JLC PCB SMD Assembly Component Catalogue that is not painful to use.

[yaqwsx]

Hello guys,

a lot of us love JLC PCB STM assembly service. It is easy to use, cheap and fast. However, you can use only components from their catalog. This is not as bad, since the library is quite broad. However, the library UI sucks. You can only browse the categories, do a full-text search. You cannot do parametric search nor sort by property. That's why I created a simple page that presents the catalog in a much nicer form. You can:

• do full-text search
• browse categories
• parametric search
• sort by any component attribute
• sort by price based on quantity
• easily access datasheet and LCSC product page.

I think some of you might find it useful, so I am sharing it with you.
You can use the service on https://yaqwsx.github.io/jlcparts/.

[phil from seattle]

I use it and like it.  Thanks for creating it.

One issue I have - it is often hard to know what is what in the first section. The JLCPCB sub category names can be incredibly long and only the first part of the name is shown. See the screen shot.  Is the highlighted "Microprocessor" for the microprocessor section?  No, it is for "Microprocessor & Microcontroller Supervisors". And you really don't know that until you scroll all the way down to the bottom and look in the Description column for the individual entries.  There are lots of examples like that. It would be great to have hover text that has the whole name so you can find what you are looking for quickly.

And even with that issue, it is a big help!

[yaqwsx]

Thanks for the tip. There should be a tooltip now. It should work in any decently recent browser.

[ANTALIFE]

Oh wow, thanks for making and sharing something this useful!

[phil from seattle]

Thanks for the tip. There should be a tooltip now. It should work in any decently recent browser.

Yes!!!  Excellent.

[S. Petrukhin]

Excellent! Thank you!
But is it possible to fasten this user-friendly interface for LCSC?

[phil from seattle]

Excellent! Thank you!
But is it possible to fasten this user-friendly interface for LCSC?

That was the first thing I asked for when I saw it.  Unfortunately, it isn't that easy.

[yaqwsx]

LCSC requires a lot of scraping to keep things up-to-date which is server-time consuming. However, it could be done. Currently, the solution leverages Travis CI to do the updating and with the recent changes on Travis, I also had to slow down the update rate on this project to fit inside the free tier. As I am not a person using LCSC, I am not particularly interested in donating a server on which the service would run.

Would you guys be interested in paying 2 USD (rough estimate, no promises here) per month to get access to such a service?

[yaqwsx]

The tool just received a small update:

- the UI should be more responsive when using full-text search
- discontinued components have a warning next to them
- clear search text button was added
- there are now quick-jump navigation buttons

[yaqwsx]

Another small update; the page now tracks newly added components to the library: https://yaqwsx.github.io/jlcparts/#/history

[gnuarm]

Would you guys be interested in paying 2 USD (rough estimate, no promises here) per month to get access to such a service?

How about contacting LCSC to see if they think it is worth paying for.  You know Digikey is paying a bunch to keep their site humming. 

But thanks tons for what you've done.  I'm impressed.

[phil from seattle]

Hi, the JLCPCB web site has been down for quite a while now.  In your catalog web page, I tried update and it successfully updated.  Does it use a different connection than jlcpcb.com?  If not, is it silently timing out and claiming success?  I'm not complaining or criticizing, just pointing out a hard to test for situation. Might not even be worth fixing if it's a bug.

[yaqwsx]

I pull the JLC PCB database every night. The source is always served from my hosting, not from JLC PCB (as I use completely different architecture compared to their site). If their site is down, an update will be missed, but you, as the user, won't notice. The only thing that stops working if JLC PCB is down is attrition and minimal price calculation (it will be just missing).

[phil from seattle]

OK, that is the smart way to do it.

JLCPCB has been down for a while now so thought to test your code against it.