Do you mind reporting how many sales you've had so far (to-date, per-month, etc.)? Have you thought about trying to do some visual diffing to get it closer to the source version control analogy? Do you do a lot of hand curation of the repositories on there?
Hey Abe (I follow you on GitHub!). We don't actually sell anything on Kitspace. Since about a month we have affiliate links to Aisler.net and PCBWay. So far I have earned about 7 Euros through links to Aisler.net and waiting on the numbers from PCBWay. I have spent about 4000 Euros on the site and a lot of my time so definitely running at a net loss still :)
Yes, I totally can't wait to take more advantage of the Git back-end! I like the idea of visual diffs though they can have problems (if you move the entire design by 1mm say). Just having tagged versions will be the first step and we can experiment after that.
I have been pushing people to better document the projects and helping with getting the required files into place (and sometime helping them use Git/GitHub). I have been doing what I call guerrilla BOM building (never shout this at an airport!) where I sort out an OSHW project's bill of materials and send a PR. I was doing some of this today: [1][2]. I will be applying for grants to do more of this and maybe get some help with it.
I was wondering more about how many orders have gone through your system and how many people have ordered PCBs and parts through you site. Do you know what those numbers roughly are?
I see you have some kind of examples for how to organize projects in your README. Do you have some more formalized guidelines for recommended 'best practices' for organizing open hardware projects? Would you consider making one if you don't have it already?
Interesting, looking around there's some people playing around with visual diffs [1] [2]. Maybe a good first step is to just have a multi-layer view of the image with different colors.
Ah nice, hadn't seen those two. The first one I came across was [1] and I have been fascinated with the idea ever since. I kind of agree with Dave Vandenbout [2] though in that it might not scale. I kind of shifted my fascination towards using code to do PCB designs and giving talks about that [3].
Best practices, it's a good idea, but it is hard enough to get people to do the minimal thing that I came up with for Kitspace and I think only certain kinds of people will read a best practices guide. At the Global Open Science Hardware Gathering [4] we are trying to come up with more general best practices for open source hardware though and doing a more focused one for electronics would be worthwhile anyway.
About attending OHS, not unless I can get some travel funding :(
Do you mind reporting how many sales you've had so far (to-date, per-month, etc.)? Have you thought about trying to do some visual diffing to get it closer to the source version control analogy? Do you do a lot of hand curation of the repositories on there?