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!
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.
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.
My favorite parts site is PartsGeek. Pretty easy to find what I want and every product has a picture so I can make sure it matches what I need. Never had a bad experience with them.
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.
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 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.
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.
Ahh, love this idea. Was going to use PriceMyPC.com / PriceAPC.com for it and have it affiliate the parts efficiently. I never worked past the hw compatibility issue. Great to see it working.
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