I am working on a new project that aims to consolidate information about open hardware toolchains:
The data is already open source, the code for the website will be once I have the visualisations down.
If this proves to be useful I would be happy to see how the current tool lost Open Toolchain Foundation could be enhanced with this work either by submitting data from my website to the list or copying some functions over.
Currently, I am looking into how one might use graphs to make such lists more accessible, not happy with the results as of yet.
Hi @matmair this looks very interesting indeed. It is quite complex to get all the info at once and I think this is much beyond the scope we started with our tool research at (mainly management and designing, in part running Hardware) but definitely worth looking into. One thing that we tried to capture is also the community activity.
One main improvement here is the filter option for “Capabilities” … I have not yet checked the code, @MartinSchott@eMPee584 you might want to have a look? I will also forward to Robert.
I will leave a first feature request in the issues section
very interesting! I had some thoughts to organize tools / toolchains by 1) design process steps (very general) and then 2) a specific process of production. Here is a screenshot of my first thoughts (some words in German, sorry):
Your categorization principle reminds me of that thought.
What is your idea behind the “network” visualisation? Maybe one could order the tools/dots from left to right, left being “beginning of the toolchain” (concept/draft) and right “last step of toolchain” (for example controlling the 3D-printer) and the lines signify which tools have working interfaces (like file formats that are supported as output from one tool and as input of the next)
@MartinSchott that is one of my main 2 ideas for better discoverability. The capabilities table is already ordered by process from top to bottom; basically the axis are just inverted from your table.
The other is the network visualization that might be used to show both the connection between processes (one might cover multiple processes in multiple domains like FreeCAD for example) and tool relations (some tools require specific inputs or are plugins for them)
