Show HN: Kitnic – A new way to share your electronics projects
kitnic.it
kitnic.it
The first step will likely be to add direct links to the PCB fabs. Assembly would be a step beyond that. I am currently trying to figure out: what are the benefits of an "on-demand" manufacture of open source hardware projects?
We actually have a lot of people asking us to provide this kind of functionality for open-source projects. In a lot of cases, the projects have complex assembly requirements (like BGAs) that restrict self-assembly to the most capable makers. By making it really easy and affordable for people to order a single unit, they see it as an excellent way to spread their project to the world.
Our model is designed to support the business-side of electronics manufacturing and operations, and our intention is to be impartial to which marketplaces/how makers sell their products. Instead, focusing on enabling connections to those market places. This is why we have not chosen to create this sort of marketplace for our customers directly. (We are integrating with a lot of other popular platforms for makers/inventors that want to sell their designs later this year.)
I'd love to help you create this sort of integration, or to answer any questions you have - please feel free to reach out to me here, or at church at macrofab net. Our API documentation is also available here: https://factory.macrofab.com/apidoc/v2/
Our focus in the short term is getting more content up on the site by helping people put things into the right format.
In the long term we definitely want to look at making the links to manufacturing easier and your API looks interesting.
I had a quick glance at the way you take in position data (what are xyyrs though?). It'd be interesting to try and standardize on something there even just to do some helper visuals for DIY builds.
Btw. getting a 404 on this: https://macrofab.com/apidoc/v2/raml.zip
Our XYRS (X-postion, Y-position, Rotation, and S[ide|ize]) is combined placement and bill of materials format. For several EDA tools, we extract that automatically (Eagle, KiCad, Diptrace, and anything ODB++), but it provides a complete set of details for us to do the assembly.
For helper visuals on DIY builds, have you seen Copper App? They have one of the best DIY-walkthrough for building that I've seen, on-par with what we've built for our assembly techs, but very clean and polished for casual users.
As you finish building out the platform and start thinking about whether or not you want to provide some direct ordering connections, please keep us in mind. Also, if I can help with structuring data for our service in any way, please don't hesitate to ask!
The site is currently compiled to static pages hosted on GitHub and that's where contributions are handled too (through pull requests). We use Node and Coffeescript for the compilation and ES6+React on the front-end.