Today we are releasing a new feature that, I hope, will make searching for parts a lot easier and a lot more fun: Octopart News.
Octopart News is an experiment that we are very excited about. We envision it as an open forums site where you can post technical questions and hopefully answer some too. You can also post links to interesting engineering/tech news stories. For instance, the discusion thread to Sam's last blog is here and the first mention of the word "Semiconductor" in the NY Times can be found here.
One of the great things about places like Reddit and Paul Graham's Startup News is that you can find interesting stories everytime you visit. We wanted to build a place for engineers, researchers and hobbyists to go and find find interesting tech stories all in one place. Selfishly, this is going to be our way of keeping up to date with cool new hardware projects. Hopefully you'll find the same is true for you.
When we were building a laser for our experiment at the South Pole we needed a communications device that operated at -50 C over 2.5 km of cable. It took us 3 weeks to find what we were looking for. Now, you can submit a discussion topic to Octopart News and somebody who has had the same problem can tell you what their soution was (an ethernet extender). For our part, we will be adding tools to make this process easier.
Tell everybody you know about Octopart News and help us build a useful and fun site that will make it easier for you to keep building things.
working on cool hardware? submit blogs to contact@octopart.com