Online interactive assembly guides for Eagle and KiCad projects

[kasbah]

We've just deployed Eagle support for our Interactive HTML BOM integration on kitspace.org. KiCad has been supported for a few months now.

This integration gives projects a guide that helps with DIY assembly by showing component locations and letting you check them off as you go. Here are some examples:

* The Open Book (DIY ebook reader) page | assembly guide
* DIY Particle Detector (electron detector variant) page | assembly guide
* AAduino (Arduino clone that fits in an AA battery holder) page | assembly guide

Check out the rest of the projects on Kitspace for more. This is all possible thanks to the awesome Interactive HTML BOM and KiCad (which can import Eagle projects).

If you have an open source project that could benefit from having a guide like that, you should add it to Kitspace! Let me know if you need any help with that.

[Ranayna]

That looks awesome 

For larger boards like in your first example, would it be possible to setup a hotkey to zoom in to the specific area of the board where the part should be placed? Hitting it again should jump to the next position for lines with multiple items. Or maybe enable that only in ungrouped mode.
I like that you can click on components to get to the BOM item, but it can be difficult to actually hit the component. In this assembly view, is it actually useful to be able to click on traces or pads? For pure assembly i would think that clicking on a pad should select the component to which the pad belongs.
Minor nitpick: In the BOM itself, the table headers "Sourced", "Placed" and "Quantity" are broken, that looks very odd, and the column width cannot be adjusted to make them fit.

Sorting for the proper assembly order (i.e. part height, parts blocked by other parts, and stuff like that) has to be done manually by whomever creates the BOM, i assume?

[kasbah]

Thanks Ranayna, those are all very fair points. I think they would all need to be addressed in the upstream project though. Do you mind adding your feedback there? https://github.com/openscopeproject/InteractiveHtmlBom/issues/new

The order is left undecided, yes. Would be cool to specify it though.