New search option

[iggy]

Is there any way to make your search function search for parts listed in the builds? Since I usually buy parts in groups, it would be great to be able to see all the builds that take a certain part. Like LM741, or BC550C, etc..... Just an idea.

[IvIark]

This has been requested before, but although I agree it would be a great addition to the site and be a great way to decide what to build next, it would be a hell of a lot of work to do.  Editing 630 odd posts and checking the layout to list the key components would take maybe a couple of minutes per post and so nearly a full 24 hours of work which would be difficult for me to find at the moment.

[iggy]

Oh, didn't realize it had that much work involved. I'd offer to help, but i sadly don't have the skills to be of any assistance. Guess i'll keep searching the layouts. Thanks for the quick reply.

[popov56]

This used to be possibly until the search function threw a wobbly, does anyone know what caused the loss of the extremely valuable 'search' tool?

Happy building,

Popov

[IvIark]

No you've never been able to do what he's asking.  If you do a search now in the top left hand box for BC550 (for instance) then it will still come up with any posts where the BC550 is mentioned within the post text.  But they won't tell you all the layouts which use a BC550 because there's no way that the software could now when the transistor types are just shown on a graphic.  So there's no text that the site could index.

What would be great would be if we could add tags for all the key components and then you really would know exactly which layouts use a certain type of IC for instance, but that would be the very big job I was talking about.

But as good as that would be I'm still not entirely sure how useful it will be.  No matter what IC or transistors are shown in the layouts we often have our favourites that we tend to use before all others.  Most of the time I end up with an NE5532 in build because I've had great results with them in the past.  Or we may experiment with 5 different types and keep the one that sounds best to our ears.  And my concern would be that you could miss out on some fantastic effects simply because you haven't looked at the layouts with one specific IC tagged.

With that in mind maybe it would be more useful to have bipolar transistor, JFET, mosfet, single opamp, dual opamp instead so it doesn't make the tags too specific.  But that again would still be a big job to add 600+ tags (or much more if we're tagging multiple key components in each layout).

So yes it would be nice, and maybe one day we'll have a chance to do it, but at the moment it is one for us to think about for the future.  

[Jopn]

I would find it useful because I frequently get a shipment from Tayda and look at the ICs and transistors and can't remember what projects I had in mind (a month ago when I placed the order!).

I would volunteer to add tags to the posts to include some of the more interesting BOM info (ICs, transistors, etc.).  Adding resistor and cap info however wouldn't be worth the effort.  I can't imagine anyone wanting to search for all projects that have a 47n or a 10k.

Let me know if you want to take me up on my offer.  I'd be happy to help.