Library of open source designs?

[mabartibin]

In the context of a research project about electronic waste recycling, I’m looking for data about the composition of electronic devices.  Essentially BOMs.  It’s hardly possible of course to get our hands on the BOMs of a good selection of commercial products.  But as a starting point I wonder whether there is some collection of open source designs?

That would at least allow to produce statistics about the values (sizes) of used capacitors, correlations between certain ICs and associated passives (decoupling caps at least) etc.

We could try to scrape github for shared design files, but that might end up being being quite a project in itself.

I seem to remember (hallucinate?) reading about shared designs in connection with some PCB manufacturer…?

Any hints appreciated!

Martin

[Nominal Animal]

I use oshwlab.com (see my projects), and many but not all do include BOMs.  When included, you can even download the BOM in Excel 2007+ format; I suggest you use Python and one of the Excel format libraries like pylightxl to read and convert the files. (Many of the OSHWLab projects are created using the EasyEDA online PCB editor suite, which includes integration with JLCPCB manufacturing and LCSC parts catalog. Very gentle learning curve for hobbyists.)

The downside is that these are typically hobbyist projects –– including mine! –– so quality varies a lot, and is predominantly on the lower end of the scale.  There are also a lot of variants of the same project (due to Open Source HardWare making it easy to do so, especially for us hobbyists), so you'll get very skewed results unless you human-filter the projects.  Auto-scraping the entire site would also be quite unfriendly; at minimum, contact them and describe your project and intent for the data, first.

[tooki]

Many IC manufacturers have huge libraries of reference designs and evaluation board designs one can download. I’ve used ones from TI and Analog Devices many times. Some of them are barebones, others are practically complete enough to package and sell.