Introducing the Common Parts Library

The Common Parts Library is a set of commonly used electronic components for designing, prototyping, and manufacturing connected device products.

Background

The Common Parts Library is an outgrowth of Seeed Studio’s Open Parts Library which contains a few hundred parts that are available through Seeed’s supply chain. We aim to expand the number of parts to allow a broader range of product development and to provide at least two alternate orderable parts for each generic part (where possible) to allow for worldwide sourcing of components.

Motivation

The Common Parts Library aims to widen two bottlenecks in product development that exist today.

The first is that component selection is a time consuming process. Often component selection comes down to the question of, “what’s the <component> that everyone uses for <application> and has good availability in the supply chain?” The Common Parts Library should answer this question quickly.

The second is that during PCB assembly, contract manufacturers place orders for all the parts specified in a BOM. By focusing designs around a common set of parts, contract manufacturers can keep these common parts on hand, speeding assembly time, and allowing them to take advantage of larger economies of scale.

The goal is to tighten development cycles and speed the processes of product development.

Scope

We’ve chosen the niche of connected devices because of the explosive growth in this area and the accompanying challenges faced by design engineers and manufacturers. Our component selection is geared towards design, prototyping and manufacturing of these products.

We’ve included mostly 0603 SMT passive components which are small enough to develop compact designs, but large enough to assemble by hand without much difficulty using tweezers. We also have modules which support communication protocols like WiFi and BLE, as well as commonly used connectors. There is also a selection of ICs for both power, digital and analog circuits: op-amps, timers, and voltage regulators. Of course, in any given device there are sure to be specialized parts that won’t be found in this library. We don’t expect this library to cover all the parts in a given design - we’re shooting for 80%.

Organization of the Library

Each section of the CPL contains a list of generic parts, each of which has at least one associated orderable part. Where possible, we’ve listed two or more orderable parts for each generic part. Ideally, orderable parts associated with the same generic part would be drop-in alternates. However, this is not always possible. We’ve indicated where the associated orderable parts are not drop in replacements due to different sizes, footprints, or attributes.

Community

The future growth and development of the Common Parts Library depends on an active and engaged community of design engineers, sourcing professionals, and contract manufacturers. Ultimately the community will influence the direction of the library - providing input as to what’s missing and what doesn’t belong. This process will be transparent and open. Initially decisions about what will be included will be decided by Octopart.

If you’re interested in getting involved with this project, please sign up to the mailing list below. We’re especially interested to hear from quick turn contract manufacturers and design engineers. If you’d like to contact us directly, please email cpl@octopart.com.

Future Plans

The Common Parts Library v0.1 below is in beta stage. The next steps are

- Community comments on the existing list, suggestions for additions and removal

- Continued component library curation and selection efforts

- Addition of Symbol files/links for popular EDA tools ( Altium, Eagle, KiCad, Upverter, etc.)

- Addition of commenting functionality and additional community tools

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