I would support this. It would improve finding the correct device and have only 1 place to go to to find what you need. It would be also great if you can request to add a device to the collection.

Seems like a reasonable fee, and a Great Opportunity for young people to get a hand up (pun intended) into their future. Any help to make things easier for everyone concerned will get my Vote for sure...🙏

I have doubts both about the general strategy and the effectiveness of some specific tasks:

In general, if NIH3D will become the official catalog of e-Nable devices (I understood this this would be the desired in past exchanges with @Jon Schull and @Jeremy Simon) it certainly makes sense to invest in it, however, in my opinion, any effort to "well present" a list of devices must be combined with a similar activity done with the "devices" section of the enable hub, improving the NIH3D catalog without completely rethinking the space on the hub in my opinion only increases entropy and we will continue to have redundant, partial and sometimes conflicting information, I believe it could be more effective to recalibrate the effort in this direction, instead of focusing on quantity (thinking of all the devices) for example we could focus on quality (think only of the recommended designs) to have the NIH3D catalog and the space on enable hub well aligned.

Creating a device is not like choosing a pair of shoes (I choose the size and style from a catalogue), it requires making a reasoned choice suited to the needs and requirements of the recipient, without a clear path to reach the appropriate solution the catalog by itself is unuseful.

In terms of the tasks, I see some critical issues too by thinking to upload 3D files from their model repository in a single centralized repository brings a significant management overhead to keep the central repository updated:

• the devices are community projects and I doubt it will be possible to have convergence between all device designers to use NIH3D as their reference repository

• following this initial effort we have a high probability to find ourselves in the same point where we are today

The risk is that when a new device is submitted or a device is updated by its creator the device catalog is not updated and it is not possible to understand who should update it and how (ok for 1 year @Ian Roy's students will do it but later what happens?)

Before investing in creating and enriching any catalogue, as I also said this in relation to Eric Bubar's proposal for the space on printables - which either was at zero cost for the community -, I would try to define a general management strategy and a process in which then the individual steps and tasks must fit together in a harmonious and structured manner.

In summary for me the project is interesting, but, in my opinion, it risks being a partial and insufficient response to an important and real problems we have, it definitely makes sense but inserted in a broader path and at the right time.

I apologize if the above criticalities I mentioned were already addressed in town hall discussion, unfortunately bot for time zone issues and for overlap with my work I cannot attend to live community meetings and I know I am missing an important part of the community discussions.

@Alberto Navatta Super appreciate your feedback! I agree with much of what you are saying here. This proposed project is not a 100% solution to everything a perfect device catalogue integrated with the hub could be - but it is a relatively low cost and relatively quick way to improve many of the pain points that exist in the device catalog today. The goal would be for Eric Bubar's group to focus on curating a few well tested devices on Printables, and a more comprehensive search database of all devices on NIH3D.

The complexity of the device catalogue is both the one of the greatest strengths of this open source hardware community, and one of its greatest challenges. One future benefit that could come from this project is that the metadata schema and search/sort logic that is developed could be exported to another more holistic system someday in the future.

I think this seems reasonable given the scale of work and effort. @Alberto Navatta There have been town-hall and strategic planning discussions on how to document and share devices and I think the consensus was that NIH is a good source for all designs to go (with some efforts to notate which are the top/recommended designs) and Printables would be a HIGHLY (some might say ruthlessly) curated set of designs. I volunteered to do that for free, since its VERY rare for a new design to release that is VERY thoroughly documented, prints nicely/easily and passes testing that we do in my lab (essentially the box and block test) making the task a pretty low lift. Getting designs onto NIH is a much bigger lift and I think is worth funding.

@Jeremy Simon Can we move this to a vote?