TL;DR - My cofounder Collin and I built an AI version of Digi-Key to help PCB designers find and use parts, except with a way bigger catalog, modern refinement tools, and an AI that can actually read the damn datasheets for you.
*The problem*
Modern circuit board design is filled with absurdly tedious tasks, where one small mistake can brick a project and cost thousands. The worst (in our opinion) is reading datasheets, which eats up to 25% of the first part of any project:
1. First, you slog through catalogs to find viable parts, using search tools that are still stuck in the dark ages. There are ~80M unique components in today’s supply chain, yet the tools we have to look through them are just digitized versions of the same paper catalogs our grandparents got in the mail.
2. During the design, you spend a ton of time flipping between different 10-100-page PDFs for every component in every subcircuit, hoping like hell you don’t miss some tiny spec in a footnote somewhere that kills your design.
3. And god help you when the requirements inevitably change and now you have to figure out what subsystems are affected!
*What we built*
Zenode is an AI-powered electronics search engine that actually helps engineers find and understand components. Our core features:
1. Largest and Deepest Part Catalog → We have merged dozens of existing part catalogs and documents from major distributors and manufacturers
2. Discovery Search → natural language queries to quickly find categories, set filters, and rank results
3. Modern Parametric Filters → rebuilt from scratch to move off the string values pervasive in industry and build numeric ranges that actually work.
4. Interactive Documents → AI constrained to a single part’s datasheet/manuals. Ask a question, get the answer with a highlighted source for quick reference.
5. Deep Dive → search across dozens of parts simultaneously (“what’s the lowest-power accelerometer available?”) instead of slogging one by one.
*What we learned*
1. By far the hardest part of the last 2 years has been wrangling 3 TB of messy, inconsistent data into something usable. We had to teach the AI how to handle hand-drawn figures, normalize different unit variables and names that mean the same thing, and navigate conflicting information present between different datasheet versions of the same part. It’s been a nightmare
2. We originally built custom PDF parsers and AI extractors, which were best in class for ~3 months until generalized AI passed them. So we stopped reinventing wheels and doubled down on data quality instead.
3. The killer feature wasn’t the AI searching a single part, but what we heard repeatedly from users is that they want the AI to read across multiple parts, hence why we’ve launched deep dive!
*Where it’s strong*
- Speed: rips through a 1,000-page microcontroller datasheet in seconds.
- Breadth: 40M+ part sources unified into one catalog, and more than just datasheets, application notes, errata, etc.
- Comparisons: Deep Dive lets you ask across multiple parts, not just one at a time.
*Where it’s not*
- Pricing/availability: currently outdated (for now we expect folks to check existing aggregators like Octopart).
- Accuracy: good enough to match my mediocre skills; not yet at Collin's level, but we're starting tuning and this will improve rapidly!
*Try it*
It’s live today (zenode.ai). Sign up for a free account and If you put “Hacker News” in during signup in the “where did you hear about us” field, we’ll give you 1,000 bonus credits (once we finish building that, so sometime this week ).
*Feedback we’d love*
1. Should Deep Dive results auto-become filters you can refine further?
2. Do you want the ability to mark preferred parts / exclude others?
3. Is “Deep Dive on a BOM” (alt discovery + manufacturability checks on a list of known components from different categories) the killer feature?