A few weeks ago, Frits posted a blog entry explaining that we were working with Pololu to integrate their product catalog into our Components section. It took longer than expected to wrestle Drupal into submission, but at last the integration is complete, and as you may have noticed on the front page, all of Pololu's 300+ products are now listed as Components. Feel free to browse around -- the cool thing about it is that all of those components remain editable by every LetsMakeRobots user, so you can post comments, tips, opinions, etc about any component you want. Likewise, Pololu can contribute to the site (as Ben has already been doing), offering help and suggestions and sharing their experience. I think this collaboration with Pololu will be a great benefit to us, and I hope you enjoy the new addition to the site.
Great amount of work, thank you! This is a great addition, a lot of cool stuff that might have barely trickled in otherwise, thank you Dan (and Frits). Many cool toys to browse, hope that more show up in the future. Thanks for all the effort you spent.
Awesome work guys! Now a feature question, would it be possible to add a feature(checkbox) that allowed the user to view components based on user vs merchant submission?
(I’m reposting this comment here to try to steer discussion onto this page)
I’m sorry you guys aren’t happy with the changes. I really didn’t think it’d be enough to annoy people. But remember, this is our site – if enough people dislike it, we always have the option to take them down again. Nobody has signed any contracts or anything – this was just something we thought would be useful. There were already quite a few Pololu products entered as components, and we figured, why not have them all? When you’re posting a robot that uses a motor controller, you can include a link to the LMR component for that motor controller, and on that page people can discuss what they think of that motor controller – both good and bad.
Personally, every time I see somebody post a robot that does something really clever, I start looking at how they built it, so I can incorporate some of those ideas in my own robots. This way, if people link to the appropriate components, I can find out exactly what they used and have a link to buy one myself, but more importantly, that person can post their experiences with that motor or servo controller or whatever on its component page, so I can decide if it’s worth trying after all. Maybe they had trouble getting it to work and decided that a DIY option was simpler. This is a perfect place for that kind of information.
I know it’s overwhelming to have it all flood the front page, and we tried to avoid that, but the software didn’t provide a good way to make that happen. But people are posting robots and walkthroughs frequently enough these days that I think the front page will be cleaned up quickly.
So why don’t we give it a week or so and see how it goes? I know I just painted our red Ferrari blue, and at first glance you might not like it, but I bet we’ll get less speeding tickets this way If we really decide we just don’t like it, I can always paint it back.
I think Dan is taking a little too much heat on this one. It was me who had the idea, made contact, and convinced Dan to do it. Also it was me who said “heck, let’s flush”, because I wanted us to try it and go online.
Dan has done a lot of work, and I am of course glad that he is man enough to stand in, but just to let you know; I am the guy to blame.
I think there are some crap things to say about it, but trust me, behind the scenes we are pulsating and working on the matter, not done yet, not done yet
I want to ask Sparkfun to do the same, once we have this going to everyones satisfaction.
In the end the point should be that we get the bartender in here, at the bar I think he will listen more to us than if we are at he’s place, and I also think it will spin a lot of other cool options in the long run
Imagine this; You can now actually rate the items, here on our site! And comment freely! And in time search our own place for a lot of stuff!
I think most people are I think most people are joking. It was just a bit of a shock to see so many new "posts" due to the upload. Also most of us knew it was coming, but not when. It just caught people off guard. It will be extremely helpful. Nothing to see here move along…
I think it’s good and bad. Good in the sense that no one will hesitate to post components now because they won’t stand out as much. It’s just a drop in the buckets so … why not? For that and other reasons, the components section might start getting more use now.
On the other hand, the cool thing about the components section was that users could post particularly fun, useful, interesting, or novel components, as opposed to every single part they used. I noticed this about myself as I was browsing through the components section, looking for user-submitted parts, and subconsciously disregarding the Pololu ones. I mean … I can just go to the Pololu site to see those. I want to see user submitted components because those are the ones that someone thought was worth taking the time to make an entry about, so it must have stood out or been particularly useful for them.
At the very least, I think all the old components, the user-submitted ones, should be bumped up to the top, and the Pololu components shifted to the back of the line (unless someone’s actually edited/wiki’d the page since it was posted, of course).
Thanks for all the feedback. I agree that it’d be useful to be able to differentiate between user-submitted components and ones that come from companies. I’m working on adding an ‘Origin’ field (which would either be ‘Pololu’ or ‘LetsMakeRobots’, and providing a way to filter your view based on that. We might even default to filtering out the non-LMR components when browsing, so that they only turn up when searching or if you actively enable them on the browsing page. We’re still playing with the various options.
I think it’ll be really useful to have them in the database, though. I’d like to come up with some way to let you easily link to any number of components when posting a robot project page. That will take some time to develop, but I think that’d be the best way to make use of all this data we now have in our hands.
If we really decide we just don’t like it, I can always paint it back.