BOM Generator

hey guys,

i recently finished the bill of materials generator i've been working on to the point where it is actually useful! basically it does 2 things:

[bom.reprap.org]

1. converts our per-module bill of materials into a list of unique parts
2. lets you choose suppliers for each of those parts.

for example, if you use it to generate a BOM for the cartesian bot, it will count up all the scattered M5 nuts and tell you exactly how many you need to buy, and then will tell you where you can get them. same thing for all the other stuff we have in the BOM.

i havent added in all the suppliers for every single part yet, so there are definitely some ones that are not supplied. also, we dont have a supplier for RP parts yet as well. we're working on it. =) if you have a suggestion for a supplier, please post it here.

[bom.reprap.org]

But it still lists every little thing even if it doesn't have a supplier? This is great, thank you so much. In the coming weeks, i'll be making my first trips to lowes and other places, so this is really helpfull.

Keep in mind that for those of us in the States, your local Lowes/Home Depot/Mom&Pop's Hardware may not have very many of the BOM parts. I certainly can't speak for all hardware stores everywhere, but I've yet to find a decent metric fastener section in any of the joints around here (western Washington State).

Kyle

its true that its hard to find metric parts here in the US, but there are definitely parts that could possibly be substituted (eg 1/8" or 10-24 for 3mm, etc.)

also, its very handy for ordering electronics... eg, for mouser, it generates a list you can simply copy / paste into their BOM importer and then it adds in all the proper parts and quantities. use your extra time to do something cool!

Ok, after actually *looking* at the new BOM format, very cool and great job! However, I've noticed that there are a few suppliers in the "choose suppliers" list that apparently don't exist, unless there's a store that goes by "Bad arguments on line 80" that I'm not familiar with! Say, that could be kind of a catchy name...

Just thought I'd give you a heads-up if you weren't aware of that yet. Overall, I'm very impressed.

lol, thanks for the heads up... which part / module was that on?

Great work. I'm in Australia, so most of the suppliers are harder to get access to, but this will make it all much easier to keep track of. Now I can start buying parts section by section from this. If you want, I can go through the list and try to find analogous numbers for Dick smith electronics stores(one of the minor suppliers listed) when I buy them here. They prob won't be that helpful for the website, but it might help with making shopping lists for rooting through the stores for parts here in Australia.

thats a great idea. we already have DSE parts for some stuff, but not all of it. if you'd like to help out, simply track down the numbers, post what part its for and the part # and i'll add them. or, if you'd like to do it yourself, i can give you access to the BOM.

I'd also like to recommend amazon.com's "Industrial and Scientific" section as another option for cheap metric fasteners for US dwellers. I've been buying all of my stuff there, since it works out to $.02-$.10 per piece, rather then the exorbitant $.80-$1.00 per that I would pay locally. Plus you can buy in quantities as small as 10 for the lesser used bits.

i agree about amazon. i just finished with the mcmaster stuff, so now maybe i'll go through and use amazon. actually, if you could post the items here in the forums that would rock! even a paste from your email receipt would do the trick.

Here is what I bought so far for the X-axis assembly (as copied from my receipt):


1 "S/S Metric Flat Washer DIN-125A M5 5.3mm ID x 1.0mm OD x 1mm Thick (Pack of 100)"
$4.75


Sold by: Small Parts, Inc.
1 "Zinc Plated Steel Metric Hex Nut DIN 934 M5, 0.8 Pitch (Pack of 100)"
$1.79

Sold by: Small Parts, Inc.
1 "Alloy Steel Hex Hd Set Screws M5 Black, 8mm Len, Knurled Cup Pt (Pack of 10)"
$1.27

Sold by: Small Parts, Inc.
1 "Alloy Steel Socket Cap Screw M5 Black, 15mm L, 0.8mm Pitch, DIN912 (Pack of 50)"
$4.74

Annnnnd, here are the parts in my cart that I plan on buying in order to be fully stocked:




S/S Metric Flat Washer DIN-125A M8 8.4mm ID x 16.0mm OD x 1.6mm Thick (Pack of 25) - Small Parts, Inc
In Stock
Shipped from: Small Parts, Inc.
$2.45


Zinc Plated Steel Metric Hex Nut DIN 934 M8, 1.25 Pitch (Pack of 100) - Small Parts, Inc
In Stock
Shipped from: Small Parts, Inc.
$4.95


Alloy Steel Hex Hd Set Screws M5 Black, 8mm Len, Knurled Cup Pt (Pack of 50) - Small Parts, Inc
In Stock
Shipped from: Small Parts, Inc.
$4.60


Alloy Steel Socket Cap Screw M5 Black, 50mm L, 0.8mm Pitch, DIN912 (Pack of 10) - Small Parts, Inc
In Stock
Shipped from: Small Parts, Inc.
$2.62


Alloy Steel Socket Cap Screw M5 Black, 40mm L, 0.8mm Pitch, DIN912 (Pack of 10) - Small Parts, Inc
In Stock
Shipped from: Small Parts, Inc.
$2.16


Alloy Steel Socket Cap Screw M5 Black, 30mm L, 0.8mm Pitch, DIN912 (Pack of 25) - Small Parts, Inc
In Stock
Shipped from: Small Parts, Inc.
$2.91


Alloy Steel Button Hd Socket Cap Screw M5 Black, 25mm L, 0.8mm Pitch, DIN7380 (Pack of 10) - Small Parts, Inc
In Stock
Shipped from: Small Parts, Inc.
$2.17


Alloy Steel Socket Cap Screw M5 Black, 20mm L, 0.8mm Pitch, DIN912 (Pack of 25) - Small Parts, Inc
In Stock
Shipped from: Small Parts, Inc.
$2.75


Alloy Steel Socket Cap Screw M3 Black, 30mm L, 0.5mm Pitch, DIN912 (Pack of 10) - Small Parts, Inc
In Stock
Shipped from: Small Parts, Inc.
$1.94


Alloy Steel Socket Cap Screw M3 Black, 25mm L, 0.5mm Pitch, DIN912 (Pack of 10) - Small Parts, Inc
In Stock
Shipped from: Small Parts, Inc.
$1.88


Alloy Steel Socket Cap Screw M3 Black, 15mm L, 0.5mm Pitch, DIN912 (Pack of 10) - Small Parts, Inc
In Stock
Shipped from: Small Parts, Inc.
$1.74



S/S Metric Flat Washer DIN-125A M3 3.2mm ID x 7.0mm OD x .5mm Thick (Pack of 25) - Small Parts, Inc
In Stock
Shipped from: Small Parts, Inc.
$1.25



Zinc Plated Steel Metric Hex Nut DIN 934 M3, 0.5 Pitch (Pack of 25) - Small Parts, Inc
In Stock
Shipped from: Small Parts, Inc.
$0.76



Teflon

awesome! i'll try and get these into the BOM soon.

I've written up an excel reprapdicksmithelectronics.xls file (also in .ods for Ubunto folk reprapdicksmith.ods) which has probably 80% of the parts listed as "component" for buying from dick smith electronics. Some of the stuff I'm not sure about, so don't take my word that these are the exact correct matching parts. Hope this will help.

It's not somewhere I usually think of, but I just checked and Futurlec seems to have most if not all of the electronic bits we need. I just put the items for the stepper board in my cart and they came to $11.65 vs. Mouser's $20.57. Wish I noticed this a few weeks ago.

I've attached my shopping list. I didn't check the diameter/lead spacing on the capacitors (don't know if they even have that info on the web site). The heat sink is fairly different, possibly less effective, and the IC socket is cheap, not machine-pin style (they have those too, for another $.20 or so). Other than that I think everything is equivalent.

Shipping to the US is cheap but I think it usually takes a week. I think they're located in Australia so they may be even more attractive in that corner of the world.

[edit]
I took a quick look through the rest of the boards and futurlec has almost everything. For the powercomms board, they don't have the molex hard disk connector, but you could substitute two two-pin screw terminals that have the same .2" spacing. They don't have the 4700uF capacitor in 50V, but they have it in 25V, I don't know if that's deemed good enough. And they don't have the optical sensors for the endstops (plenty of mechanical switches that might be usable though). Aside from that, I think they've got everything we need, and if you ordered the components for all the boards in a repstrap, it would be around $40 cheaper than mouser. If the parts check out, you could consider selling the opto sensors and molex connectors on rrrf to save everyone a shipping charge.

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 07/03/2007 11:19PM by emf.

fantastic! i added most/all of your list to the cartesian BOM. i still need to go through and add them to the extruder as well, but i'll get to that eventually. there are a few things i havent gotten to/found yet:

1. the spring for the z drive.
2. M8 smooth rod. i cant seem to find it, they only have threaded rod. however, 5/16" is *very* close to 8mm, and i found this link:

[www.amazon.com]

it doesnt say the length, which makes me nervous. its probably 3ft, but who knows. its probably better to just get it at hardware store anyway.

i'll get the electronics parts added soon, or maybe vik would like to do it for his fellow oceanians.

hopefully i'll find time this week to improve this system a bit more. currently it uses google docs as the 'database', which definitely imposes limits. i basically need to split the supplier stuff up into unique parts to suppliers and then the BOM stuff into parts and quantities. then it will make managing suppliers SO MUCH EASIER! although it makes changing names of parts something you dont want to mess with =) we'll see how it goes.

its definitely a useful system as-is, which is good.

Not sure if this is what you're looking for, but McMaster has 1 meter lengths of M8 stainless unthreaded rod: 1272T17. It is, however "Not rated for straightness, diameter, or length tolerances."

Also, that parse.php script in web/james-bom will build your db for you from the google pages. Download the whole directory, edit db_auth.php and run the script. It has a bunch of suppliers hard-coded, but I'll make it read the google page for suppliers today.

The viewer is coming along: [hackervisions.org]

One nice thing about it is that you can see all the parts tagged as, say, "fastener" and get a list of all the nuts and washer and bolts. It's that view that tells me, for example, that the project requires exactly one M3x30mm cap screw, a part that will cost $9 when bought in lots of 100 from McMaster.

Perhaps one step along the way will be to combine lengths and substitute M3x35 cap screws for the M3x30 and the M3x25 screws. That would lower the total cost by some $15 to $20, and if we can do that in a few places, it might reduce the cost of the project by a few percent here and there.

thanks.

yeah, i already have the mcmaster supplier... i was looking for the amazon equivalent. next time i do it, i'll probably just go with 5/16" rod from the hardware store. 5/16" is very close to 8mm (7.9375mm)

Here is an amazon equivalent for the 8mm rod: [www.amazon.com]

They also carry it in shorter lengths:
36": [www.amazon.com]
24":
[www.amazon.com]
12":
[www.amazon.com]
6":
[www.amazon.com]

holy crap. at $20 per 3" length, and with needing 15-16 rods, that is ridiculously pricey. i dont even think thats worth sourcing. going with mcmaster is still bad, but not that bad. my guess is that most people will be able to get away with hardware store rods.