The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast

Welcome, Natasha Baker, Founder and CEO of SnapEDA!

• Natasha has an EE background, she got her start working on tools at National Instruments
• She was reading IPC-7351 specs early on. What’s in there?
• All about how to create footprints, with different density levels, depending on the complexity of your board
  • Most
  • Nominal
  • Neast
• A new version is coming out soon, check IPC.org for more info
• With corporate sponsorship, anyone can participate (and Natasha recommends it!)
• Interesting discussion around using an X shaped pad under a QFP
• Later, Natasha got interested in the marketing side of business.
• She found that she was designing board and footprints taking a ton of time
• Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
  • Gumption
  • Craftsmanship
• When Natasha started, she was coding it herself. She taught herself using a Django tutorial meant for a website that organizes books. It still has some form on the current site.
• A site like SnapEDA is difficulat because it’s starting from no content. They had free “requests” to figure out what people wanted early on. They had some user generated models at the beginning, but they were not preferred.
• Natasha estimates there are nearly 1 billion parts in the ecosystem, in part because of the number of connector companies permutations.
• Semiconductor acquisitions has messed with a lot of part number data.
• Natasha took SnapEDA through the yCombinator program, focusing on it full time. We have had two shows in the past about YC
  • Luke Iseman, former head of hardware at YC
  • The Upverter team, who also went through YC
• YC has continued funding hardware companies since then, even though SaaS have been more popular
• Eric Migicovski, founder of Pebble, is now running hardware at YC
• During interviews with engineers, trust was the biggest/most common thing brought up
• SnapEDA has a neutral meta format, which means each component goes through a PCB exporter to match your specific CAD tool.
• Chris didn’t realize there is a batch export for KiCad. This will be less necessary for the upcoming v6 version. There is also a KiCad plugin.
• Natasha hopes in the future they can offer additional engineering content
  • Simulation models
  • IBIS
  • Subcircuits
• Microdecisions
• Working with old school chip companies
• Component registrations
• Free samples
• Analytics/Insights
• Lizard brain vs logical brain
• 40% browse parts directly through site. Others arrive via external search engines. There are tools built directly into ExpressPCB and Proteus. SnapEDA created external plugins for Altium and KiCad.
• InstaBuild allows engineers to pull pin tables out of datasheet PDFs. The resulting symbol is only available to the user who created it (for now, at least)
• Popularity of platforms using SnapEDA (in order)
  1. Altium
  2. EAGLE
  3. Orcad/KiCad/Allegro (tied for 3rd)
• Launching some cool things in the next month or so
• SnapEDA has published about popular components via EETimes in the past.
• Feedback welcome! You can reach them via the SnapEDA chat bubble (on the site), via email at support@snapeda.com, or via the “report issues” dialog on each part page