Arclight  wrote:
> We use notebooks with baseball card pages and 3-hole punched anti-static foam 
> sheets to hold through-hole parts, DIP chips, and cut tape SMT components. 

For through-hole components, connectors, switches, etc, we have drawer cabinets:
http://i3detroit.com/wi/index.php?title=Electronics_Room

The first photo on that page is an overlay map showing where everything is, and that's reasonably current. The second photo is ancient, from back when we only had 4 cabinets, instead of the present 14. :) Anything static-sensitive is poked into ESD foam in the drawers, but yeah, the drawers themselves are cheap polyethylene and a static nightmare.

For SMT passives, they come in a binder:
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=190790845877
We don't have a good solution for larger SMT stuff yet.

There's no "inventory" kept on any of that stuff, rather, members are asked to notify if something's out of stock or nearly so, or if there's something they need and we don't have it yet. If we run out of one particular value, it's probably a popular value, so we'll order a whole bunch of it next time. Orders go in every few weeks, whenever someone needs something unique, and anything that's been standing on the "order soon" list gets thrown in.

Then, in the other half of the room, we have clear bins (plastic "shoebox" bins from Home Depot) for all sorts of stuff, here's a sampling:
USB cables
USB devices, hubs, adapters
Flash memory and adapters
GPS
GPIB 
Magstripe
ISO7816/Smartcard/SIM
RFID
Webcams
Lasers
RF connectors/adapters
Laptop power bricks
and about 60 more such bins. 

The items in those bins are mostly random, just a combination of individuals' collections. They're not "stocked", per se, just organized. Anyone's welcome to use any of the stuff in those bins, but they have to ask permission (i.e. find the owner) before removing it from the space. 

I can't imagine adding the overhead and hassle of an inventory system -- people having to check out and count down the number of components they used? That would slow down development and create more responsibilities for people to slack off... The guidelines for the electronics room are in the "zone warden sign" linked near the top of the page, and they're pretty simple.

Consumables in the rest of the space (welding wire, tungsten, argon, acetylene, oxygen, mills, drills, blades, sandpaper, vinyl, tape, fasteners) mostly manage themselves, with people chipping in a few bucks for what they use, and someone buying more when it runs out. But again, nobody keeps inventory of anything, except perhaps the vinyl where we do try to make sure all the common colors are on-hand regardless of what weird ones get brought in.

Now, what WOULD be useful, is if we had a way to identify the common hobbyist-relevant parts among the 3-million different parts on Mouser or whatever. Figure most of us will use maybe a thousand different parts in our entire lives, right? Murphy's law says that when I go looking for a part, I'll find the weird-ass one, use it in my design, and everyone I share the design with will curse me for picking such a nonstandard part.

If there was some way for Partkeepr or ecDB to show the most popular components across all users, then it'd be easy for us to see the most popular stuff everyone else has chosen, and choose the same. If every hobbyist-made PCB had the same common footprints, we'd be able to build copies of each other's designs using parts-on-hand. I think Lady Ada's Partfinder is helping us move in that direction already: http://www.ladyada.net/wiki/partfinder

-Nate-
