Keeping track of stuff

Mostly to organize electronic components at home and at hackerspace. Store details in a database and make them findable with a pleasing fast search.

We use it at Noisebridge: https://parts.noisebridge.net/

If this is the first time you are using go, you might need to set up the GOPATH environment variable; please refer to golang documentation.

Uses SQLite to keep data in one file, so you need this external go dependency

go get github.com/mattn/go-sqlite3

For users with Go version < 1.7 This go-sqlite3 dependency uses 'context' which was built into go after golang v1.7. So, if you are using Go version < 1.7 (say on a raspberry pi or beaglebone black), then install the go context package, and you will need to modify something something in the go-sqlite3 and install the external packages

go get x/net/context package

Other than that, no external dependencies are needed.

To run the app navigate to the stuff/ directory and run:

make stuff
./stuff

You can then open it at http://localhost:2000/ to start adding stuff to your database.

These are the available options for the binary

Usage of ./stuff:
  -cache-templates
        Cache templates. False for online editing while development. (default true)
  -cleanup-db
        Cleanup run of database
  -dbfile string
        SQLite database file (default "stuff-database.db")
  -edit-permission-nets string
        Comma separated list of networks (CIDR format IP-Addr/network) that are allowed to edit content
  -imagedir string
        Directory with component images (default "img-srv")
  -logfile string
        Logfile to write interesting events
  -bind-address string
        Port to serve from (default ":2000")
  -site-name string
        Site-name, in particular needed for SSL
  -ssl-cert string
        Cert file
  -ssl-key string
        Key file
  -staticdir string
        Directory with static resources (default "static")
  -templatedir string
        Base-Directory with templates (default "./template")
  -want-timings
        Print processing timings.

There is a demo database in the db/ directory (which really is just a backup of the Noisebridge database). So you can play around by copying db/sqlite-file.db to stuff-database.db and play right away.

Let's try this:

cp ../db/sqlite-file.db stuff-database.db
./stuff -dbfile stuff-database.db

There are no images in this repository for demo; for your set-up, you can take pictures of your components and drop in some directory. If there is no image, some are generated from the type of component (e.g. capacitor or diode), and some color-coding image even generated from the value of a resistor.

To show your own component images, you need to point the -imagedir flag to a directory that has images with name <component-id>.jpg. So for bin 42, this would be 42.jpg.

By default, you can edit database from any IP address, but with -edit-permission-nets, you can give an IP address range that is allowed to edit, while others only see a read-only view. The readonly view also has the nice property that it is concise and looks good on mobile devices.

If you give it a key and cert PEM via the --ssl-key and --ssl-cert options, this will start an HTTPS server (which also understands HTTP/2.0).

Features

(work in progress of course)

• Enter form to enter details found in boxes with a given ID. Assumes that all your items are labelled with a unique number.
• Search form with search-as-you-type in an legitimate use of JSON ui :)
• Automatic synonym search (e.g. query for .1u is automatically re-written to (.1u | 100n))
• Boolean expressions in search terms.
• A search API returning JSON results to be queried from other applications.
• A way to display component pictures (and soon: upload). Also automatically generates some drawing if there is a template for the package name, or if it is a resistor, auto-generates an image with resistor color bands.
• Drag'n drop arrangement of similar components that should be in the same drawer. We have a large amount of different donations that all have overlapping set of parts. This helps organize these.
• An extremely simple 'authentication' by IP address. By default, within the Hackerspace, the items are editable, while externally, a readonly view is presented (this will soon be augmented with OAuth, so that we can authenticate via a login of our wiki).

Search	Detail Page with resistor	Mobile view

API

Next to a web-UI, this provides as well a search, status, and item information API with JSON response to be integrated in other apps, e.g. slack

API Endpoint	Required Query	Optional Queries
/api/search	q (search query)	count (default 100)
/api/status	offset (beginning item ID)	limit (default 100)
/api/info	id (ID of item)	(none)

Sample query

https://parts.noisebridge.net/api/search?q=fet

Optional URL-parameter count=42 to limit the number of results (default: 100).

Sample response

{
  "link": "/search#fet",
  "components": [
    {
      "id": 42,
      "equiv_set": 42,
      "value": "BUK9Y16-60E",
      "category": "Mosfet",
      "description": "Mosfet N-channel, 60V, 53A, 12.1mOhm\nSOT669",
      "quantity": "25",
      "notes": "",
      "datasheet_url": "http://www.nxp.com/documents/data_sheet/BUK9Y15-60E.pdf",
      "footprint": "LFPAK56",
      "img": "/img/42"
    },
    {
      "id": 76,
      "equiv_set": 76,
      "value": "BUK9Y4R4-40E",
      "category": "Mosfet",
      "description": "N-Channel MOSFET, 40V, 4.4mOhm@5V, 3.7mOhm@10V",
      "quantity": "4",
      "notes": "",
      "datasheet_url": "http://www.nxp.com/documents/data_sheet/BUK9Y4R4-40E.pdf",
      "footprint": "LFPAK56",
      "img": "/img/76"
    }
  ]
}

Sample status query

https://parts.noisebridge.net/api/status?offset=0&limit=3

Sample status response

{
  "link": "/status?offset=0&limit=3",
  "offset": 0,
  "limit": 3,
  "status": [
    {
      "number": 0,
      "status": "mystery",
      "haspicture": false
    },
    {
      "number": 1,
      "status": "good",
      "haspicture": false
    },
    {
      "number": 2,
      "status": "good",
      "haspicture": false
    }
  ]
}

Sample item query

https://parts.noisebridge.net/api/info?id=1

Sample item response

{
  "available": true,
  "item": {
    "id": 1,
    "equiv_set": 1,
    "value": "120",
    "category": "Resistor",
    "description": "",
    "quantity": "20",
    "img": "/img/1"
  }
}

Note

Beware, these are also my early experiments with golang and it only uses basic functionality that comes with the stock library: HTTP server and templates. It doesn't use a web framework of any kind, only what comes with the golang libraries. And it might not necessarily be pretty as I am learning.

HTML, CSS and JavaScript is hand-written and not generated - I want to keep it that way as long as possible to get a feeling of what would need to be done for a web framework (but be aware that my last exposure to HTML was around 1997, before there was CSS and working JavaScript ... so if you find something that should be stylistically better, let me know).

When the HTML output is not burried under various layers of abstractions it is also easier to understand what parts in web-browsers are slow and address them directly. So no dependency on golang web-frameworks or JQuery of stuff like that. Less dependencies are good.