Thanks for sharing your experience. I do hesitate on projects like this for this rreason, it’s always the small stuff that seems to get in the way of a streamlined experience. That said, I feel like building one rather than buying off the shelf would give me a lot more know-how about how to troubleshoot and maintain the system I am using, plus I prefer to support Open Source initiatives when I can over walled gardens.
You know, as an aside, this kind of part kitting is one of those things that I think LLMs might actually make a meaningful change in very shortly. No one wants to individually order all the parts on a BOM right now because it is a bunch of labor, but do it once with an activity log of your purchasing behavior and the sites/vendors used and there is no reason it cant be fully automated and shareable as simply as the BOM itself. Add in a function to check pricing and inventory against other related vendors and it could get quite good.
Thanks for sharing your experience. I do hesitate on projects like this for this rreason, it’s always the small stuff that seems to get in the way of a streamlined experience. That said, I feel like building one rather than buying off the shelf would give me a lot more know-how about how to troubleshoot and maintain the system I am using, plus I prefer to support Open Source initiatives when I can over walled gardens.
You know, as an aside, this kind of part kitting is one of those things that I think LLMs might actually make a meaningful change in very shortly. No one wants to individually order all the parts on a BOM right now because it is a bunch of labor, but do it once with an activity log of your purchasing behavior and the sites/vendors used and there is no reason it cant be fully automated and shareable as simply as the BOM itself. Add in a function to check pricing and inventory against other related vendors and it could get quite good.