The EE Concierge Process

A multi-stage verification process to produce parts you can trust.

The EE Concierge Process

The big difference between EE Concierge and every other outsourced parts library, every other free online repository of parts, and every other shared library is that you can trust it. It's not enough to just give people data. No true professional would ever use a random part off the internet - they'd rather make it from scratch to be confident in its reliability. So we knew that for the parts concierge to work, the parts had to be perfect - perfect attributes, symbol, footprint, pricing, and they would need to come with a 3D model.

It's a very hard problem to convert PDF datasheets into CAD symbols, footprints, attributes, and 3D models reliably. Especially if people are involved. To address this, our first secret weapon: we built a massive distributed team of electrical engineers, and developed software to split up tasks and spread them around the world. The team works on the same parts that are compared against each other to eventually produce a winner, or if a winner is not produced, we request more samples. We then pass all of this data through a machine intelligence to verify if the part is correct. And finally we pass the part through a trusted human expert as the final stage of approval. This is the only way you can reliably make the highest quality parts in huge volume and still trust that the data is correct. Only parts made through this process can be "Verified by EE Concierge". Download our example library and evaluate the quality for yourself.

We store all of this parts data in a common format that we've been developing over the years at Upverter. This common format is our second secret weapon. It allows us to build intelligent export configuration and translation tools so that the users of EE Concierge can configure their parts library to export in exactly the same style as parts they make internally. One of the first steps to using EE Concierge is to provide us with your internal hardware team style guide, so that we can help you setup your export to be exactly the same as the parts you make manually.

Finally, our third secret weapon: we've built a sophisticated pricing algorithm so that you get charged a fair price for every part you request through the concierge. This algorithm is based on the complexity of the part - not how long it took us to make it, or how many parts specialists needed to be involved, or anything like that. You pay a fixed deterministic fair price based on the complexity of the part we made for you. Resistors are cheaper than BGAs, and parts that can be generated with our software are cheaper than non-standard connectors that we need to draw by hand.