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Make Electrical Component Selection Suck Less

Details

External ID
45813943
Source
HN
Company
—
Product
Make Electrical Component Selection Suck Less
Website domain
get-merlin.com
Launched
Nov. 4, 2025
Cohort
—
Upvotes
8
Upvotes percentile
0.4421397379912664
Tags
—
Fetched at
Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.
Updated at
Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.

Description

We're building Merlin to speed up electrical component selection, starting with ceramic capacitors. Overview video: https://youtu.be/FrGrivAKhncThe problem: We hated the tedious work of choosing components: copying specs into spreadsheets, taking screenshots from multiple datasheets, and cross-referencing parameters across manufacturers.What we built:- A comparison tool that displays all relevant electrical/mechanical specs along with the performance curves in a single view- An alternates tool that identifies equivalent parts based on a reference componentWe think this helps because: Instead of juggling multiple browser tabs and Excel sheets, you can quickly verify if a part meets your requirements and find alternates when your current part is out of stock or EOL. We found it also helps during the design phase to readily compare specs and find better parts.Try it out at www.get-merlin.com - we'd love your feedback, especially:- What information are we missing that you need?- What component types would be most valuable?- How does your team currently handle component selection?You can use the comparison tool for free, and we have a 14 day trial of the alternates tool available now.

Enrichment

Theme
graphics rendering and visual tools
Vertical
Manufacturing
Function
Vertical SaaS
Audience
B2B
AI stance
Not AI
Project type
Commercial product
Normalized one-liner
electrical component selection tool
Manually corrected
False

Could you build this?

Partial A web interface for comparing electrical parts is standard, but accurately extracting parametric data and curves from thousands of messy manufacturer PDF datasheets requires complex document-parsing pipelines.

What it would actually take: The architecture needs an automated scraping and document processing pipeline using OCR and vision-language models fine-tuned to extract tables, graphs (e.g. DC bias derating curves for MLCCs), and mechanical specs from arbitrary manufacturer datasheets. Building a reliably structured component database requires deep electronics hardware engineering domain knowledge to normalize electrical parameters correctly.

Discussion

No comments on this launch.

Competitors

Other products that read as similar to this one — 17 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.

Attention rank: #9 of 18 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).

Looks like the first mover among its competitors.

Other launches for this product

Same idea, different domain

Nobody's really built a vertical saas tool for Insurance yet.