Some background - We think that hackers with hardware experience are the best people to build engineering design tools. Unfortunately, it's quite difficult to get startup capital for design tools so there hasn't been much innovation in the space. The end result is that only large well funded companies have had the resources to build design tools. We hope that by sharing revenue generated by the API, we can democratize design software by enabling hackers of all stripes to build new tools.
We'd love to step aside to let developers build on top of the API. I'd even like to see someone revamp the Octopart UI! Here are some other ideas:
- a really good project manager (with collaborative features and publishing tools)
- browser plugins/toolbars
- ajax circuit simulator
- an AdSense-type widget to help engineering forums monetize their sites
Finally, I think that each node in our category map needs a specialized UI. Since we have 1000's of categories there's endless room for improvement there. Top of the list are:
- power supply picker
- capacitor picker
- opamp picker
A power supply designer would be super-useful. I've designed at least a dozen onto PCBs in the last several years, all pretty similar to a few reference designs. It's a constant pain in the butt to keep up with obsoleted capacitors. I'd love to see a fully general-purpose power supply designer, where I enter a voltage & power and it spits out a working schematic complete with intelligently selected minimum-cost part numbers.
Several of the big voltage-regulator manufacturers (National, Linear, ST come to mind) have software along these lines already, some of which is fairly good. A unified and less cumbersome application would be great, especially if it could pick out passives (caps, as you suggest, but also inductors and freewheel diodes for switchers). National's Webench already does this, but its library of passives is very limited compared to Octopart and many of the parts it suggests are either expensive or hard to find in low quantities.
TI and Linear seem to be pushing their power supply modules lately. They are pretty cool for projects where you don't care too much about mass production cost and space.
