The rise of low-cost, hacker-friendly electronics is fueling a new wave of hardware hobbyists. Using programmable boards like the Arduino and dirt-chip computers like the Raspberry Pi, you can build everything from your very own supercomputers to an internet-connected beer fermentation refrigeration system.
But Belgium startup called Circuits.io wants to take this trend even further. It wants to give you the power to build your own custom circuit boards.
Historically, that's been expensive and difficult for hobbyists to do, but Circuits.io wants to change that by offering a web-based circuit board design system made especially for hobbyists complete with library of open source component designs. And soon it will also offer a CafePress-style print-on-demand service for circuit boards.
The company was founded earlier this year by Karel Bruneel and Ben Schrauwen. Bruneel is an electrical engineering post-doc at the University of Gent and the co-creator of the Arduino-like Dwengo board. "After his Ph.D. Karel had a void he needed to fill," Schrauwen explains.
Schrauwen is a professor of machine learning and robotics at the University of Gent and the co-founder of Mollom, a spam filtering company that was acquired by Acquia last summer. "After that, I had a void to fill as well," he says.
The two have decided to fill the void in their lives by filling a void in the electronic design automation (EDA) software market. Bruneel and Schrauwen had seen how hard it was to teach circuit design to beginners using the tools already on the market. Most of these tools are meant for large electronics companies and are too complicated and expensive for hobbyists, Schrauwen says.
Meanwhile, hobbyists are forced to design common parts of a board, such as power supplies, from scratch -- or at least manually enter them into their design software from a schematic. In the software world, developers rely on open source libraries to avoid tediously re-creating common components. But Schrauwen says incompatibilities between different EDA applications have made it difficult to create common open source libraries for circuit boards.
Finally, once you've finished a circuit board you'll want to have it printed. But Schrauwen says that currently unit prices only gets reasonable at a minimum order of about a 100 units, which makes printing boards prohibitively expensive for most hobbyists. And even those who do shell out for bulk manufacture will have to wait weeks to get their hands on the final product.
Circuit.io is tackling all three of these problems. Its web-based design tool is aimed at hobbyists, and Schrauwen and Bruneel say they've kept it as simple as possible.
But what's really interesting is the component library. Circuits.io already has hundreds of components that hackers can use in their projects, and users can upload and share their own designs as well. What Circuits.io is offering is actually quite a lot like GitHub, the popular host for open source software projects.
In addition to being able to reuse components, hardware hackers will be able to "fork" existing ones -- that is, make their own copy that they can modify and share. In the future you won't even have to use the online editor -- you will be able to import and export designs from Eagle and another popular design program.
Schrauwen says the online editor and the open source libraries will always be free to use -- the company will make money through its print-on-demand service.
Schrauwen says the reason it costs so much to produce printed circuit boards (PCBs) is that manufacturers have to do extensive testing and preparation of a design before it's put into production. But by standardizing its formats, Schrauwen says Circuits.io can eliminate most of this prep work, enabling them to send files to manufacturers that are ready to be printed.
By cutting out these costly early steps, Circuits.io users will be able to buy a single PCB at the unit price they now pay if they order a 100 boards and get their hands on their boards much more quickly.
Circuits.io isn't alone in its mission. Upverter is a web-based schematics designer and online community, and Fritzing is also trying to make it cheap to produce PCBs. This movement is just getting started.
Correction: This story has been updated to indicate that import/export functionality in Circuits.io is a forthcoming feature, not one readily available, and that manufacturers can and will do smaller runs of PCBs for customers.
