PasteBOM.com, and no, that's not a typo!

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Hey guys,

I wanted to share something I’ve been working on for (an embarrassingly) long time now. The time taken is more attributed to my lack of networking and server skills, but I digress.

www.pastebom.com is a website I’ve made from scratch, running on a server I set up at home - when it starts getting more hits, I’ll move it to a proper hosting service somewhere, like Amazon.

The premise is a fairly simple one, but one I think has been over looked - sharing BOMs, it’s imgur for boms! I know you can email, put them in Gdrive, etc, but I always found this a hassle. PasteBOM allows you to upload (just drag and drop!) a CSV bom, and in return gives you a short, unique, URL for sharing, posting on social media, forums, YouTube descriptions, whatever! My experience is no one likes to download anything anymore, for simple viewing, the web browser is the way forward.

At the moment, it’s the bare bones functionality, you drop a bom, get a link and are able to view the bom online and share with others. But I think this has as lot of scope. Future ideas are to integrate this with KiCAD, KiCAD generates nice looking CSV boms, it would be really cool to have a plugin that pushes this to pastebom, and gives a link in return.

Another feature soon to be integrate is version control, the ability to update the bom with another, and have a history of what’s changing. I think this would also be a good way to keep track of personal stock/inventory for hobbyist too.

Any way, check it out and let me know what you think! (constructive criticisms are always welcomed!) I’d be interested if this is something you might use to share initial BOMs with clients, in a quick easy manner (instead, if you’re like me, of adding a downloaded bom to your /Desktop/New_Desktop/qwert/this/ folders!)

Max

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Hey Max, looks interesting. I tried it with several .csv files but it tells me “only .CSV is supported” :man_shrugging: Here are the files I tried: csv-boms.zip (1.6 KB)

If you wanted you could add 1-click BOM extension support to this, allowing people to 1-click add to cart for Digikey, Mouser etc. What you’d have to do is serve up a .tsv file in the right format so it can be loaded into the extension.

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sigh, that’ll teach me to try and attempt to work on the site live, instead of a local copy! It should work, now. Thank you very much for alerting me, that wouldn’t of made a good first impression!

If you could add this to your 1 click bom (something i hadn’t seen before, but will be installing now!) that would be pretty cool! How do you envision it would work?

EDIT//

looks like there’s an issue tabulating your bom atm. I’ll check it out as it’s a good chance to make the program more robust

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Great, works now after a hard refresh.

If you turn the .csv into a .tsv (tab seperated values) and serve it up, then it can be loaded into the extension. Of course there are restrictions on the format in terms of what can be understood. This is all described to some degree in the readme on Github. We also have a Javascript lib that can parse various formats including .xlsx and .kicad_pcb that you could actually include into your service.

Another thing you could consider is adding popups with component info and datasheet links like we do on Kitspace. We grab this through a backend called Partinfo. This depends on BOMs in a particular format too though.

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Ah excellent, that sounds great! (yeah I forgot to mention to clear the cache!)

I’ll take a look at this later tonight, this would be very cool, and the datasheet links etc is a great idea, that certainly a feature i’ll add! Thanks a bunch!

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I like the idea! Works fine for me. Another feature that could be really good is to “map” columns (reference designators, amounts, MPN and so on). Once you have this in place, you could make buttons for downloading into formats that are accepted at PCB maker “X”? :slight_smile:

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Oh that’s a great idea! I know LCSC has an upload function, so that would be a great place to start and see how they generally want the formats to be. I’m really interested in the idea of silkscreen the pastebom ID on to PCBs, to have a live BOM available easily

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