Eagle Parts Online Database

[jmbldwn]

Hi. I made a website recently that I think is interesting to almost anyone who builds schematics and boards using Eagle or KiCad.

I find the process of creating my own board footprints therapeutic, though often tedious. It always bugged me that I was spending a bunch of time doing something that inevitably someone else has already done.

In fact, a lot of people put their projects on the internet, in forums like this or on Github. Finding the parts in these places isn't easy; the file names aren't usually what you're looking for and G doesn't index the contents of xml files, so you have to be crafty.

Or, you can brute-force it, which is what I did.

So I made a crawler that combs the Internet for Eagle files, .lbr, .sch, and .brd. When it finds one it parses it and extracts all of the devices it finds inside into individual libraries files and puts them into a searchable index. The site lets you search for parts and displays a rendering of the schematic symbol and board footprint so you can verify it's the one you want. From there you can download the individual device file and pull it into Eagle (or KiCad, though I haven't tried KiCad myself) and enhance/improve it to your liking.

The URL is: http://schematicpal.com

I would love feedback from anyone who uses it. There's a link on the site to email me. I have a few ideas of improvements I can make but I would love to hear more. The whole idea of this effort is to make making boards easier.

-Jim

[jw40]

Huh. This is kinda neat. Granted I haven't played with it much, but I've got to say I'm interested in what you're doing on the server-side with the search functionality.

[jmbldwn]

It's a custom web app, written in Scala, using the Play! framework. I use a MongoDB database, and elastic search for indexing the data.

I'm not yet happy with the search piece. Sometimes it's harder to find something than it should be. Still learning how to wrangle elasticsearch. I promise it'll get better over time.

-Jim