February 05, 2013

An Interview with Andrew Seddon - Necessary Networked Novelty

1 hour 32 minutes

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Welcome, Andrew Seddon of CircuitHub.com!

Founded the company with Jonathon Friedman, from across the Atlantic!

Andrew went to school in Leeds but left for a design position.

Previously worked for companies such as Turnsafe and Active RF and in his spare time worked on model rockets. Check out all of his past work on his personal site.

London is barren, but outlying areas of the UK do electronics. Hardware is stronger in Cambridge, with companies such as ARM and Cambridge Silicon Radio.

There is also the M4 corridor, west of London

Amateur electronics is growing in London. Shared spaces, Makerspaces and Hackerspaces allow for shared tools, which are a premium in expensive real estate areas.

Andrew and the team needed to learn web software and currently use CoffeeScript, a JavaScript stack

CircuitHub uses an online interface to create parts and then allows users to find and sync with the footprints and schematic symbols using Dropbox. The site creates parts compatible with 3 of the top PCB CAD programs available today and more are planned for the future.

Circuit hub is sponsoring hackathon along with yCombinator and Upverter (and more!)

How parts are handled depends on workplace culture and software packages. Altium and EAGLE handle associating footprints different and big companies might have a librarian whereas smaller companies may not.

Companies likely won't be revealing any information by pulling and sharing footprints from a central database, but trust will be an issue with larger companies.

They will be open sourcing all possible code and feeding it back to the community. You can view the team's work on GitHub.

The main tool will always be free. Revenue will come later by integrating with manufacturing.

The project started because Jon and Andrew were "scratching their own itch". They submitted a yCombinator application on deadline day.

Because it's strikingly difficult to get a visa for the US, even if you're a founder of a startup, they are operating out of Playa del Carmen for the next few months. The US has only recently considered any kind of legislation in this area (!?)

Andrew reluctantly agreed to some kind of gamification in order to encourage participation ("we'll see," he says). Chris cited the awesome Adafruit badges as a good example of this in action.

Be sure to head over to CircuitHub.com and start an account. You can start pulling in designs to your projects and submitting new footprints to the community.

You can follow Andrew on Twitter at @seddonandrew and can also follow @CircuitHub.

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