[hpsdr] Thoughts on organizing purchases.

[Jason Hitesman]

Can't even being to describe how excited I am about the ideas behind
this project.  But since there don't seem to be firm plans on how to
offer parts sales in the future I wanted to bring up a good example I
experienced elsewhere.

The MegaSquirt EFI controller is another DIY electronics project with
hard to find and large quantity purchase required parts included with
a board as a partial kit.  And then a really nice page for ordering
parts on-line for the rest:

http://www.megamanual.com/v3bom.htm

The orders are for Digikey - and I'm not sure if it would be possible
to do something similar with Mouser...but at least a text list ready
to past into the project manager could make it real quick and easy to
get parts ordered by individuals.

Their project started very small - but grew FAST and even has some
commercial players creating their own versions now but with some
limitations on them.  The user community has benefited greatly from
the commercial interest as the open source nature of the project has
encouraged much improvement.

HPSDR so far seems to be headed on an even more open idealogy
apparently even including plans to release the board layouts which I
applaud.  But on the other hand the strict control over board layout
and availability has resulted in very tight development and helped
rule out a lot of possible hardware issues in a large kit built user
base.

Just noticing that the number of boards already ordered for Atlas
could make for a very complex build process for the user to find parts
for if things aren't well organized.  The guys behind the MS had
already done one open source hardware/software project and learned a
lot about building kits which is why they went the partial-kit route
to speed things up on their end so they could focus on development
instead of shipping kits - but at the same time the nice order pages
they've always offered make it a non-issue for the user to order a
full set of parts from a supplier.

I've yet to see any radio projects offer such an easy to use BOM so I
thought I'd mention it in case those organizing or planing on
organizing were looking for any ideas.

Thanks to all of you doing the hard work so far.  I look forward to
both melting solder and compiling code soon :D