[hackerspaces] Announcement: PartKeepr - Electronic Component Database

[Timo A. Hummel]

I'm happy to announce the "birth" of PartKeepr - an electronic component 
database with hackerspaces kept in mind.

I know that many hackerspaces have some kind of electronic lab, and most 
hackerspaces I've talked to don't use a database to track their 
electronic components. Reasons for that are very different - only a 
small number of parts or no shared parts at all; "offline" inventory 
systems (e.g. labeled drawers and boxes). However, our hackerspace 
RaumZeitLabor [1] from Mannheim, Germany has now exceeded 1.650 
different parts with an overall quantity of 30.500pcs available for 
projects, which makes it very much impossible to use any offline system.

Until now, we've used a software called PartDB (available in german 
only) to manage and inventorize parts, but the software wasn't designed 
for multiple users, the huge amount of parts we've got, and hackerspaces 
in general. So we decided to work on another system, started in late 
2010 and we're now near a first release. Many thanks goes out to Georgyo 
of the NYC resistor who "invented" the name PartKeepr this night.

I don't know if your hackerspace has similar huge numbers in terms of 
parts and quantity, but since PartKeepr is open source - feel free to 
have a look, leave comment, bugfixes, code, suggestions and start using 
it. A demo site with demo parts is available [2] - sorry, but our part 
names are german since we're from germany ;)

I've prepared a FAQ [3], which answers quite some questions that popped 
up when I showed PartKeepr to some people. Even if you don't have the 
need for a managemen software, you might find some nice ideas about 
inventorizing components.

Our code is on Github [4]. Feel free to fork!

Thanks,
Timo

[1] http://www.raumzeitlabor.de
[2] http://partkeepr.felicitus.org
[3] https://github.com/timoahummel/PartKeepr/wiki/FAQ
[4] https://github.com/timoahummel/PartKeepr

<http://www.ohloh.net/p/partkeepr>
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