bbourn

Can you elaborate on what you mean by “it’s almost assumed..”? I’m actively working on datasheet parsing at scale at Zenode.ai, and I haven’t read anything specifically about this…

This is basically just a vent about all the sh!t i've dealt with over the years as a EE

Thank you! Yeah, missing pricing and availability is a tough one, but I'm really hoping we'll be able to get it from the distributors in return to funneling better traffic towards their sites...

We've actually heard this from a few industries, there's definitely a lot of different vertical AI opportunities here! Right now we're very focused on just doing electronic components, but maybe someday!

Yeah, this was actually a nightmare . We had to create "canonicals", which ended up being a mix of regex, machine learning and good old manual human labor. Fortunately, we could usually rely on the datasheet as the 'source of truth', but even that approach failed when faced with the overwhelming amount of part data we were shifting through.

That's the hope, but thus far we've been heads down building, and haven't had much time to chat with those folks.

From all of our customer interviews, almost everyone used Digikey and the occasional manufacturer website to find parts.

Because of that, we're seeing many people put the parameters they're looking for directly into the search. After a few searches, it starts to be clear that you can add more information directly into the search, so queries get a little more complex.

We're getting ready to add features to the AI to help you (interactively) navigate the range of available parts to narrow down your choices and understand what's available when you don't know where to look or what parameters to use. You should be able to ask 'I need to convert a parallel RGB display bus into MIPI' and the AI will show you different families of parts that could do that.

ChatGPT has definitely spoiled us all, but we're working to improve performance every day. Thus far we've usually prioritized accuracy over speed since there isn't much room for error in this industry, but hopefully our current response time is still faster than reading everything yourself. The sources not linking is a bug, should have it fixed today/tomorrow!

Well, that's super annoying, we definitely don't want that, thanks for finding and letting us know! We'll have it fixed shortly.

Digikey's parametrics were the best in industry prior to ours, but they were still really painful to use because of the strings. But to even get to the parametrics, you first have to know in advance the category and subcategory names of the part you're looking for. There are over 3000 different categories, so even once you're pretty good, you're always asking yourself "is what i'm looking for in the logic category or the amplifier category". With Zenode, all this is handled using natural language! And we did a huge overhaul on the parametrics, we turned the strings into structured values and built modern filters that are just waaay easier to use.

Octopart is a bit of a different beast from us. They're crushing the pricing and availability data, which is actually hard to get (a LOT of business development to get access to the realtime values from the distributors themselves). Plus they have a really massive catalog, definitely broader than ours, but they don't have the depth (i.e. the detailed spec and documentation data) that we do because we went to the manufacturer websites to obtain that.

We're learning a lot here, since this always happened AFTER we handed over the BOM. It certainly seems like a pain, particularly when a supplier ends up being a critical bottleneck (always late, overcharging, etc). The number one requested feature from these folks is a way to validate an alternate component, something they can use for themselves BEFORE passing it over to us design engineers for approval (heard some pretty spicy takes on doing this, apparently working with EE's isn't always sunshine and rainbows...)

Yeah, Moat's are tricky in the age of AI. We think there's always room for a standalone interface in this niche sector, given the sheer amount of data that needs to get presented (with no room for hallucinations). But beyond the data curation (which is actually quite hard) and the custom UI, there's also all the tuning data to optimize for the workflows that come next, like Alternates, schematic awareness, etc.

But yes, OpenAI continues to be the 800lb gorilla 'boogeyman' crushing startups with every new update. Our goal is to remain cockroaches until we find solid distribution!