If you go to the Pricing tab you'll see links to buy the parts through popular North American and European distributors. This data is supplied via Octopart.
We list parts from Premier Farnell which is in the UK and we'd like to get part data RS Components. Who else would you like to see? If you let distributors know that you'd like to see them on Octopart when you make purchases, that would help greatly.
I agree and disagree. Octopart is very revealing if you do low volume manufacturing had have been caught in the 'digikey convenience turbine'. Like any search engine, it's useless if you don't have the part. But there are a lot of core parts to a generic circuit board listed, so I end up using it quite a lot.
There's the whole section at the top about availability and average price, but no link to go buy it? In addition to the InstaPart revenue, are you also going to make money with affiliate sales to parts sites (a la Octopart)?
As a Computer Engineering student, Octopart is defiantly one of nicest sites for buying parts or just looking for data sheets. I actually wasn't aware it was a YC company, but it makes sense!
Octopart is the YC website I use the most. In addition to current revenues, I'd suggest there's an opportunity to build a marketplace for parts too. I'm often looking for parts online to buy that simply are not available or require custom manufacturing. An alternative to eBay and other consumer marketplaces for parts, components etc. Generally anything B2B/B2B2C is under-served in comparison to B2C.
I wish there was Octopart UK. Was trying to track down some nice Hall effect sensors to measure wheel speed on a robot I'm working on and bouncing around from vendor to vendor is a mess.
I actually use Octopart as a product catalogue and then find the things it finds in the UK.
I'm not sure I understand - Octopart does not sell any parts. Digi-Key's core function is to sell parts. They do in fact have a warehouse of parts and a team of salespeople, whereas we are three guys working out of cafes. Our interests certainly overlap to a high degree in that we both want accurate part information. But Digi-Key is in the information business in the same way that Walmart is in the information business (a company that also re-sells most of its inventory from manufacturers in its supply chain).
It's nice, but it doesn't tell me all that much I can't get from other sources like Octopart
What does "parts popularity" mean, anyway? You probably don't have sales volume. Number of distributors? Part popularity is actually useful; you want to design using popular parts when possible, to avoid supply problems. Seeed Studio is big on that; that's why they have a recommended parts list of parts they can easily get in Shenzhen.
I disagree. I use Octopart regularly. If something's hard to find, at least Octopart tells me where it's NOT at. One query, and I know 1/2 a dozen of the usual suspects that I don't need to bother searching. That's a big win for me. Now that they have Digikey, that's also a big win.
I have no idea where you're finding parts at, that they don't have in their database, besides the sleezy feeling parts brokers that tell you they have everything, even if they don't, so you'll contact them and they can try to locate the part for you at $5.00 per IC for a $0.35 part. I have no interest in these people. If I have to resort to them, than I won't be able to find production quantities anyway.
datasheets and even pricelists seemed to be the locus of some very unseemly rent-seeking activity
I once made the mistake of paying $10 to subscribe to a datasheet web site because they seemed to have the full tech specs (i.e. register layouts) of an IC I was reverse engineering (see http://myhd.sourceforge.net/). It turned out to be the same marketing materials I had downloaded from the chip vendor's web site.
Octopart is like the million-dollar part spec databases that electronics manufacturers buy just to have available in their design software, but for free.
As Sam says, one of the best parts of Octopart is that it has so many distributors, especially the ones you've never heard of. So when Digikey and Mouser are sold out of what you need, you can find it somewhere else.
I couldn't find any parts I searched for, like a common voltage regulator. Even searching parts already found on the octopart site (https://octopart.com/ft232rl-reel-ftdi-19172117), didn't come up in the demo.
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