Kit Space

This past week SGMK and ANORG in Zurich hosted a KitSprint where people were encouraged to create new electronics kits, document existing ones and make them "Shenzhen ready" i.e. ready to be ordered and built. Below, are pictures of the results.

Most of the BOMs still need to be sorted out. I released an alpha version of a BOM builder tool and have been showing people how to use it.

More information on the SGMK wiki.

The project has now been renamed to Kitspace. I feel the new name is more self-descriptive and people won't ask me about the '.it' TLD anymore. Go check it out at kitspace.org!

I've just deployed part information popups in the bill of materials view on Kitnic pages. You simply hover over the Manufacturer/MPN to get more information. You can also click the '...' button to get the full range of information available.

So far all of the information is retrieved from Octopart.

This should help in quickly answering part specific questions when looking at a project's BOM.

You can now preview your submission on https://kitnic.it/submit.

In trying to spread the word about the site we have been getting in touch with project creators that have published their work on GitHub. The goal is often to try and determine the bill of materials for a design and put it into our standard 1-click-bom.tsv format. As you might expect it can be a bit of a tedious process as there is no standard way to present the information and often the designers never put up their exact part selection!

But the good thing about going through this is that it motivates me to work on automation to make this work easier.

One of the most tiresome things is selecting generic SMD resistors and capacitors as often these won't be exactly defined but you won't care which exact part or manufacturer is selected. The solution I came up with is to match descriptions in the bill of materials against the Common Parts Library in the 1-click BOM extension. This is what that looks like in practice.

This works by:

1. Checking if the references are Rs or Cs, if so, extract the important parameters from the description and match against the Common Parts Library resistors and capacitors.
2. If not Rs or Cs or nothing is found from the CPL, search Octopart and Findchips and select the first result.

I am planning on adding more CPL matching for LEDs, ICs and through hole parts. I have also started work on searching retailer sites direct. Octopart and Findchips are really great and let the extension search a lot of different retailers with a little bit of code but they are sometimes a bit out of date and won't let me filter quite the way I want to.

After 2 days of work I deployed a README renderer to Kitnic so READMEs are displayed right in the page.

See https://kitnic.it/boards/github.com/JarrettR/USBvil/ for instance. It can really make a page much more approachable.

I am running a small promotion and giving away 20 orders through Dangerous Prototype's PCB service. In order to qualify you have to register a design of your own creation with Kitnic and once you do that I'll give you a coupon you can use at checkout when you order your PCBs.

PCB Stackup, the open source Gerber renderer we use and contribute to, has been getting a lot of attention lately with over 200 stars on GitHub.

Mike Cousins also recently deployed viewer.tracespace.io which uses the same rendering engine. It is a really neat Gerber preview site to inspect your boards. It gives you the full rendering like it would on Kitnic and also lets you inspect individual layers.

Gaudi (@info) recently added the production version of their 8BitMixtap to Kitnic. I believe it sounds similar to the one in this video.

Since I have entered this project into the Citizen Scientist round for the Hackaday Prize I want to make a case for its inclusion.

Reproducibility is a core principle of the Scientific Method and as a community of electronic experimenters we have a problem: it is too hard to replicate and validate each other's work. Both CERN and Hackaday have recognized this and that is why we have project sharing sites such as Hackaday.io and CERN's Open Hardware Repository. Clearly we are making progress.

One of the fundamental road blocks, one that Kitnic is trying to address in a very focused way, is the friction encountered looking at someone else's project. How can I get a PCB? What other parts do I need? On a Kitnic page the answer is very obvious and ordering the right bits is just a click away.

We want to make this standard practice for everyone that is happy to share their electronics work. This will foster collaboration in the present and serves as documentation for the future when the creator has long moved on to other things.

image: CC- BY Jean Peccoud