Making a BOM to Get LunchTrak Tags Ready for Manufacturing
BOMs are important for telling manufacturers what parts should be used in a PCB design. In this article, I'll explain my process of creating one without a lot of effort.
Summer is almost here. With only 7 weeks to go, I have a lot of work before I am ready to get all of my LunchTrak tags manufactured and shipped. One of the biggest things to do beforehand, however, is to get a final invoice ready for the school to review and decide whether they want to pay. I've always had an estimate of how much the parts would cost overall, but I will need a more succinct list. That's where the Bill of Materials (or BOM) comes in. The BOM is mainly used to tell the manufacturers what parts I want to use in my PCB and where they should source them, but it also helps give a final price for the board. Originally, I was too lazy to research which parts to use, and that is partly because I didn't know where to look. Luckily, some Redditors suggested Octopart because of its powerful search engine for parts.
Researching Parts
For example, if I wanted to find a resistor component with a specific resistance, I would go to Passive Components --> Resistors --> Chip SMD Resistors and then filter out the right footprint and resistance values. It even compares costs across many different distributors, making it nice for me to pick the best price. I went with Mouser for most components, though, because of its very high reputation.
After finding the component that I wanted, it would take me to the distributor's official page for more details on the exact part # to put in my BOM.
Putting It All Together
With the parts in mind, I could now go back to EasyEDA and fill in the corresponding data for each component. It took a while, but it was oddly satisfying entering all of this data.
And just like that, we can now easily generate a BOM with all of the information we need. Thank God I didn't have to fill this table out by hand.
Conclusion
With a BOM created, I'll be able to get real quotes from the manufacturer on building my LunchTrak tags; the school will be happy to finally know how much the project will cost. The only sad thing, though, is that the ATM2 Module I am using is not listed by any major parts distributor. PCBWay, which is the manufacturer that I will most likely use, does support user-submitted parts, but it is kinda annoying to have to do that in the first place. Oh well, I guess we'll see how that goes.