> Another option, that may not be acceptable to all, is that in the UK > RS & Farnell both recently acquired small PCB development > companies(DesignSpark & eagle respectively). The intention being the > companies adopt the free tool which integrates easily with their > catalogue and then buy more from them. This would be great if they
You know a distributor fails it when the only way to lure in customers is by providing some half-assed EDA software which happens to have all their parts catalog footprints/symbols available. Digikey doesn't need to do that because they actually have things in stock, ship fast, and have worldwide free shipping deals for any reasonable kind of order, so they don't need to buy gEDA or Eagle to keep repeat customers. I had to order something from RS few days ago because their stuff arrives next day to my location as opposed to worst case 4 days wiht DigiKey Worldwide UPS, and I ended up paying $12 for *100* 1000pF capacitors. for $12 on Digikey you get a 4000-piece *REEL*. That and every resistor I had specced for the project I couldn't actually GET from RS. I had to waste time recalculating vreg resistors so i could match my order with shit RS had in stock. Ridiculous! Of course all this WAS available from DigiKey I just had to have it asap. So what ended up being a couple bags of resistors/caps/vregs cost me ~$90 from RS which would have been at most $16 from Digikey. Of course this is customer money and it just ended up being passed to them, but this is still stupid. I don't care how much money they poured into their stupid DesignSpark shit, their stuff is overpriced, in-stock selection is ridiculous, and their website is fucking unusable (how about sorting shit by stuff that's actually IN STOCK and not "comes from another country in 2 weeks" - its almost impossible to actually tell the difference between these 2 conditions because "in stock" indicator in the table is both GREEN in these times.) Anyway tl;dr version: RS sucks, DesignSpark sucks, Eagle sucks, buying a EDA suite to pimp to your customers as the only benefit of your shitty stock/price practice = stupid. Also any designer too lazy to make symbols/footprints for a new part should just /quit. my $0.02 worth. _______________________________________________ geda-user mailing list [email protected] http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user
