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Kit Space

An site to share buildable kits

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Kitspace.org (formerly called kitnic.it) is a site to share electronics projects. If a project is on Kitspace, its Gerbers are ready to download and send to the fab and the parts can be put in your shopping cart with one click.

Please visit the site at kitspace.org and try it out! 


There are tons of open source hardware electronics projects out there. You come across them on GitHub, on random blogs or here on Hackaday and while the makers have made the best efforts to document their project it's still a hassle to find the Gerbers and purchase the parts if you want to make it yourself. The problem is that there is no standard way of presenting the build information.We address this by making a minimal standard which you can use unobtrusively in your project.

We use a 1-click-bom.tsv file to list components and retailer stock numbers and optionally a kitspace.yaml file if you want to have custom settings in your project. To find out more about this standard and how to have your project listed, please follow the build instructions below.

The Kit Space site and the 1-click BOM extension are open sourced under a CPAL license. Have a look at the TLDR or see the LICENSE files for details.

  • KitSprint in Zurich

    Kaspar Emanuel02/26/2018 at 14:41 1 comment

    This past week SGMK and ANORG in Zurich hosted a KitSprint where people were encouraged to create new electronics kits, document existing ones and make them "Shenzhen ready" i.e. ready to be ordered and built. Below, are pictures of the results.

    Most of the BOMs still need to be sorted out. I released an alpha version of a BOM builder tool and have been showing people how to use it.


    More information on the SGMK wiki.

  • Renamed to Kitspace

    Kaspar Emanuel11/26/2017 at 22:53 0 comments

    The project has now been renamed to Kitspace. I feel the new name is more self-descriptive and people won't ask me about the '.it' TLD anymore. Go check it out at kitspace.org!

  • Part information in BOM

    Kaspar Emanuel03/15/2017 at 14:43 0 comments

    I've just deployed part information popups in the bill of materials view on Kitnic pages. You simply hover over the Manufacturer/MPN to get more information. You can also click the '...' button to get the full range of information available.

    So far all of the information is retrieved from Octopart.

    This should help in quickly answering part specific questions when looking at a project's BOM.

  • Preview your submission

    Kaspar Emanuel02/01/2017 at 23:41 0 comments

    You can now preview your submission on https://kitnic.it/submit.

  • Matching against CPL

    Kaspar Emanuel11/01/2016 at 17:13 0 comments

    In trying to spread the word about the site we have been getting in touch with project creators that have published their work on GitHub. The goal is often to try and determine the bill of materials for a design and put it into our standard 1-click-bom.tsv format. As you might expect it can be a bit of a tedious process as there is no standard way to present the information and often the designers never put up their exact part selection!

    But the good thing about going through this is that it motivates me to work on automation to make this work easier.

    One of the most tiresome things is selecting generic SMD resistors and capacitors as often these won't be exactly defined but you won't care which exact part or manufacturer is selected. The solution I came up with is to match descriptions in the bill of materials against the Common Parts Library in the 1-click BOM extension. This is what that looks like in practice.

    Read more »

  • README Rendering

    Kaspar Emanuel08/13/2016 at 19:08 0 comments

    After 2 days of work I deployed a README renderer to Kitnic so READMEs are displayed right in the page.

    See https://kitnic.it/boards/github.com/JarrettR/USBvil/ for instance. It can really make a page much more approachable.

  • Free PCB Promotion

    Kaspar Emanuel08/09/2016 at 12:18 0 comments

    I am running a small promotion and giving away 20 orders through Dangerous Prototype's PCB service. In order to qualify you have to register a design of your own creation with Kitnic and once you do that I'll give you a coupon you can use at checkout when you order your PCBs.

  • Gerber Stackups and Viewers

    Kaspar Emanuel08/01/2016 at 18:45 0 comments

    PCB Stackup, the open source Gerber renderer we use and contribute to, has been getting a lot of attention lately with over 200 stars on GitHub.

    Mike Cousins also recently deployed viewer.tracespace.io which uses the same rendering engine. It is a really neat Gerber preview site to inspect your boards. It gives you the full rendering like it would on Kitnic and also lets you inspect individual layers.

  • 8BitMixtape Added

    Kaspar Emanuel07/26/2016 at 12:20 0 comments

    Gaudi (@info) recently added the production version of their 8BitMixtap to Kitnic. I believe it sounds similar to the one in this video.


  • A tool for scientists

    Kaspar Emanuel07/08/2016 at 17:07 0 comments

    Since I have entered this project into the Citizen Scientist round for the Hackaday Prize I want to make a case for its inclusion.

    Reproducibility is a core principle of the Scientific Method and as a community of electronic experimenters we have a problem: it is too hard to replicate and validate each other's work. Both CERN and Hackaday have recognized this and that is why we have project sharing sites such as Hackaday.io and CERN's Open Hardware Repository. Clearly we are making progress.

    One of the fundamental road blocks, one that Kitnic is trying to address in a very focused way, is the friction encountered looking at someone else's project. How can I get a PCB? What other parts do I need? On a Kitnic page the answer is very obvious and ordering the right bits is just a click away.

    We want to make this standard practice for everyone that is happy to share their electronics work. This will foster collaboration in the present and serves as documentation for the future when the creator has long moved on to other things.

    Read more »

View all 17 project logs

  • 1
    Step 1

    Create the 1-click-bom file. Download the extension and see the guide on exporting a 1-click-bom from your design. This format will allow people to quickly purchase the components. By default this file is expected to be a `1-click-bom.tsv` in the root of the
    project, if the file has a different name or is in a different location, please add this info in the kitspace.yaml file (see below).

  • 2
    Step 2

    (Optional) Create the YAML project description file. The `kitspace.yaml` file allows you to specify a website, give a description, pick a rendering color or configure custom paths for the two requirements above. If you don't have a `kitspace.yaml` with a description we will try and find a description from your repo. If we can't find one the build will fail. See the README for details of the file format.

  • 3
    Step 3

    Add your project to a Git repository. To have your project included on Kitspace it needs to be in a publicly accessible Git repository (but it doesn't have to be on GitHub). If you don't know how to use Git then *don't worry*! - you can easily create a repo on GitHub and upload your files using the web interface.

View all 5 instructions

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