Comment by kasbah | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kasbah | Hacker News Reader

The UI looks and feels very polished. Congrats on shipping. Well done! Nice work on not re-inventing the wheel and using Git as well.

> Automated BOM generator that can detect parts in a project and give you a cost estimation of how much the parts will cost.

I imported a project [1] but couldn't find anything about the BOM (though I have several in the repo). This is something I have been working on for https://kitspace.org. We may be able to collaborate on some standardisation here (e.g. the repo I imported has a kitspace.yaml file that points at the BOM - the BOM formatting is standardised as well - I can link you to the docs if you wish).

Other than that, something I'd really like to see as a user is the ability to add my SSH public key and even better would be the ability to just "sync" an existing Git repository. This is something that https://cadlab.io has and it seems to be very similar to InventHub.

Can you talk more about the technologies used to build this? What's your front-end framework of choice? Did you implement Git-hosting from scratch or did you manage to reuse an open source project like Gitea or Gogs?

[1]: https://app.inventhub.io/kaspar/sangaboard/tree/master/

Hi, Thank you so much for your kind words and appreciation. we tried our best to make the UI user friendly, glad that you liked it :)

Definitely, there was not point of making something from scratch in place of Git.

> Automated BOM generator is under-development and is not released yet. I just visited https://kitspace.org and I really like what you are doing. I totally agree there needs to be a standardization and we can definitely collaborate on this. It would be great if you can link me to the docs so we can improve the feature we are building.

Also, what will be the best way to get in touch with you I would like your feedback on BOM generator.

> SSH Keys & Sync feature with other Git repos are in development and will be out soon. It nice to see someone else doing the same thing, the more the better.

> Technologies - We implemented git from scratch because we were initially more focused on the design conversion + faster rendering. Now when we were thinking to expand on git like features it was taking us too much time so we are considering to utilize Gitea and focus more on hardware centric features.

Frontend - ReactJS Backend - NodeJS, GoLang, Python(Server-less functions for design conversion) Database - MongoDB and MYSQL

We figured the limitation of NodeJS and are now planning to migrate the infrastructure on GoLang. Gitea will come in handy for this as well. A lot of things will come off the shelf.

Nice, thanks for the honest answers about the tech. I think focusing in on what makes hardware different is definitely the right move. I have been working on using Gitea as the Kitspace back-end as well.

Regarding the BOMs, the manifest is documented on the Kitspace readme [0]. The BOMs themselves are mainly documented in the 1-click BOM readme [1]. I also put an MIT licensed parsing library on NPM [2].

The parsing library has seen a lot of feature creep, expanding what it accepts: it can now parse Excel, ODS and even .kicad_pcb. However, what it outputs may be the more useful standard. BOMs in this format have predictable headings, are tab-seperated (so you can actually just parse by splitting on \n and \t) and are always served on

    https://kitspace.org/<project>/1-click-BOM.tsv (e.g. [3])

My email is in my HN profile, always happy to talk more about it.

[0]: https://github.com/kitspace/kitspace#kitspaceyaml-format

[1]: https://github.com/kitspace/1clickBOM#all-cad-programs

[2]: https://www.npmjs.com/package/1-click-bom

[3]: https://kitspace.org/boards/gitlab.com/bath_open_instrumenta...

No problem! >I have been working on using Gitea as the Kitspace back-end as well.

That's great do let me know how was your experience. Will let you know if we plan to use gitea may be my development will of help for you as well with regards to using Gitea.

> Regarding the BOMs, the manifest is documented on the Kitspace readme [0]. The BOMs themselves are mainly documented in the 1-click BOM readme [1]. I also put an MIT licensed parsing library on NPM [2].

This is amazing and very thoughtful project. Its a really good standard for us to adopt and expand on with regards to our ideas of BOM generator and I see a very solid base line. I am going to sit and tinker with this tonight.

Thanks for sharing the contact info, will be in touch soon to share the ideas and get your feedback.

Good stuff, thanks for the kind words. If you are trying the lib, probably best to use it straight from GitHub. I got a bit sloppy about releasing it to NPM and have been using GitHub versions everywhere.

It's interesting to think about how to make BOM parsing a more universal solution. Some things I do for Kitspace definitely don't scale. Embedding a lot of header aliases into npm-1-click-bom is one of them.

Anyway, sorry to make this so much about me and my work. Great to see new platforms in this space. I am definitely going to follow along, try it out some more and see where it goes even if we don't manage to work together, but let's try and keep in touch.

My pleasure :) Great I will try it with GitHub. No worries I can understand.

>It's interesting to think about how to make BOM parsing a more universal solution. Some things I do for Kitspace definitely don't scale. Embedding a lot of header aliases into npm-1-click-bom is one of them.

May be we will be able to contribute back with some scalable strategies once we start utilizing it.

> Anyway, sorry to make this so much about me and my work. Great to see new platforms in this space. I am definitely going to follow along, try it out some more and see where it goes even if we don't manage to work together, but let's try and keep in touch.

Oh no worries I loved your work and I am glad you shared it we would have been reinventing the same thing when something sophisticated already existed out there.

It would be really great if you can use the product and keep sharing the feedback we are in it for long and we will make sure to give it the shape hardware industry needs.

Definitely I will stay in touch even if we don't work together. I am happy that I made a new friend here on HN today :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com