Thoughts on Implementation

Local Thing Metadata Organisation

For a project with many parts and sub-assemblies, the TTN spec could be implemented in such a way that each part has its own thing metadata file, and these are collated into a tracker via a build process of some sort.

Take the parts defined in the BOM ideas page. These could be defined in files alongside each source file. e.g.

thing1/stls/part1.scad

• Contains the source code for Part #1.

thing1/stls/part1.stl

• Is the derivative file for Part #1.

thing1/stls/part1.thing

• This defines the metadata which corresponds with the source files.
• The file contents could be accessed via the (API)[/API] with a URL such as https://example.com/tracker/thing/00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000002
• The contents would be similar to the following:

{
	"UUID":"00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000002",
	"title":"Part #1",
	"URL":"https://example.com/thing1/stls/part1.stl",
	"billOfMaterials":[
		{
		   "partNumber":"1",
		   "type": "source",
		   "description":"Part #1 Source",
		   "URL":"https://example.com/thing1/stls/part1.scad"
		},
		{
		   "partNumber":"2",
		   "description":"Part #1 Derivative",
		   "type": "derivative",
		   "URL":"https://example.com/thing1/stls/part1.stl"
		}
	]
}

Potential to integrate with ThingDoc

With such metadata available it may be possible to integrate with Josef Prusa's ThingDoc.

In ThingDoc, the BOM and assembly instructions are stored as Javadoc-like comments either in the source code, or in external metadata files (identified with extension .tdoc). A python script then pulls the information together to produce BOMs and assembly instructions.