Inventorying Miscellaneous Computer Junk?

drewhearle writes "I'm sure lots of Slashdot readers act as technical support to friends and family. I do a lot of this myself and have collected all sorts of miscellaneous computer hardware over the years, such as cases, power supplies, older memory, hard drives, cables and the like. If you're like me, you have to dig through everything and look in various closets, drawers and boxes whenever you need something. What do you use for keeping track of your inventory? Is there a full-featured open-source or freeware package out there that actually works?" Read more for what he's looking for -- sounds like a useful niche.

drewhearle continues "Ideally I'd like an open-source solution with the following features:

A web-browser-based system (or something else with LAN connectivity) that would allow me to access the inventory from multiple computers

Something to indicate where each part is, i.e. "under bed" or "behind bookshelf" :)

A way to attach one or more photos to each item

Category organization, like "hard drives," "memory," or "cables". Subcategories would be nice too.

A "notes" field for each item, to save misc. information

Search functionality, so I could search by category or text-search any field.

I'm probably asking too much, but if there isn't [widely available] software out there like this, maybe somebody has developed something similar for themselves and would be willing to share."

Comments

First Post

[AntiGenX]

I call what you're looking for a spreadsheet. A small database will work if you need more complexity.

Not to sound snide or anything... It's just, if you are a geek, then you should know how to work one of those thing-a-mabobs.

Re:First Post

[arcanumas]

Well, you could always set up MySQL and read/write from a Calc (openoffice) spreadsheet.
Then you can use somthing like PhpCodeGenie to create some simple webforms for view/change/delete etc.
Maybe tinker with them a little so that they do the job...
But obviously, this is far from trivial (although not at all difficult for a Geek).

Check SourceForge

[christopherfinke]

Upon searching SourceForge for "inventory", 4 out of the top 5 matches appear to do what you want. I didn't check them all real close, but none of them appear to have the ease of use that they should, but here's what I'm thinking:

This wouldn't be all that hard to put together with PHP and MySQL, and I've got a lot of code laying around that could be reused to put this together pretty quickly. Anyone want to help with development? Contact "chris at efinke dot com" to pitch in.

Re:Why spreadsheets?

[baywulf]

Here are some reasons people use a spreadsheet:

* There are no complex interrelations to the data. Not complex enough to normalize. Maybe just a bunch of key/attribute relationships.

* Many databases are client/server with a server always running in the background. Why run yet another service when you do something infrequently.

* The user interfaces to many databases are not user friendly. Spreadsheet allow for ease of entry without any coding. Many will auto-expand what you type with similar text above it. Many will provide pulldown menus to do basic queries.

Plone product

[Bazman]

You could write a nice little product for the Plone web-system, using the 'Archetypes' framework, to do this.

* A web-browser-based system (or something else with LAN connectivity) that would allow me to access the inventory from multiple computers

- plone works through the web, so thats no prob.

* Something to indicate where each part is, i.e. "under bed" or "behind bookshelf" :)

- you just define your Archetype with 'location' as a field - it can either be a free text field or you could make it a choice of items.

* A way to attach one or more photos to each item

- that's just an Image field in the Archetype.

* Category organization, like "hard drives," "memory," or "cables". Subcategories would be nice too.

- that's another simple 'choice' type field.

* A "notes" field for each item, to save misc. information.

- a text field - do you want structured text, plain html, ReStructured text, or uploaded files? Easy.

* Search functionality, so I could search by category or text-search any field.

- plone catalogs the content and there's a search box.

With Plone and Archetypes, all the forms for editing and adding content are built for you. You can use the default view, or write your own view templates.

www.plone.org for all your plone needs. Python skills useful.

Baz

Re:I have a simple solution.

[Ripplet]

Holy shit pal, you have heard of "the slashdot effect" haven't you? I mean, seriously, you know it can also manifest itself *physically* too?

And even if only 1% of the guys'n'gals here are crazy enough to take you up on your offer (which I would say is a very conservative estimate),well let's just say you're going to get to know your postman very well!

On second thoughts, it would be quite handy, I know I have tons of stuff I don't use any more, but I hate throwing stuff away, I would be glad to donate it to a worthy cause. You could maybe set something up with Oxfam or somebody to donate stuff even you don't want to third world countries or something? Maybe you have something after all...

Oh wait, that address is Alan Ralsky's right?

Semistructured data? Use a search engine.

[Bazzargh]

While a lot of folk might suggest a database, structuring data is difficult, especially when you're spanning the gamut from "bits of green wire" to "Cray XMP, Serial no 700l33t4u", with and without photos, etc.

A simpler, scalable solution is to see all of this stuff as semistructured or even unstructured data - and point a search engine at it. (lots of people are heading this way - see eg ReiserFS, WinFS.

To create your data, just make web pages and get the search engine to index them. You can even make the whole process very simple by using a Wiki with built in full text search like MoinMoin, or just go for a proper search engine like lucene/

There are disadvantages. In the most basic setup you will not be able to search for "green things" because until you move from unstructured to semistructured data, there are no properties for the search engine to pick on. Even once you do add properties, you won't be able to ask "add up the cost of all my junk" which is easy in SQL. But the speed at which you can add stuff to your inventory is some compensation.