Thingiverse Goes Mobile

The advent of mobile computing has brought us many things: the sum of human knowledge at your fingertips wherever you are, instant map capabilities, and the ability to wax poetic on the go 140 characters at a time. Well, now you can carry a universe of things in your pocket. Provided your pocket has an iPhone, of course.

The iPhone site is the product of about 4 days of feverish hacking and refactoring of the existing Thingiverse code. It’s pretty much read only, but if you need to do any heavy lifting you can easily switch back to the standard HTML view. The idea is to create a site that is interesting and helpful if you want to kill some time and see whats going on in the ‘verse.

Of course, there is an ulterior motive: I wanted to be able to access the inventory system on my iphone. I’ll admit that I’m a selfish bastard, but also a thorough one. When I launched the parts and inventory systems I was really happy. Especially when I realized that I could skip the whole barcode reader step and just put QR codes with the part url on all of our parts. (Notice we auto-generate QR codes for all parts and things on thingiverse…)

Well, unfortunately I soon realized that the computer-monitor optimized Thingiverse did not make managing the inventory via iPhone very easy. So, instead of simply converting that single page into one that works well with the iPhone, I converted the whole site! Now that its done… its really awesome! All of our boxes at MakerBot are covered in QR code stickers. I just scan one of those stickers with QuickMark and it takes me to the Thingiverse page for that part. From there I can add or subtract from our inventory nice and easy. No more lugging a heavy box to the barcode scanner station just so I can add or subtract one bolt. I can just grab a bolt, scan the code and go!

Ah the joy of 4 days work to save 5 minutes work.