Firefly Design LLC

I've developed a Bill Of Materials (BOM) tool that helps with pricing and availability of parts:

When doing low volume builds, it is important to be able to track availability of parts and pricing.  It is often difficult to find all of the required parts from the same distributor. Parts go in and out of stock leaving the need to check other sources.  A design may have a number of assembly variants (different ways to populate the PCB with parts) depending on what features are needed for a particular build.  Determining the price and availability can be a time consuming process.

The BOM tool reads an Eagle schematic and creates a part list.  Attributes in the schematic are used to specify the manufacturers part number.  Optional attributes can be specified on parts in the schematic to describe different assembly variants.  The BOM tool uses the Octopart API to find distributor pricing and availability for all of the parts.  The assembly variants and distributors that carry the parts are shown and can be individually selected.  A pricing and availability information summary is shown and a detailed report for each quantity is saved.

With this tool, it is now possible to easily estimate prices and lead times at various volumes for Firefly Ice Blue.