usamaabid

Definitely, we are leaning towards gerber support with gerber generator, sharing and viewing in web.

With regards to HLS like language, our next step over the year will be creating a universal and open format parser to translate designs back and forth between multiple formats and eventually getting it editable using a language, modular visual editor or a complete circuit editor in the cloud.

Have looked into SkiDL definitely a great tool, will explore more and would love to hear your thoughts more on this as to how we should approach this further.

Thank you for trying out and sharing your feedback. Your kind words and appreciation means a lot.

a) This makes sense, definitely a hover/show file name button should be there to facilitate with the complete name. I have added this to our improvement list and we will soon be rolling out an update on this.

b) We primarily targeted the parsing of ECAD formats, and their repacking. We have gerbers support planned for next quarter so you will soon be seeing a gerber generator (from source files) and a gerber viewer within inventhub.

c) This is a great idea, will definitely prioritize this as it could help someone understand platform with a fully populated project.

Sure, you can email me at usama@inventhub.io

Hi Bob, Thank you! Do checkout and share your feedback.

Thanks for looking into it and sharing your notes. I am glad you see the value and understand its need.

Definitely, the recurring revenue is the starting point, we are in process of integrating with supply chain (basic integration is already rolled out — the minimum you suggested)

We are working towards the maximum with a two way model giving pcb manufacturers to create a tool for estimation and order creation, while giving users a one click interface to get estimates and order parts/boards.

It will be for both public facing projects and private projects, to purchase the boards + parts.

Thank you! we love your product too and have been following along. We definitely are building rule checker with our feature custom rule checking and DRC checker on two levels.

The first level is to be implemented on every design update upload, to check DRC, ERC and custom rules defined by the company in the form of a script.

Second is to have a runtime checker like CI to run rule checks on production/pre-production builds (including DRC, ERC and again custom rules/industry standard compliances etc.)

We are moving forward with the goal of having an open parser, a universalized parsing language for all formats to be generalized in and build utilities on top. Thinking beyond just ECAD leading into, EDA and eventually MCAD.

We envision Inventhub to eventually become a design data dashboard, letting you pull say simulation data, production QA data, gaining more insights beyond just visualization with cross-platform integration and open API for more utilities.

Thank you!

Definitely, Altium is a very capable tool for electronics design. I totally agree the features like commenting, BOMs, component library is in Altium 365.

With regards to differentiator, first being we support same tools and utilities for all formats (Eagle, Altium, KiCAD, PADS, OrCAD and Allegro). The Altium 365 is tied to just their ecosystem is specific to just managing single file PCB projects. Whereas, with inventhub you have flexibility to manage data however you want, it let you go beyond storing designs or components or visualizing in the web (e.g. adding specs documentation, instruction manuals in the project, or attaching more data to components like your internal stock for reference)

- Inventhub let you have consistency in the process of development and gives you a single space to manage all kind of data.

- Secondly, its all in the cloud, today it gives you single source to maintain data (for all ECADS). With inter-portability between formats we take reusability of trusted designs and assets a step ahead.

- With our version control the collaboration is effective and it coupled with the the utilizes let's you focus on just the design and development vs. figuring out how to configure.

Do let me know if this answers your question and give you the understanding of differentiating factor. I would be happy to jump on a call to walk you through the platform with use-case as well.

Hi, Thank you for reviewing and giving such valuable feedback. I am glad you feel this way about the space.

With regards to IP, we definitely ran into this concern couple of times. To address this we are in the process of getting SOC 2 Security Audit and post its report on the platform. Definitely agree on the identity part, will definitely have it up soon. We have the on-premise version in our roadmap for Q2 this year.

This is an interesting insight about iterative fabrication. We are thinking along these lines, for manufacturer space e.g. generating and translating the BOM and design files fabricator anticipated formats within Inventhub from source files. - Adding manufacturers directly into the partner space for placing order could be an added revenue source. We can probably come up with a utility that facilities manufacturers with their work and have them connect with our user-base. (Like cost estimation utility from source files etc). Agreed on the part of generating revenue from connecting customers and manufacturers within the platform.

- We did build a basic supply chain integration in the BOM to help user find parts from multiple component dealers, compare prices and choose the best one. Will definitely look into the rare stock supply.

- I agree, we did consider building an add-on to github or gitlab, but overtime we have ran into some engineering problems that made us realize it has to be done ground up. Also, the future vision we have does make more sense for us to host data on our platform. We did engineer the architecture in a way to port the utilizes to any git under-base to keep this acquisition door open. This is not a priority though with where we see ourselves headed though.

Thank you so much again for sharing your feedback.It is indeed really helpful.

Hello,

I am Usama, Founder & CEO of inventhub.io, a platform for securely managing and collaborating on electronics design data, is excited to announce a set of tools which provide an improved way for hardware companies to manage their PCB design projects and allow early collaboration on the data of those projects.

Its been a year since I have posted an early version of Inventhub here on HackerNews (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22476514) with just a visual version control and couple of ideas. Over the year, we were able to work with hardware developers and electronics product teams to get feedback, improve product and add new features.

We just recently launched a completely revamped product with a new website. Inventhub started as a git based version control with utilities to visualize ecad design and changes (diffs) in the web.

In our new release we introduced a complete electronics product design data management and collaboration to enable true collaboration on PCB design projects. Tools and their benefits include:

* Visualization and Discussions on PCB Documents: The design view of a pcb document on the platform helps in bringing a shared understanding where everyone has access to view, discuss and understand the document and its data. Inventhub supports visualization on formats such as Altium Designer, EagleCad, KiCad (more coming soon)

* Git based version control and tools: Having one database is a single source of truth which allows everyone to work from the same single database that is updated with every change from everyone who has access to it. All data is accessible in a centralized and secure cloud space. The information is visible to everyone instantly with its history.

* Access controls and sharing engineering data: Inventhub wants to help make it easy for the reusability of documents with multiple stakeholders. Organization access controls on the platform enable team based collaboration and sharing the latest version of the document and having access controls on top of it helps in early communication.

* Release management and Manufacturer Space: Easily Create, Manage and share a release by marking a point in history of a version controlled project. A manufacturer space is provided in addition for accessibility of project and design data. This helps to communicate production details easily to external stakeholders.

* Bill of Materials: Smart BOM brings a design-to-cost development approach. Create, edit and keep your bill of materials updated with every change in your project. With smart supply chain integration, find prices, generate cost estimates, get parts availability all in one place. This synchronized integration lets your team use the right parts and enable your procurement team to have up-to-date information at every stage.

* Components Library Manager: Inventhub wants to make it easy to manage components libraries and their life-cycle in centralized cloud storage. This gives teams and organizations easy access to trusted reusable assets and adding supply chain integration on top gives designers and procurement teams to see real-time/up-to-date component life-cycle data, pricing and availability.

I would really appreciate if you guys can look at the new website along with new product features and provide us with your feedback. We are keen to hear what do you guys think about the product now?

Also, we will definitely commit to what I said we believe as company in our terms of service. As I have said we are in process to update them with more clarity.

Thanks Animats. Being part of the industry I understand the importance of these policies and how much it can hurt a developer. We are working hard to improve the terms and bring more clarity in them. I would love to chat with you to get your suggestions/feedback.

Currently we are closely following GitHub's terms(adapted under CC license).

"We need the legal right to do things like host Your Content, publish it, and share it. You grant us and our legal successors the right to store, parse, and display Your Content, and make incidental copies as necessary to render the Website and provide the Service. This includes the right to do things like copy it to our database and make backups; show it to you and other users; parse it into a search index or otherwise analyze it on our servers; share it with other users; and perform it, in case Your Content is something like music or video."[0]

[0]https://help.github.com/en/github/site-policy/github-terms-o...

We have a preset names on the annotation/designs or other feature it is just a coincidence that your name is in the preset.

Yes, it's great to see others doing the same work. The more the merrier, it's a huge industry and we need more hands to solve this problem.

That's the magical part! We implement visual diff on the native design itself to make sure you get the most accurate diffs on your projects.

Thank you for highlighting this. We are working to improve the language of the terms to make sure we help protect the the designs/trade secrets.

Just to put it out as a company this is how we see the obligation to protect trade secrets.

For public projects: We are giving user leverage to share at their own discretion along with a license made by them, industry standards or the new licenses we are coming up with.

For private projects: No designs will be listed publicly, shared with anyone, they exist in complete privacy to the user who created the repository. We do not and will not list them, rank them, read them or share them in any way.

To summarize if a user makes the project public, that means user is doing that on his own will and we will fulfill the obligation by enabling them with proper licensing tools + providing better licenses which InventHub is working on. For private projects everything will be safe and secret with the project owner and doesn't need protection more than platform infrastructure security which we take very seriously considering a lot of IP's will be hosted on our platform.

The project would have been great. Because this one of the biggest struggle initially.

Agreed and yes its good to state it more clearly.

I wasn’t able to find any best resources of ToS. The best option was adapting these ToS covered under CC licenses.

No problem :) Thank you for taking out time for looking at product and asking such questions.

Thanks for your kind wishes. We will make sure to provide you support and new features that you’ll switch to Inventhub.

Hi Kyle, Thanks for the appreciation. I would love to connect with you to talk more. Sending the PM.

I have forwarded it to the development team to be added asap.

Do you have any theories as to why more companies don't choose KiCAD or other open tool in lieu of Altium? It seems to me there is a lot KiCAD can do, and there's very little Altium does that KiCAD does not. Do you choose to support KiCAD with the thought that the market will eventually move to free tools like that?

I have two things to say about this;

First to answer your question precisely, that wasn't my theory. We supported KiCAD because it is most popular in community. We figured this based on user surveys and feedbacks while being in private beta. Though KiCAD is my personal favorite tool for ECAD designs as it gives me freedom to code tools for myself with its programmable utilities (that wasn't the criteria for choice). They two main goals of InventHub are to empower open-hardware community and help small startups build hardware products fast so we see more innovative hardware products coming out everyday.

Yes I agree the money is at Altium as all big companies use it and we are definitely working on to add support for Altium because that will help us sustain so we can empower the open-hardware community.

Second thing: My personal theory is that world is a better place when we work together. I truly believe in community and DIY GEEKS or InventHub both were started on the idea to build and empower the community. I have a hope that open source will be commercially viable soon and will get bigger than enterprises(Just the things I keep on thinking about: how will we moderate the infrastructure for security) - Well I can keep on talking about this, but I guess its a conversation for another thread.

Thank you :) Do try the product and share your feedback or any feature request you have.

I agree with what John said and I have responded to his comment. These kind of terms should definitely be highlighted. I apologize that we adapted this term in our User Agreement and it was a mistake. I will make sure we fix it. I would also like to assure that we will be careful in future regarding these kind of terms so we fulfill the mission of empowering open-hardware truly.

Best, Usama - Founder of InventHub

Hi John, I totally agree and we are inline with the mission of protecting open source projects and helping design owners maintain copyright ownership. We are even exploring avenues to work with industry leaders and lawyers to develop new open source licenses for open hardware to help protect the projects completely.

I am sorry for this language in our terms and policies, which shouldn't have been there in first place. We adapted the terms of Heroku's Terms of Service which are maintained under CC license, as engineers we were more focused on product features initially. I will get it fixed and make sure they designs stay the property of the owners and owners maintain copyright ownership, and they have explicit discretion of licensing it the way they want.

Have you tried InventHub though?

This is a great space to be working on - I've wanted tools like this as a HW engineer for a long time. Enabling remote work as an EE seems like a powerful advantage to grant to EE contractors

Definitely its has been a huge need and as an EE contractors it makes things much easier to share and handover work to your clients. Documentation gets much easier for others who join the project or extend it later on.

nother business I've seen pop up in this space who appears to compete with you is Allspice - they're my neighbors here in Massachusetts. What do you do that they don't?

They have done some great work and its interesting to see other people trying to solve this problem too. I really liked their simple approach.

If we make the comparison; They just offer diffing on Altium schematic file and they are download only.

Whereas, we are cloud based VCS you can view your projects and view changes on the go. But on top of that we offer visual annotation, documentation tools. Not just that we are building a part database and many other features to make it an experience for an HW engineers. So, you focus more on your designs/projects with efficient process in place and tools that take care of repetitive and time consuming stuff.

Also we have support for EagleCAD, KiCAD, Altium (schematic and layout) support is under development and will be soon rolled out.

I hope this answers your question.

I am glad you liked it. Do try and share your feedback.

Yes we totally missed this aspect while focusing on to develop fast experience with conversion of designs and rendering.

My pleasure :) Great I will try it with GitHub. No worries I can understand.

It's interesting to think about how to make BOM parsing a more universal solution. Some things I do for Kitspace definitely don't scale. Embedding a lot of header aliases into npm-1-click-bom is one of them.

May be we will be able to contribute back with some scalable strategies once we start utilizing it.

Anyway, sorry to make this so much about me and my work. Great to see new platforms in this space. I am definitely going to follow along, try it out some more and see where it goes even if we don't manage to work together, but let's try and keep in touch.

Oh no worries I loved your work and I am glad you shared it we would have been reinventing the same thing when something sophisticated already existed out there.

It would be really great if you can use the product and keep sharing the feedback we are in it for long and we will make sure to give it the shape hardware industry needs.

Definitely I will stay in touch even if we don't work together. I am happy that I made a new friend here on HN today :)

One of the open source python project helped us in understanding the format for schematic from there onwards we explored the layout files. Hopefully we will have something functional soon. In long term I see partnering up with Altium, will be a better way to go about it because its not sustainable for us to keep on reverse engineering every new update in their design formats.

That’s exactly why we have built InventHub please do give me your feedback :)