Comment by kasbah | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kasbah | Hacker News Reader

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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 :)

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