Digikey Part Finder – Speeds up building out BOMs
I really don’t care who makes a 1% 0402 1k X5R resistor, I typically pick the cheapest one. However, navigating digikey’s website (I am not affiliated but I like them and use them) is painful to sort by quantity and price and takes more time than I want. And I spent way too much time picking out optimally priced parts. So I finally gave in, and wrote myself a tool to help speed up part searches. You need only specify the type of part and it will spit out a nice list of pricing at digikey, as well as pricing if the part is found cheaper elsewhere (so you can call digikey and get them to price match).
This was made possible thanks to the public API available through Octopart. I’ve been meaning to release this for some time, but I migrated hosting sites and getting my personal domain was not a high priority. I also wanted the blessing of octopart to use their database in this way, which I received. You need to register for your own api key, but that’s easy to do. Software is free to use, and it is not related to my company, ReThink Medical, INC – but I threw the logo in there just because.
In any case it’s finally up now.
You can find the installer here : DigikeyPartFinderInstaller-0.2.msi
And the source is on github (btw, I HATE HATE HATE git, but other people like it so I threw it up there). https://github.com/thethereza/Digikey_PartFinder