moment, we do have some getting started videos that walk you through the whole process. If there is anything missing or confusing, please point it out! We do want to make it as approachable as possible. It will only get better from here, I promise!

On the downloading, currently we have the package on pypi, which does make it pretty easy to install from a command line, but I can appreciate that will be new to alot of people. In the future we might do an executable download version.

We have a getting started video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7aeZLlA_VYA

We are very active on discord also if you get stuck or have any questions/feedback, hope to see you there! https://discord.gg/PBq4pS4K3p

For what it's worth I'm very happy you didn't go with lisp. I abhor s-expressions and think it shouldn't be used for anything except machine reading.