RS Gives More Information on DesignSpark Access Levels

Earlier this year, RS announced that it was changing the way that users had access to the company’s Designspark community. It now has three subscription levels for members - ‘DesignSpark Explorer’, ‘DesignSpark Creator’ and ‘DesignSpark Engineer’, with each level offering different levels of access to the engineering tools on the site. The basic layer, DesignSpark Explorer is free and aimed at students, makers, and designers. It provides members with the same community access and tools and design resources that they already have on the site. DesignSpark Creator is the intermediate level, and will allow users access to more advanced tools and resources. £9.99 per month will provide you with the same features as Explorer, but with an enhanced version of DesignSpark Mechanical. The highest level of access is DesignSpark Engineer, which costs £14.99 per month and is targeted at professional-level engineers. Offering all the benefits of Creator, it adds a new advanced feature set to DesignSpark PCB.

The senior management team at DesignSpark hosted a call last week to to give further details on the changes to the site. Those changes were made to cater for the different types of users, with many asking for more powerful tools, according to Mike Bray, Vice-President of Innovation and DesignSpark at RS. Designspark now has 1.3 million registered users, with 5 million visitors and 7 million page views each year from all around the world. The users can be broken down into comprising roughly 20% from academia or professional institutes, 40% hobbyists, makers or pro makers and 40% from the professional sphere. The breadth of user provides RS with rich insight, and allows the company to poll users on what features they’d like added to the site.

“Users told us that they'd like more tools, and simulation and test tools require a little bit more horsepower than the tools that they can get access to today, so they had already realised that additional features would likely come at a cost”, explained Bray. He continued, “The bigger concern for our audience was paying costs without being locked into longer term high value contracts. The additional tools or resources were seen by users as being very valuable if we could offer them, and that insight led to DesignSpark 2.0. We are giving our members the opportunity to upgrade at any point, and dial that back whenever they are finished. The upgrade gives access to capabilities that could cost many hundreds of pounds, euros or dollars”.

In practice, this means that DesignSpark Creator contains an enhanced version of DesignSpark Mechanical. The extras will include a 3D Mirror tool and detailing tools to annotate parts and create manufacturing drawings, and enhanced part libraries that provide further intelligence on component capabilities and status. DesignSpark Engineer beefs up RS’s DesignSpark PCB software with the ability to use blind and buried vias, custom pad shapes, differential pair routing, a panels editor, and hierarchical schematic block capability. The top version also offers more part intelligence data, including export compliance data and PCN/EOL notifications, as well as help with component alternatives.