Denis Bohm of Firefly Design works on designing and manufacturing his own open source designs, with a focus on low power wireless sensing devices, activity monitors, Internet of things, and more. With a technical education background (BSEE Purdue, MSCS Stanford) and over 20 years of product design consulting experience, Denis is all too familiar with the challenges of production and varying degrees of scale:
“Lower volume (~10) is generally easy - all the parts are in stock or not. Higher volume (~10,000) is typically done ordering full reels and waiting for the required lead time. To do medium volume production (~1,000) with quick turn around it can be hard to find parts that are in stock.”
Managing this requires checking with many distributors and possibly ordering partial quantities from multiple sources. Keeping track of all that by hand in a spreadsheet is a lot of work.
“Since my designs are open source, I wanted a way for individuals or small teams to customize the designs and do quick turns of medium volumes.” says Denis. “I wrote this tool to fulfill that desire.“
As a long-time user of Octopart.com, Denis was familiar with Octopart’s capabilities and found the API a great fit for his purposes. He was up and running with it within an hour.
In future, Denis plans to enhancing the user interface, so that it shows the BOM and orders and updates them in real time. Read more about the app here.