• Let me give you a quick overview of how you can make electrinics.
• You have a printed circuit board, typically made of fiber glass and copper tracks
• You could try and etch these yourself but they have become very affordable to order in the past decade.
• So you have this board, often shortened to PCB And you have components, with legs or pins, that you solder on by careful application of heat and solder wire

• You can have through hole components where the legs stick through a hole in the boord

• And you can have surface mount components, which are often shortened to SMT or SMD

• If you are making more than one board, or you have very tiny surface mount components you typically want to use a reflow process.
• You apply solder paste, site the component on top and heat it up.
• Often people hack toaster ovens to have more control over the temperature curve

• If you are interested in doing this, you should check out your local hackspace and learn how.
• Here in bristol we have a modified toaster oven and plenty of friendly people that are willing to show you how to use it.
• We also have a lot of other cool tools like a laser cutter and 3d printer, go check us out on the web!

• The way to design these boards is to use a schematic entry and a PCB layout software.
• You draw out a schematic, which is a sort of map where you want all your connections to go.
• And then place them onto a model of a board and route the connections your previously defined
• Once you make a design you can share this with people, and in theory someone should be able to replicate it.
• So that's what we call open hardware.

• And it's growing!
• I gave a presentation at FOSDEM in febuary and took a rough survey and did the same again last week
• And there are other places to put up projects as well
• So what's the problem?

• The problem
• The problem is that it's hard to document electronics in a way that allows others to replicate them
• Often it takes considerable effort to understand someone else's work
• Projects can be simultaneously brilliant but not reproducable
• There is no clear standard way to present the information that reduces the friction

• So what we would like, is something that incorporates all these different ways of doing things

• Allows you to make the PCB

• And allows you to purchase the parts

• And this is my approach to try and solve this
• The Kitnic.it web service
• and the 1-click BOM browser extension

• The browser extension tries to completely reduce the friction between a BOM and the retailer shopping cart
• It does this by replicating the web requests that your browser sends when using the site
• Currently works for these retailers

1-click BOM extension

• Available for Chrome and Firefox
• Takes in tab separated values (the clipboard format of spreadsheet programs)
• Can load a online BOM
• Able to add to and remove from cart
• Can have a guess at what part you mean
• Open source (CPAL)
• About 600 users

• So this kind of solves one aspect of our goal.
• We can replicate purcheses across the globe
• But it doesn't include the PCB and there is no standard way to package a complete project to be replicated

• So this is where kitnic.it comes in.
• We combine the BOM with gerber files and put the in a Git repository
• And kitnic.it makes a page out of this for people to access