I have mostly really enjoyed the DigiKey search engine for the last few decades. However, it has one glaring shortcoming. Several parameters on parts, such as power supply input voltage or RF component frequency, are specified as a range, not as separate min and max fields. This makes it impossible to find a part based on the max value, since the min value pollutes the search.
I realize that this is a big undertaking, but I personally feel that it would be worth running a script to separate the min and max values in the database to make searching more effective.
How can this request be sent to the people who would implement it?
Greetings,
The feedback tab is the best way to weigh in on such matters: it gets wide attention and serious consideration, particularly when one provides feedback that is specific, articulate, and considerate.
Ease of selection within attributes expressed as ranged values is a known issue receiving significant attention. The issue is often more complicated than first appearances may suggest, due to variations both in how different manufacturers express a given idea and differences in the underlying parts themselves.
Take AC-input power supplies as an example: some are still built with a manual-switch voltage doubling front end, whereas others are built with a “universal input” PFC-based front end. Some are characterized/qualified for DC-input operation, others not. Some suppliers express a nominal input range exclusive of required margins for line variation, others give numbers taking that margin into account.
Best practice for coping with the mess is to use one’s other care-abouts to narrow the slate of options first; this alone will often improve things considerably. Thereafter, I often use the “download table” button to pull results into Excel and parse things as desired there. The excel find/replace function interprets the asterisk () as a wildcard character, so a column full of “X ~ Y” values can be separated into min/max by duplicating it and replacing all "~" with nothing in one, and replacing all “*~” with nothing in the other. The “replace all” trick in conjunction with scientific notation is also handy for normalizing units; replacing “KΩ” with “e3” and “MΩ” with “e6” for example can give a person data in uniform, math-able numeric units useful for calculating figures of merit, graphing, or other purposes.