EEVblog® Electronics Community Forum

Electronics => Manufacturing & Assembly => Topic started by: mkedar on March 05, 2026, 06:27:41 pm

Title: Stop wasting time on hardware logistics and get to building.
Post by: mkedar on March 05, 2026, 06:27:41 pm

Hey guys! While working on my hardware start-up in the past, I got tired of using spreadsheets and scouring random Google sites for part search.
To help manage all this, I vibe-coded a tool over the weekend.

To try the demo website (with the demo/mock data), checkout

https://odem-git-main-skymark.vercel.app/ (https://odem-git-main-skymark.vercel.app/)
Email: demo@gmail.com
Pass: test123

It's super early stage, and mostly mock data, but it's been pretty useful so far. It's got
- Historical price data for parts (predictions?)
- Supply chain risk calculation (for those hoping to get past the prototype stage)
- Alternative part finder (mock on demo)
- LLM-based part search (mock on demo)
- GIT-ish BOM management
- CSV Import/Export
- And more :)

To any hardware founders out there, are there any features you'd kill to have while working on your products?

Also, if anyone wants to try it out properly for their projects, let me know. Will not only let you use it for free, but also build out whatever you want.

Here is a quick demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YPuKl5_qoG8 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YPuKl5_qoG8)

Title: Re: Stop wasting time on hardware logistics and get to building.
Post by: RRRXXX on March 16, 2026, 09:59:25 am

Good idea, but as I know, some big company is on this field, and they are collecting data. But opensource is always supported!

Title: Re: Stop wasting time on hardware logistics and get to building.
Post by: Doctorandus_P on April 01, 2026, 11:43:22 pm

For KiCad, there is a project called KiCost. It's intention is to collect pricing data from various sites, and it started to work quite nice. But then it turned out that the big shops don't want to be compared with their competitors in a way that is convenient for users and they make it difficult to keep a pricing database up to date.

I played around a bit with octopart (now bought by altium) and it also shows a very one sided view of the market. It does for example not show parts from LCSC.

For my hobby projects, I also want to keep an eye on "getting rich from mass production". For a hobby project, you can buy a TPIC6B595 but it's more expensive then a uC with more pins. Not a big deal for DIY, but it kills series production. At digikey I found the 3peak TPM0596 for 18ct. That's nice, but only full reels. That pretty much excludes hobbyists and prototypes.

Title: Re: Stop wasting time on hardware logistics and get to building.
Post by: H.O on April 07, 2026, 05:00:36 am

Sorry for the semi-ot, nice find on the TPM0596 Doctorandus_P.
The non-C variant of it seems to be available in single digit quantities:
https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/3peak/TPM0596-TS3R/22229608 (https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/3peak/TPM0596-TS3R/22229608)

A quick look at the datasheet doesn't tell what the difference is, same package, specified temperature range.