BOMIST: Parts Inventory and BOM Management

Thread Starter

msr

Joined Jul 8, 2008
64
Hey everyone,

Fun fact first: I just checked the date I joined All About Circuits: Jul 8, 2008!
This is mind blowing for me. Time flies! I remember printing (yes, paper format) a lot of AAC content/exercises to learn more and more about electronics.
I used to work as an hardware and embedded software engineer until a few years ago. I created a small business offering electronics development services but decided to give software and web dev a try while creating a small software utility to help me managing my inventory. From there I shifted I'd say 100% to software and web dev and that's kind of what brings me here today.

I just released a new version of BOMIST: <Mod: deleted link> (the software I initially created to help keeping my inventory on track)

I started coding it in C++/Qt (because, you know, C/C++ is what electronics people know the best) but soon this MVP became increasingly hard to maintain and to add new features - and often requested features. That's why I decided to re-write it, which took me roughly 1yr, and why I'm sharing the result now with you.

BOMIST is now cross-platform and I'd say the FREE plan is quite generous:
* you can manage parts, BOMs, purchasing, storage locations
* local database (you can use it offline and sync with other computers if you put it on a Dropbox folder for ex - there's also a (paid) plan for teams to collaborate on the same workspace)
* you can attach as many documents as you want to everything
* export every table into CSV, JSON, HTML or PDF
* write notes in markdown
* (and probably a few more things...)

Would love to know what you think. Questions and suggestions are all very welcome!
 
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bloguetronica

Joined Apr 27, 2007
1,541
Glad to see you here, too! As for the link, you are better off placing it on your profile description. Links are not allowed on posts at the AAC forums, which is unfortunate.

Anyway, I already saw that Bomist is an interesting BOM management tool. Do you have a Linux installer? Or can you provide a tarball? I prefer the latter, frankly, because I want to see what is getting installed.
 
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BobaMosfet

Joined Jul 1, 2009
2,110
At the company I work at, we were among the first companies to develop such a tool, for parametric inventory and retrieval of parts across all the tens of thousands of components, classifications, oems, and vendors we work with. The task of entering the inventory was monumental (taking photos, weighing parts, finding all docs to go with it, etc). We backed ours with a database as well. It is remarkable how insightful such a thing can be, and it is the only real way to keep track of parts after a certain point.

Our is 'EPD' (Electronic Parts Database). But it handles everything, from components to tools, equipment, anything we might have or use.

@msr
Would love to have talked with you about 15 years ago, if you were working on this then.
 

Thread Starter

msr

Joined Jul 8, 2008
64
@bloguetronica on linux BOMIST is released as an AppImage (it works on essentially every linux distro - thus avoiding distributing it as distro-specific file - .deb, .rpm etc - something I'm trying to avoid) and it's also available on the Snap store. I'd say the snap store in particular is quite awesome, all it takes is a "sudo snap install bomist" to have BOMIST installed. Still, if these two options really don't fit your needs just let me know.

@BobaMosfet thanks for sharing. 15yr ago I was finishing high-school!
 

bloguetronica

Joined Apr 27, 2007
1,541
@bloguetronica on linux BOMIST is released as an AppImage (it works on essentially every linux distro - thus avoiding distributing it as distro-specific file - .deb, .rpm etc - something I'm trying to avoid) and it's also available on the Snap store. I'd say the snap store in particular is quite awesome, all it takes is a "sudo snap install bomist" to have BOMIST installed. Still, if these two options really don't fit your needs just let me know.
...
If you release your binaries or source code in a tarball (tar.gz), you can avoid distro-specific issues. But anyway, it seems that snap comes pre-installed with Kubuntu, so, no problems.

I'm curious, how do you compile and distribute with snap?
 
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