From Idea to Checkout - A New Way of Shopping for Your Electronics
Ch Ch Ch Ch Changes
Change is hard.
Change is rewarding.
Circuito.io has always been about making Making easier. Yes, if you’re building a project or working on a prototype, circuito.io was and is here to help you.
When creating the initial schematic for your idea there are many things you need to do: first, you need to start searching online for examples, then reading spec sheets, googling. You might find yourself staring at the pinout thinking ‘hmm I need to use the SPI pins, so I can’t wire to the A5 analog input..’. At some point you’ll also need to figure out how to place all of this on a breadboard, using as few wires as possible, sometimes cramming everything to use an efficient space design... After that, I’ll be looking for good software libraries, one from github, another from Arduino’s forum. One might not work, or require some configuration to work with my setup. Then I’ll need to find all the variables that hold the actual pin numbers and replace them appropriately. That’s quite a lot of work.
Looking back
Circuito.io was designed out of the desire to replace this robotic work with a two minute automated process, so you would have more time to actually work and develop your idea and end up with an improved design faster. Iterate, fail or success, and learn along the way.
At some point, we realized that helping you get the right parts for you project is another important aspect. The reason is that if the parts you’re using don’t match the ones you see on our app - some things might not work properly. This took us back to the drawing board, and that’s how we came up with a new method for buying electronics.
Idea to checkout
After careful assessment we came to the realization that we want to give our users another benefit - the option of buying their components directly through our App. This doesn’t mean that you necessarily have to do so though, you can still buy your components in your local electronics store, or from your favorite online distributor. It just means that now, on top of our circuit planner, which is still free and you can use it regardless of buying components on circuito.io, you can also use our checkout option to buy some or all of the components for the circuit directly from our website.
A new shopping experience
We’ve been discussing a lot lately how to create the optimal shopping experience for electronics. There are great component manufacturers, developers, distributors and tutorial makers out there, and we’ve even had the pleasure of meeting some of them. But in the end, when you go to any of the online stores, the experience is roughly the same - you browse through components, compare specs and prices. Then you look for examples or technical documentation, think about your design, and try to figure out what else you’re going to need. At the other end of this spectrum you’ll find kits and packages that already have everything you need for a project, but it may not be exactly the project that you want to build. All in all, the interface of these online stores may appear to be different, but the overall process is similar. And that’s what we’re here to change.
I believe that our new approach will give you more control over what you buy, and will put you and your creation in the front, giving you a project-based purchasing experience.
Let me know if you agree, and more importantly - let me know if you don’t.
Cheers.
Eyal