Octopart Blog - News and Updates

Summer Sale! Arena Solution's Supplier Item Lookup Limited Time Offer

Wed, 12 Jun 2013 00:00:00 UTC

Our friends at Arena Solutions are offering a limited time offer on the Supplier Item Lookup in Arena's BOMControl tool. Normally priced at $1,548 per year, this Octopart-powered add-on is now $299 for the first year, if you purchase by September 9, 2013.

Supplier Item Lookup displays real-time supplier information—including datasheets, cost, availability and compliance information—alongside the parts in a BOM. Check out this video to see how it works:

Arena has been a longtime supporter of Octopart and our effort to open up access to electronic part information. We're excited to tag along on their mission to bring PLM into the cloud!

API Update: Access Datasheets from the Octopart API

Mon, 03 Jun 2013 00:00:00 UTC

As part of our goal to make component data more open and accessible we’ve been working hard on adding new features to the API. Today I’m happy to report that you can access datasheets from the Octopart API!

http://octopart.com/api/docs/v3/overview#datasheets

Accessing datasheets is as simple as adding an include[] url argument to your requests:

$ curl -G http://octopart.com/api/v3/parts/match \
   -d queries='[{"mpn":"SN74S74N"}]' \
   -d apikey=EXAMPLE_KEY \
   -d pretty_print=true \
   -d include[]=datasheets

The API will then return a list of datasheets attached to each part when available. Each datasheet will also have a source indicating where we obtained the file. In many cases the source listed will be the manufacturer of the part or a distributor who is selling it.

Our hope is that by using the Octopart API to gather datasheets for your BOMs you can save a tremendous amount of time and money. Please send us an email to let us know what you think (api@octopart.com)!

Acquiring a Distributor

Tue, 28 May 2013 00:00:00 UTC

At the EDS conference a few weeks ago, I had the great fortune of meeting up with Bernard Gizzi, president of Electronic Connector Company (ECCO). ECCO is a franchised distributor based out of Chicago that Gizzi acquired last year.

I was intrigued when I learned about this, and wanted to know more about what it's like to acquire and take the helm of a distributor. I interviewed Gizzi after the conference and thought I'd share some of his insights with the users of Octopart.

Christopher Calvi (CC): Please describe your background and experience.

Bernard Gizzi (BG): I have been in the electronics distribution industry for 28 years. Over 19 years at Arrow Electronics in various sales and management roles, 5 years with Newark/Premier Farnell as a VP, and 4 years with Eclipse (my own business) before buying ECCO.

CC: Can you describe the process that led up to you acquiring ECCO? Had you always had it in mind to start/acquire a distributor?

BG: Ed Allen (partner at Eclipse/ECCO) and I had the vision to acquire a electronics distributor that would give us a platform for growth utilizing our skills and experience. ECCO came to us as an opportunity soon thereafter.

CC: Tell us more about ECCO and its history.

BG: ECCO was born out of a previous electronic connector distributor-Air Industries, started in 1963 by a Pilot who dabbled in aviation connectors. He sold it to Anixter in 1987, and it was spun out to Arris Corporation in 1993. Arris has since become a large “head-end” cable equipment company and sold ECCO in March of 2012 to us, as it could no longer focus on electronics distribution, so that is how we stepped in.

CC: Knowing what you know now, what is the advice you'd give to your past self before acquiring ECCO (or others in a similar position)?

BG: Buying or selling a company can be very complex, so give yourself plenty of time and energy, as it is not for the faint of heart and requires some extra patience with all the parties involved.

CC: What is your marketing strategy for ECCO?

BG: First, our value proposition is to… Simply be a stocking distributor and a “specialist in connector solutions”. In addition, we will use our experience & technical skills to add value to our stakeholders via solution selling, cost effective cross referencing, and marketing prowess.

CC: What's your outlook for electronic distribution and what's next for your company?

BG: Electronic distribution has been evolving steadily over the last 25 years, and outside of continued consolidation, there is opportunity in differentiation, personal attention, and partnerships. In the end, if you provide a valued product and service at the right price-you will succeed. That will be our focus at ECCO.

RepairDB, The Electronic Repair Reference App

Wed, 22 May 2013 00:00:00 UTC

Ron Rockwell, a CompTIA Certified and Authorized Warranty Repair Technician, has been repairing electronics professionally and for fun for over 15 years.

“Every time I had a hard repair job I found myself going through known failures in our repair database for related failure symptoms,” says Ron. “9 out of 10 times this way of troubleshooting helped my overall time to repair equipment. “

The “repair database” is a collection of solutions lovingly curated by Ron from a 25-year old video service / PC repair business he used to work for (and later became owner of), as well as contributions from other technicians globally.

“One day my wife and I got to brainstorming an idea to make this database an actual PC app, but we never pursued it much further until 10 years later when Apple came out with the iPhone. When I got my first iPhone I thought to myself this is it, how perfect can it get? My repair database app idea on a mobile device.”

That Ron had no programming knowledge was a challenge, but not a deterrent. After scouring the App Store for a well-designed electronics-related application, Ron found Electronic Toolbox by Marcus Roskosch, an independent iOS developer and winner of the prestigious Effective Mobile Marketing Award for his app for NXP Semiconductors.

Fast forward a year later and today RepairDB contains more than 100,000 repair solutions for everyday electronics like televisions, monitors, computers, and VCRs. It includes a rich library of service manuals, FCC IDs and customized troubleshooting wizards -- an ideal toolkit for repair technicians and DIY enthusiasts.

In addition to the repair database, the App contains a cross reference database with over 28,000 parts for components along with a component search engine that finds even the discrete hard to find parts – powered by Octopart.

“I needed a search engine that searched every possible electronic distributor. It had to be accurate, it had to have datasheets and it had to condense its findings from multiple companies into one page,” Ron recalls. “To be honest I am not sure who found Octopart first, me or Marcus. All I know is when I did my first component search on Octopart’s web site, I said there it is the perfect search engine.”

With over 2,000 copies of RepairDB sold all over the world, Ron says it’s his “dream come true“. Read more about RepairDB here.

How often do you update? - The Pareto Principle

Mon, 13 May 2013 00:00:00 UTC

Developing on a native mobile platform such as iOS or Android is very different from developing for the web. In addition to the standardized development environments necessary to develop code, there is also the issue of posting updates to an App Store, waiting for it to be approved (if the app store requires approval) and then waiting for users to apply updates. You can't push early and often like you can with web applications.

The difference in the update methodology possible on the Web vs. native mobile is actually a really important issue. Let's say that you want to roll out a release that uses a new backend infrastructure that you've developed that offers more features and costs less money to operate. How soon after the update can you start scaling back the old infrastructure and turn it off? Will it ever be possible? What about if you want to release an update that fixes bugs and crashes? How many users are going to bother to update instead of writing off your app as buggy? These are questions that we've been asking ourselves as we've improved our iOS application over the past few months.

Apple provides reporting on downloads. The information is admittedly very sparse -- they only have info on the number of new app downloads per day and the number of updates per day. Nevertheless, there is some information to be gleaned from these simple metrics.

Here's a chart showing the update distribution after a recent update we made and a curve fit of the Pareto distribution over it:

The chance of a user updating after N days seems to follow a power law distribution, this specific fit being a Pareto distribution. Power law distributions are good models for many common phenomena and statistics, such as the populations of cities, the frequencies of words in a book, song popularities, earth quake intensities, file sizes on a disk, etc. In our case, it seems like we get 90% of users updating after 10 days, an example of the 80-20 law at work:

So far, we only have a hypothesis that app updates follow a power law curve. The test of our hypothesis will be to see if the update curves look the same over upcoming updates (ie. our hypothesis being useful as a predictive measure). Stay tuned!

Analysis: Top Part Searches on Octopart

Mon, 06 May 2013 00:00:00 UTC

Looking at a typical month of searches on Octopart immediately shows us some parts are much more popular than others. In the plot below, you can see that the top 20 queries are requested nearly one thousand times more often than the next 90,000.

So what makes the parts in these searches so popular?

Parts like the pic10f200 micro controller (and more advanced controller architectures like Arduino) can be used with quad half-bridges like the SN754410 or L293NE for various robot-making fun. Grab a LM386 audio power amplifier and a speaker from your favorite discarded land-line phone in the basement, and your robot gains a voice. My theory: a singing robot army is being built.

Autodesk Partnership: Octopart's in the PLM 360 App Store

Thu, 18 Apr 2013 00:00:00 UTC

We are excited to offer the first application in the brand new Autodesk PLM 360 App Store!

PLM 360 is Autodesk’s cloud-based product lifecycle management solution. PLM 360 users can now access Octopart through the new App Store and get part information for over 20 million parts, right within the PLM 360 interface.

Read more about the PLM 360 App Store launch here, or check out this video about the App Store and the Octopart App:

The Octopart App for PLM 360 is built on top of the Octopart API. We had an awesome time working with Peter, Jared, Brian and the rest of the team at Autodesk on the integration. Autodesk's spirit of embracing new technology was an excellent fit with Octopart's mission to open up access to more information in electronic design and purchasing. We can't wait to work together on the next thing...

In the meantime -- if you're an Autodesk PLM 360 customer, we'd love to hear what you think!

Analysis: Pricing Hike Post-Merger in Two Cases

Wed, 17 Apr 2013 00:00:00 UTC

Last week, Vishay announced that it's acquiring MCB Industrie S.A, a manufacturer of specialty resistors. Acquisitions have been a key piece of Vishay's strategy, so we took a look at its track record to see the effect on market pricing of the target company's products. (We used Octopart's historical pricing data.)

Here's Huntington Electric's resistor product line, which Vishay acquired in September 2011:

The chart above shows average price changes from one month prior to the announcement to five months after, using the average price on the announcement date as the baseline. While this looks interesting, the small sample size (Octopart carries pricing data for fewer than 1,000 Huntington resistors) gave us some heartburn so we took a look at another recent acquisition with significantly higher volume.

Thomas & Betts, acquired by ABB :

In both cases, we see initial price fluctuation post-announcement, then big increases in the following months. While the long-term impact on pricing is highly dependent on the specific acquisition scenario and goals, price hikes in the short-term post-announcement could reflect market uncertainty over product availability or changes.

If you have questions or feedback on this exercise, please leave us a comment or email us. If you'd like to help us open up access to information in electronics part sourcing, send us your ideas on topics you're interested in and we'll take a look.

Octopart API V3

Sun, 31 Mar 2013 00:00:00 UTC

Today we're happy to announce the release of the newest version of our API: Version 3!

The Octopart API is the easiest way for developers to access up-to-date pricing and availability information for components from distributors around the world. Using the Octopart API, you can access stocking information, price breaks, lead times, minimum order quantities and much more information from over 100 distributors including Digi-Key, Mouser, Newark, Premier Farnell, Avnet, Arrow, RS Components, Allied Electronics, Future Electronics, Grainger and many others.

Octopart's pricing and availability data is already being used by hundreds of OEMs and Contract Manufacturers both large and small to help them quote BOMs and manage their internal part lists.

Fideltronik, a leading EMS provider in Poland, uses the Octopart API to check for market pricing and to scrub BOMS.
ADCO Circuits, a contract manufacturer in Michigan of complex electronic assemblies uses the API to quickly source parts.

We've seen applications as simple as internal BOM apps to as complex as full ERP integrations. If you have a BOM in your company that you'd like match check out our quickstart documentation:

BOM Quickstart

Soon we'll be adding more design data so stay tuned. If you're already a user of the API, you'll find V3 more RESTful, more intuitive and better documented than V2 -- so if your app is focused on pricing and availability, we encourage you to start migrating to V3 now. Our plan is to continue to support V2 until V3 has reached feature parity. (We will not be charging for V3 until later this year.)

In the meantime, let us know what you think in the comments or send us an email.

Octopart on the iPhone

Tue, 05 Mar 2013 00:00:00 UTC

We've been listening to the users of our new iOS app and have steadily been making it more full-featured and easy to use. We've just made the app available to iPhone and iPod Touch users. Enjoy!

Introducing the Octopart API Stats Dashboard

Mon, 04 Mar 2013 00:00:00 UTC

In the past few months, we've heard from lots of developers who have checked out the Octopart API. Today, we have something for you -- behold our new API dashboard! Whether you're building a sourcing tool, BOM scrubber, stock check module or circuit design application, the most common request boils down to: analytics.

Now you'll be able to register new applications and track your usage across different requests in realtime. Sign in and checkout your own dashboard here.

We're working hard on the API and this marks more things to come in the next few weeks and months. Stay tuned for news and updated by subscribing to API announcements. Email us with any questions or feedback at api@octopart.com.

Cool Projects at the YC + Upverter Hardware Hackathon

Tue, 26 Feb 2013 00:00:00 UTC

I spent this past Saturday at the Y Combinator + Upverter Hardware Hackathon. The place was packed with electronic components, oscilloscopes, 3D printers, quadcopters, soldering irons, and roaming telepresence robots. But the most interesting part was talking with the hackers themselves about their projects.

I met a team working on a DIY pick and place machine for populating components on printed circuit boards. They built the whole thing out of 80/20 and showed me the placement head moving along its travel.

Here's a closer up shot of the machine.

This team of Berkeley engineering students had a working heads up display + camera attached to a pair of glasses. They harvested the display from another commercial product and figured out how to send it a video signal. I tried it on and it really works! It's like having your computer desktop floating in space a foot in front of your right eye.

Some folks were building a piece of jewelry which would pulsate with the intensity of the ambient music (the purple pendant on the table). Rave wear at its finest.

But my personal favorite was the group making a toaster that could "toast" a 16x16 array of pixels on a piece of bread. Unfortunately they didn't have a working prototype when I chatted with them.

I'm hoping that some of these projects will make their way to market soon, especially the toaster.

Y Combinator + Upverter Hardware Hackathon and NYC Payphone Hack Day

Thu, 07 Feb 2013 00:00:00 UTC

Once you start attending hackathons, you can't really stop. I'm going to the Y Combinator + Upverter Hardware Hackathon in Mountain View, CA on February 23rd. Applications close tomorrow, so apply now!

I attended my first hackathon two weeks ago at the NYC Payphone Hack Day. The mission was to develop ideas for the Reinvent Payphones Design Challenge, a contest to reimagine the role of payphones in NYC. The ideas that people came up with were great - check out the slideshow below.

Octopart on the iPad

Wed, 23 Jan 2013 00:00:00 UTC

We've all personally had to deal with organizing our part datasheets in project binders or reading them ad-hoc on the computer. Today, we're releasing our new home-grown Octopart iPad application so that everyone has a convenient way to find parts, technical specifications, and datasheets without a computer or a fat binder. We hope that this new app can make looking at datasheets painless and save a few trees in the process too!

Check out some screenshots:

Sandy Hook Elementary School

Fri, 21 Dec 2012 00:00:00 UTC

This morning at 9:30am we will observe a moment of silence to remember the victims of Sandy Hook Elementary.

Hurricane Sandy and Amazon Web Services: Migrating Out of us-east-1 in a Hurry

Fri, 02 Nov 2012 00:00:00 UTC

As we approach our 5th day without power here in lower Manhattan, I wanted to update our users on how we've fared here at Octopart during Hurricane Sandy.

Our team members are all safe and doing well. Watching the images of destruction puts into perspective the small inconvenience of walking uptown to charge my phone battery. Our hearts go out to all who were affected.

As the storm approached on Sunday evening, this image made a strong impression.

We utilize Amazon Web Services to power Octopart, in particular the us-east-1 region which is located in Northern Virginia. Although we spread our services across availability zones within the region, the swath of red on the map above made it clear that those preparations were not enough.

High on our to-do list has been testing our ability to migrate to a different AWS region. We quickly decided to run that test.

We immediately began migrating databases, spinning up web servers, and moving search indexes across the country to the us-west-2 region in Oregon. We ran into a number of stumbling blocks which we figured would be useful to share:

EBS snapshots cannot be moved between regions

This meant that we could not simply snapshot our existing webserver EBS volumes in us-east-1 and build new EBS volumes from them in us-west-2. Instead we had to rebuild the servers from our puppet definitions, a longer process. This surprised us because EBS snapshots are stored on S3 in non user-viewable buckets. Since S3 is available from any region we (incorrectly) assumed that we would be able to access EBS snapshots from any region.

RDS database snapshots cannot be moved between regions

RDS database snapshots are stored the same way as EBS snapshots and have the same limitations. To work around this we loaded database dumps, a time consuming process.

Not all AWS services are available outside of the us-east-1 region

In particular, we use SES (Simple Email Service) which is only available in us-east-1. Amazon has a page describing which services are available in which region.

Service settings are region specific

EC2 security groups, RDS security groups, RDS Parameter groups, among other settings need to be set up in each region separately, a time consuming process. Since this can be done without cost, you should have these set up ahead of time.

Aside from these challenges, most things worked well.

Data transfer between regions was reasonably fast

We achieved roughly 9MB/s between m1.large instances in us-east-1 and us-west-2. Your mileage may vary.

We were able to provision the machines we needed in us-west-2

Keep in mind though that not all instance types are available outside of us-east-1. Amazon has information about the regional availability of instances in their FAQ. Had there been an complete outage of us-east-1, thousands of AWS customers would have been scrambling to provision machines in other regions. It's unclear whether enough capacity exists in other regions to handle a mass migration out of us-east-1, Amazon's largest region. It's also not clear if the AWS API could handle the request volume which would accompany a large scale exodus.

Ultimately, we were able to work around all of the issues above, and had us-east-1 gone down completely, we were ready to make the switch to us-west-2.

My battery is running low and my fingers are cold so it's time to hike uptown to plug in and publish.

Introduction to Octopart - Video

Tue, 02 Oct 2012 00:00:00 UTC

Here at Octopart, we put lots of effort into building new features to help you find electronic parts fast. Now we're going to show you how to use those features. Below is our first Octopart tutorial video: an introduction of the site's basic features. Let us know what you think in the comments!

More European Distributors

Thu, 27 Sep 2012 00:00:00 UTC

Readers of this blog may have noticed that we’ve been working hard to improve Octopart for users outside of the United States.

As part of this effort, I’m happy to announce that we’ve added several European distributors to Octopart:

You can read more about our efforts to translate the site here and to regionalize the site here.

We realize that there are a lot more distributors in Europe and around the world and we want to list them all! Please let us know about your favorite distributors so we can reach out to them and get them on Octopart (contact@octopart.com).

Translations • Übersetzungen • Traducciones

Mon, 27 Aug 2012 00:00:00 UTC

Octopart is now available in German and Spanish!
Octopart ist ab sofort in Deutsch und Spanisch!
¡Octopart ahora está en alemán y en español!

We know a lot of our users come from outside the U.S., so we’re continually working to make our website more useful for them. We’ve translated all of our headers and static text around the website, but our part search page and the information we receive from distributors are still just in English (for now!).

You can set your language preference without an account, but if you are logged in your preferred language will be remembered every time you log in. To select a language, simply click the language link near the top right corner of our home page.

It’s a work in progress, so we would love to hear your feedback! Do we have any amusing mistranslations around the site? What other languages should we include in the future?

Octopart Trends: Electronic Component Prices (June 2011 - June 2012)

Tue, 14 Aug 2012 00:00:00 UTC

One of our twitter followers tweeted us asking if we'd seen prices rise across our components database. We decided to find out.

Using June 1, 2011 as our baseline, we calculated average percent changes in prices published by major small volume distributors until June 1, 2012. We sampled roughly 200,000 parts -- this sample represents the full breadth of diversity in the components universe. Everything from an oscilloscope to a ceramic capacitor is treated on an equal footing in this analysis. The resultant trend line is certainly not without its interesting features, including a ~2.5% price drop around August 2011 accompanied by a subsequent increase in price in early 2012. Keep in mind though these percent differences are marginal, perhaps the most interesting feature of this graph is how remarkably constant prices seem to be.

Electronic Component Pricing Changes, June 1, 2011 to June 1, 2012

This analysis has a natural bias towards component categories for which more components exist. This issue could be addressed by sampling evenly from categories. The narrower the category, the more likely a distinct trend will emerge. To illustrate, we ran the same analysis code over the known microcontrollers in our database which resulted in a very interesting discovery - prices have dropped by nearly 5% on microcontrollers over the last year.

Microcontroller Pricing Changes, June 1, 2011 to June 1, 2012

Sampling across categories introduces another bias -- which categories should be sampled and how much weight should be placed on each category? The 'basket of goods' which are interesting to someone working on power management circuits will be very different from that of someone working on logic, rendering an arbitrary choice very limited in scope. Rather than decide on this basket of goods ourselves, we'd love to hear more thoughts on this matter (or calls for other analysis requests).

We'll be diving into more comprehensive plots in our newsletter