On the organization of electronic parts

The Tower of Koffers. Can we sort it even better?

Note: This page is heavily a work in progress. Once this work is finished a plan will be proposed.

Here at RevSpace we have an ever growing assortment of electronic parts, organized on various levels. While looking for parts is a fairly good experience there is still some room for improvement.

I feel like there are some challenges, some of which listed below.

1. Finding the group of components.
2. Finding the specific location of specific parts.
3. Exploring which parts we have.
4. Finding additional information about the parts.

The goal of this brief work is to research and, if it proves to be possible, tackle these minor burdens in such a way that it can be implemented at the Space.

Scope and risks

While the Space could improve on other related areas as well, such as the recording of inventory counts, the main goal of this work is to structurally improve the way in which parts can be found.

Some important aspects to keep in mind are the following actions.

Setting up

• Simple and cheap.
• Must be able to set it up within a single day.

Keeping it up

• Easy end-use.
• Easy editing.
• Sustainable over longer periods.

Ethical considerations

Atoomnet went a step ahead to think about the consequences of such a system, listed below.

Having such a system in place to search for parts means that it has to be accessible. People using it more often will be a logical consequence.

• This could pave the way for people with malicious intent to abuse the fair-use policy. Outsiders will be able to obtain our free parts more easily.
  • How often are we going to give away one-off free parts?
• By restricting access to the system resource increases the burden of using such a system.
  • For example, having to login with LDAP sucks and makes you want to get up and search manually instead.
• On the other hand, maintaining our friendly stance towards newcomers (who seek parts) will statistically get us new members.

Problems of search strategies

Whenever you search for something, you are essentially doing one of four strategies.

• Explore: What a nice Tower! So many types of parts! Let me look what we got.
  • whatta we got
• Browse: Cool, we got 4000 series ICs. I think we can find a hex inverter in here.
  • which ones we got
• Locate: I need the 4069. Where are they?
  • wheres the thing
• Lookup: I found the 4069, but what brand is it? I can't use any Chinese ones in this project.
  • whats it do

Each such strategy rips open its own can of worms.

Explore

Exploring the Tower becomes more difficult if it is less organized. Obviously, it becomes much more difficult if Koffers are not located inside the Tower, which may force a user to look for missing Koffers first.

• This raises the question: how can we best organize the Koffers in such a way that...
  • people put them in an ordered fashion such that it makes the most sense; and
  • people keep putting them where they are supposed to?

Browse

There is no such system that aids us in browsing available parts, except for forcedly pointing our eyes directly at them.

Imagine you are looking for hex inverters. You know there could be multiple ICs doing the same thing.

• How can we best browse for parts that we (could) have?
  • How can we best identify them by type? Recognition is key. Do we even have any other hex inverters?

Locate

• How can we best search where specific parts should be stored?

Lookup

• How can we best provide additional information about a part?

Solutions: ideas

Let's try to come up with solutions which addresses the questions of each strategy. It's important to keep the key points in the scope in mind.

• Does it reach the goal?
• Is it not too much effort to do?
• Is it not too much effort to maintain?
• Will people actually use it?

Explore

• Build a system where people can easily check which Parts we (should) have in stock. Ideally a digital Catalogue.
  • Put the catalogue on an easily accessible central place, such as a website.
• Make sure the referenced Part storage locations are fixed.
  • This requires the Tower to have some kind of markings as to where to store each Koffer.

Browse

• Categorize the Parts (for each type of part) on most important parameters, and make search queries filterable.

I think people will use it: for example the combination MOSFET, SMD, <=12V, can be quite useful.

Locate

• For each Part in the Catalogue we should add where it is located.

Having to maintain a catalogue of all locations and the mappings thereof is tedious and is a high burden. This can be overcome by making it much more modular, but still. It sucks, man. To lower the burden compared to manually checking irl, we need to check what makes the latter so bad. Common nuisances:

• The part you look for is in another Storage/Place.
  • U IC diversen? U IC analoog? U 4000? SMD IC?
  • Turns out the AVR and ST programmers are in a separate Samla underneath the scopes.
• The boxes are shuffled.

Rationale:

• The location of a part should be a description of an object of a size in the order of magnitude m2, for example the Tower, the SMD Samlas, the soldering equipment rack.
• Boxes should have a fixed location, made clear with some kind of identifier.

Lookup

• Same points as listed at Browse.

For each part that exists in the Catalogue it should at least be categorized with the appropriate tag, such as IC, MOSFET, Diode and such.

We might as well add some metadata. This metadata can be obtained from various sources with the aid of Octopart.

This is quite a bit of work. The metadata of parts never change though. The real burden here is to add metadata whenever you add something to the Catalogue.

Other notes

supakeen suggests to first asking ourselves what do we expect to have at the space? Such a question will guide us to prioritize on a base collection of parts and to make space accordingly. All other parts that we have will be a nice supplementary collection.

Atoomnet suggests to make per category an "exotic parts" box which are such obscure parts that do not belong in the main collection.

Proof of concept

By building a small proof of concept we can see if it's chill, how much work it is and if it's worth the hassle.

Big picture

As a proof of concept, we could start by mapping out one of the wooden boxes of Koffers in the Tower, along with some other Samlas to the right of it.

• Implement a system which keeps storage locations in place.
• Create a Catalogue system which allows manipulating Parts, Locations and their tags. It should also accept and spit out queries.
• List the parts
  • Tag along their specs and location.
  • Use it with the following kind of queries:
    • Find part location (show parts, pick one, focus on location)
    • Find part details (show parts, pick one, focus on metadata)
    • Find fitting part (show metadata categories, enter one or more filters, show parts results)
    • Look around (show categories, pick one, show parts) or (show locations, pick one, show associated parts)

Implementation

WIP

Background and structure

An opened Koffer.

This part is kinda irrelevant for now.

We have quite some parts. Some participants have come up with clever logistic solutions which brings us to the current situation.

Storage structure

The main point of focus is the Tower of storage boxes.

• The boxes used are the Allit EuroPlus Flex 37-17 Assortimentskoffer (picture).
• Each Koffer is labelled which category of parts it contains.
• Each Koffer has an internal configuration of storage parts (Inserts), which allows them to be modular. Inside the Koffer there are two sections.
  • main section: up to 4x6 individual 1x1 Inserts can be put, or Inserts with dimensions which are multitudes thereof.
  • front section: The front section of each Koffer is a fixed mold with two smaller compartments and a single wide compartment. Inserts do not apply to this section.
• Koffers can be put at any location inside the Tower.

Let us define a compartment to be any main section Insert or front section compartment, designatable to store parts.

Usual routine

When we want to store a part, one or more compartments are designated to store the part by means of labeling them and putting the parts inside.