jwjulien / inventory

A bespoke electronics component inventory management tool in Python/Qt.

Inventory

There have been many version os an inventory management system for my collection of electronic components. I continue to strive to build something that ticks all of the boxes and the result has been a multitude of tools that all barely do anything. At this point, I just need a functional tool to start cataloging parts that are seriously piling up.

The primary purpose of this tool is to allow me to catalog all of the electronic components that I have on hand.

**Warning:**This tool is very much a work in progress at this time. It is also the most complicated PySide application that I have created to date. Further, I'm terrible at testing (read: I have not), so expect this software to be buggy.

I doubt many other folks would want a tool such as this as it's got a pretty specific use case, but I'm putting it out there as, at a minimum, it may serve as a nice example application for how I like to create GUI applications using Python and PySide6.

Design Goals

This tool must:

• Support generating/printing labels for storage location using my Dymo printer.
• Support scanning location barcodes to pull up parts.
• Easily increment/decrement inventory numbers using GUI.

The tool should:

• Connect parts to their storage location(s), so that I can find them.
• Link to their supplier(s).
• Link to the project(s) that use the part so I can cross reference.
• Support categories in a tree form with linkage to a single part.
• Support browsing parts by: location, category, supplier, project.
• Allow me to count parts using my USB scale.
• Allow me to calibrate part weight using USB scale.
• Include a wizard to handle periodically checking inventory for parts.
• Support a reorder-report - show a list of parts whose quantities are LESS than their reorder threshold.
  • Consider including a tolerance such that parts that are getting close to the threshold can be viewed too.
    • Don't show any parts with a threshold of zero - they are non-stocked.

The tool could:

• Provide a representative picture of the part.
• Store the datasheet and supporting docs (design whitepapers, drawings, etc.)
• Easily decrement multiple parts when a project is build, using a stored BOM for the project.
  • Can BOMs be imported from .md files?
• Export HTML report of parts that can be used to lookup parts. Read-only doc to publish to parts.exsystems.net.

Why another version of this tool?

This tool was originally a web application but has hit a bit of a development wall as the complexity and scope has increased. I have attempted to solve the problem by building Qt based supplements and even switching frameworks on the wab side (Angular), all of which are sitting in a state of limbo.

I then considered building a REST API for the web interface to support using multiple tools but ultimately decided that a standalone tool might actually be better.

Bug Reporting

For my own sanity, I am using a bug tracker, b, that I created. I'm the solo developer on the project right now and for that reason I am not tracking issues on Github.

If you want to view open issues without pulling a copy of the project and installing b yourself, you can view the bugs as plain text YAML files located in the .bugs directory.

Installation

This project makes use of poetry for managing dependencies. With a copy of the project on your machine and Poetry installed, just run poetry install to get a virtual environment.

Then you can run poetry run python inventory to launch the tool.

For further help, I recommend you start from the Poetry Docs as I'm not doing anything out of the ordinary here.