Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Show HN: Zenode – an AI-powered electronic component search engine

zenode.ai

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 40 posts

Re: Show HN: Zenode – an AI-powered electronic component search engine

#21

Post by bbourn »

caromexia2 wrote: post #17

Congrats on the launch! How much of the component selection pain is actually on the supply chain side? Like, engineers pick parts, but then procurement has to source them without really understanding the technical tradeoffs. Have you talked to purchasing teams about this?

We're learning a lot here, since this always happened AFTER we handed over the BOM. It certainly seems like a pain, particularly when a supplier ends up being a critical bottleneck (always late, overcharging, etc). The number one requested feature from these folks is a way to validate an alternate component, something they can use for themselves BEFORE passing it over to us design engineers for approval (heard some pretty spicy takes on doing this, apparently working with EE's isn't always sunshine and rainbows...)

Re: Show HN: Zenode – an AI-powered electronic component search engine

#22

Post by jbryben »

Congrats on the launch! Toyed around a bit with the site and seems really intuitive; though I used a few of your prebuilt suggestions: "A thermal fuse rated for 75°C and 10A, An optocoupler with 1.5kV isolation, and 5V LDO with 1A output" for example and all come back as not available/no parts available. Just FYI not sure if you want the autofilled suggestions to be the ones that don't produce the results.

Re: Show HN: Zenode – an AI-powered electronic component search engine

#23

Post by bbourn »

sonaliv wrote: post #15

How does this differentiate from Digi-Key’s parametric search or Octopart’s aggregation?

Digikey's parametrics were the best in industry prior to ours, but they were still really painful to use because of the strings. But to even get to the parametrics, you first have to know in advance the category and subcategory names of the part you're looking for. There are over 3000 different categories, so even once you're pretty good, you're always asking yourself "is what i'm looking for in the logic category or the amplifier category". With Zenode, all this is handled using natural language! And we did a huge overhaul on the parametrics, we turned the strings into structured values and built modern filters that are just waaay easier to use.

Octopart is a bit of a different beast from us. They're crushing the pricing and availability data, which is actually hard to get (a LOT of business development to get access to the realtime values from the distributors themselves). Plus they have a really massive catalog, definitely broader than ours, but they don't have the depth (i.e. the detailed spec and documentation data) that we do because we went to the manufacturer websites to obtain that.

Re: Show HN: Zenode – an AI-powered electronic component search engine

#24

Post by bbourn »

jbryben wrote: post #22

Congrats on the launch! Toyed around a bit with the site and seems really intuitive; though I used a few of your prebuilt suggestions: "A thermal fuse rated for 75°C and 10A, An optocoupler with 1.5kV isolation, and 5V LDO with 1A output" for example and all come back as not available/no parts available. Just FYI not sure if you want the autofilled suggestions to be the ones that don't produce the results.

Well, that's super annoying, we definitely don't want that, thanks for finding and letting us know! We'll have it fixed shortly.

Re: Show HN: Zenode – an AI-powered electronic component search engine

#25

Post by ctstoner »

jkontulis wrote: post #18

When normalizing specs across manufacturers, how do you handle cases where units aren’t directly comparable (e.g., different test conditions for “low power” claims, or different temperature reference points)? That’s often where human engineers end up second-guessing the catalog data.

We typically take the 'nominal' value in the datasheet's electrical specs table for parametric specs. If the manufacturer is trying to be sneaky by providing the value with perfect test conditions to improve the numbers, we still give the value because there's no other way to give a credible answer.

However, we saved all the test conditions and similar notes. Maybe we could display the conditions with the specs in the table? That way, any outlier manufacturers would jump out right away.

Re: Show HN: Zenode – an AI-powered electronic component search engine

#27

Post by ctstoner »

alejandravl1901 wrote: post #26

This seems to be incredibly helpful, even if it's not 100% accurate. Then again, isn't that what chatGPT is for? How should I think about Zenode vs. a more generic AI search engine?

The difference between Zenode and something like Perplexity is that Zenode is built specifically for electronics, so it's trained specifically for searching electronics, and the data is much more detailed for electronics. Perplexity has to be good at everything; Zenode is specialized, so it just needs to be the best at working with electronics!

Re: Show HN: Zenode – an AI-powered electronic component search engine

#29

Post by KDunc »

bbourn wrote: post #19
KDunc wrote: post #11

Congrats on your launch! What's your moat? The big AI players are getting better at reading datasheets and providing contextual guidance and info. It seems like it won't be long until ChatGPT and others will be able to do what your tool does. Thoughts?

Yeah, Moat's are tricky in the age of AI. We think there's always room for a standalone interface in this niche sector, given the sheer amount of data that needs to get presented (with no room for hallucinations). But beyond the data curation (which is actually quite hard) and the custom UI, there's also all the tuning data to optimize for the workflows that come next, like Alternates, schematic awareness, etc. But y…

Thanks for the candid response. I'd expect that because you're not one of the AI giants that you'd be able to work with the different suppliers more easily - licensing deals and even embedded tools in their websites. As far as I can tell, your business model doesn't rely on assimilating as much info as possible, so you're better positioned to work within suppliers' IP and sales pipelines.

Re: Show HN: Zenode – an AI-powered electronic component search engine

#30

Post by GraemeWiltrout »

bbourn wrote: post #13
GraemeWiltrout wrote: post #5

This is awesome! Way better than DigiKey’s search.

Thanks, that's why we built it! We're big digikey fans, and have spent hundreds of hours on the site, but that doesn't mean it's without room for improvement!

I was playing around with the search and AI tools and it's pretty sick overall!

The speed of the search was ok, but the AI stuff seems to take a minute. I'm not sure if I've just been spoiled by ChatGPT or if this is a product issue, but it definitely could be faster.

I like the sources that are shown in the deep dive search and the datasheet chat, but deep dive doesn't seem to be taking me to the actual page it references. I know I can just type in the page it says in the pdf viewer, but the datasheet page takes me straight there so why doesn't the deep dive source?

Post reply on HN