Original Summary

Inventory sucks. Trying to figure out what you have, where it is, and what you need to buy is annoying and the least glamorous part of making things. I've been working on this for a bit over 4 years now that came out of the issues of COVID electronic parts shortages. For some background, I'm an electrical engineer predominantly but have spent a lot of time around embedded systems and delved into pretty much every area I can get my hands on in terms of electronics. Due to working at small companies, I have usually been very close with the production floors, sometimes literally being 10 feet away from my desk. Getting familiar with the manufacturing leads, the technicians actually putting the things I designed together, and trying to keep everyone up to date in purchasing and manufacturing. While working as the sole electrical engineer at a prior employer, I had the joy of managing their decades old designs, during the COVID parts shortages. While some of it was annoying, the worst of it was this linear encoder that went obsolete. The manufacturing lead tasked me with trying to figure out a replacement, but I only had 2 weeks as they only had enough for two more units. To my chagrin, there wasn't a "drop in" replacement due to tolerance and availability issues, resulting in those 2 weeks becoming 6 months of work. The part that scares me years later, is that manufacturing ended up buying old units off of eBay, refurbishing them, and then reselling them as new just to keep things moving. It bothered me that there didn't seem to be an immediate way to resolve this issue, and since I try to put a lot of effort into reducing cognitive load in my workflows, I began working on what would become warecache . I wanted to remove the human error of having to physically count what is in inventory, as it repeatedly came up as the sole source of problems with inventory (besides communication of course). In addition, it would be nice to know where things are, and what I can actually make with the parts on hand. I know I'm not the only one who has hoarded tons of components over the years, leftover from small projects or prototypes. At the various jobs I've had, there have also been many instances where buying new was faster than digging through mountains of bins. So I have created a system that allows for custom sensor storage bins, that could sit on a workbench which then report back to a central server to be accessed by everyone needed. Purchasing will know when they need to buy new components, manufacturing knows when they will run out of the current inventory and has accurate numbers for what is on the stock shelves, and the engineers know if the part they need is amongst the stockpile from 10 years ago. The hardware is what I feel sets this all apart from every other system, open source or closed. Since I wanted to make this available to work with any industry, I focused on making two sensor bins to start: a weight based and

  • 情报分类：商业与市场研究
  • 分类依据：内容涉及商业、投资或市场动态
  • 信息来源：Reddit · SideProject
  • 发布时间：2026/9/25 06:33:07