As many of you may have already read. I spend the last 5 month coming up with the way to build my own CNC machine from scratch. The goal it to create a design that anyone can build at a low cost and that works reasonably well. However I have grater ambitions than just proving my point that I can build a machine, I want to share it and I want the community at large that cares about or like the idea to be able to benefit from it and even contribute their own experience and expertise knowledge to the project. For that reason we are creating an Open Source Portal. What it will be exactly is still in the air but for sure it will be a website build for online engineering collaboration. It may live inside of MFGx of as parallel "sister site" but for sure it will have single common user sign-in and shared forums.
Now why am writing this Blog? Well I think it will be very neat to share the development process. Following I will share a series of screen shot and requirement that reflect the latest stage of the site development process. It will be mostly images followed by functional description and some discussion about the back end implementation. I will not be posting any code, as I don’t see the need for that now. Certainly comments and feed back is always welcomed.
The Home page
The following is mockup of the portal home page. In it you can see the MFG logo, that will change for an MFG OSH logo which we still need to come up with, then there are basic function such as login, register and search. We plan to make this search include both documents and project on MFG OSH and MFGx. The login would be the same as in MFGx as well as the registration. Remember we want to have single common user sign on.
The logo will always be there and links to the home page, it is really a home button similar to what you see in MFG.com and MFGx today. At the bottom we have a very standard set of links:
About Us / Terms of Use / Privacy Policy / F.A.Q. / Advertise With Us / Contact Us
We haven’t created those pages yet but we will leverage a lot of preexisting content and legalities form our existing sites. The Advertise with use is new, this is a feature to allow supplier to push their products in a context intelligent fashion. So if we are looking at setting up the servo-motors for a project, well you can place your option for motors on the project tree or have a highlighted version a la Google search results. By the way you may notice that we copy a lot of behaviors from other sites that are fairly common practice and that people know how to use.
Inside the page we have a main graphic, we want that to change over time, a banner to advertise special deals or partners and a number of content preview windows that include “Latest features, New Projects, Success Stories, contest, Forum, Review” We won’t have the side scroll bars you see now, those will go away and if you click on any of the thumbnails or >> links you will be taken to the project page. (this is still under development)
Remember this is simply a mockup, none of the content you see is real and perhaps not even ours, in fact I think we should hurry up and change this before the guys at Instructable figure out that their site is a source of inspiration for us.
OK but that was a just the introduction, we are going to skip the middle navigation page a move on to the core of the site, the view and collaboration for engineering data.
It is going to have a 4 tab approach to the each project, the first tab is a main visualization and navigation view, from here you can dive down into more detail. The second tab is all about engineering detail, spec, and file downloads. The third tab is about instruction, how to and steps to follow. And the forth tab is about the BOM, many ways to view it and download it. All pages have a left navigation bar just like a cad program; many of us are very familiar with a parts tree so why re-invent the wheel.
Main View Tab
Cad Data Tab:
Assembly Tab:
BOM Tab:
