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BOLTS in Thing Tracker Network

I just played around a bit with automatically publishing all the parts in BOLTS in the Thing Tracker Network. The Thing Tracker Network is an awesome and very important idea, although it is still in the early stages of development.

Edit (May 2019): During the efforts to revive the website, the thingtracker network feature was removed.

The Thing Tracker Network specifies a way to publish your 3D designs in a way that is independent from any particular website, and thus opens the possibility for a world without walled gardens.

I will not go into details why walled gardens are bad for an ecosystem. But I believe that there is still a chance to steer towards a world without walled gardens for 3D designs for 3D printers. There are some big places around that have a huge market share, but I think that the community that uses these platforms is still flexible and open enough to make an unwalled solution a success. This time slot closes though, the walls are getting higher, the users more lazy and unwilling to change anything.

But the fundamental discussions aside, what I did is that I added an automatic export of a TTN tracker for all the parts in BOLTS. It is available here (not for humans to read). That turned out to be very easy to do, as all of the information necessary is already available in computer readable and structured form. All it took were 50 lines of code.

As a user one can not do very much with it, apart from viewing the contents of the tracker. The only way in which this is or might be useful is to raise awareness and activity for TTN and to help with the development of the TTN and of tools using it.

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