Title: Barcodes, Partkeepr and parts providers(TME)
Author: paco
Date: 2018-03-08
Type: article

_Update 2021-05-29: I don't use Partkeepr anymore.  It's been a pain to
maintain and update over time.  I wrote [this nasty thing][7] which is good
enough for me._

Electronic parts are small ... and they get smaller and smaller when you
go down the rabbit hole of SMD components.  They are also really difficult
to organize and catalogue. There are useful tools like [Partkeepr][1] to
help you keep things tidy and, most importantly, don't buy things twice
because you can't find them or you don't remember where the hell they
are (or even don't remember that you have them).

The only drawback to that is that you have to manually insert all the
parts that you buy ... which is tedious.

I basically get my parts for 4 places:

* The _slow boat from China_, when piece is important and time is not.
* Ebay, basically same thing, although sometimes there are sellers in
  Europe, which is nice !
* [TME][2], a polish distributor with fairly good prices and good catalogue
  that I tend to use when I need to be sure what I'm buying.
* And [Farnell/Element14][3], when I need something that I cannot find
  anywhere else ...

It turns out that the last 2 have good APIs to query their catalogue. And
specifically TME adds a little iQR code to all their packages with some
info.

With any old webcam you can find, and [zbar][4], you can extract the info
on that iQR code easily, and dump it to `stdout`.  It looks something
like this (this is a little 12V fan):

    QTY:1 PN:HA50151V4 MFR:SUNON MPN:HA50151V4-000U-999 PO:xxxxxx/x https://www.tme.eu/details/HA50151V4
  
  where:
  
      FIELD   NAME   Desc
      0       QTY    Quantity
      1       PN     Part Number
      2       MFR    Manufacturer
      3       MPN    Manufacturer part number
      4       PO     Order Number (at TME)
      5              Url of the product at vendor(TME)


That's easy to parse, and contact TME's API for more info.

I've put together a little python3 script that takes that from `stdin`
and makes all the necessary calls (to TME and then to Partkeepr), so I
don't have to enter my TME orders by hand anymore.  You can find it
[here][5]

You'll need a token and secret from the distributor. So go to their
developer's [page][6] and sing in.

It downloads the datasheets too (if they have any) and uploads them to
Partkeepr. If the item is already in the db, it just increments the
stock.

On the git page you can find more info, but it's really easy to use,
just pipe the output of zbar to the script like this:

    zbarcam --raw /dev/video0 | ./parteye.py

If I order something from Farnell I'll check if they do something
similar, so I can adapt the script.

[1]: https://www.partkeepr.org/
[2]: https://www.tme.eu/
[3]: http://farnell.com
[4]: http://zbar.sourceforge.net
[5]: https://git.e1e0.net/parteye/log.html
[6]: https://developers.tme.eu
[7]: https://git.e1e0.net/partsdb/log.html