Ultra Librarian joins Flux to take the hard out of hardware

by rock_hardon 3/6/2024, 6:27 PMwith 27 comments

by petefordeon 3/6/2024, 7:07 PM

I spent several months working with Flux, and while I actually generally enjoyed the UI and web-based approach, I had to switch back to KiCAD because there were so many dealbreaking bugs in fundamental features.

The realtime collaboration was just straight up broken; as in, my collaborator would make changes that would not manifest until I refreshed. This is unacceptable.

The PCB tracing was unusable because you could not control the wires and things would appear in strange places. Forget auto-routing... I had trouble just getting it to connect wires.

I could go on at (great) length, but while I genuinely am rooting for the team behind this product, I can't recommend it until they prioritize getting the fundamentals working properly over adding new AI features.

That said, in attempting to work through these issues, I gained a healthy amount of respect for how hard it is to create a viable new entry in this domain. For whatever reason, it often seems culturally normalized to shit on Flux and I think this is toxic and unproductive.

by engineer_22on 3/6/2024, 6:45 PM

I have not found Flux to be particularly useful. For schematic design and PCB layout KiCAD is my go-to. Flux was difficult to use and the purported AI assistance was non-existent.

by swamp40on 3/6/2024, 7:00 PM

Digikey has made Ultra Librarian famous. I wouldn't be surprised if they were connected somehow. About 80% of Digikey components have models. About 80% of those are Ultra Librarian models. About 95% of the models are correct, which is a lot better than a few years ago.

by cyberaxon 3/6/2024, 7:32 PM

Now it needs to be integrated with atopile.

It'd be nice to be able to describe the circuit as simple code, compile it, and then get it in the mail a couple of days later.

by dpcxon 3/6/2024, 8:48 PM

Having never heard of Ultra Librarian, I thought this was somehow related to https://justgetflux.com/ and that they'd made a switch from doing color changing to hardware.