Digikey search tool. A friend of mine is a distributor of semiconductor components on the gray market. He has a website which lists his inventory and and there are several hundred line items, each with different quantities. They are maintained in a spreadsheet and updated in regular intervals. His website allows a customer to click on an inventory item and see more information about the part. However, there is little to no information because of the effort required to gather that information onto the page. For example, package type and basic specs are critical for both making a decision about a part and verifying that a customer is ordering the correct one.

Solution

Take each part number and send it to the Digikey API where it can be queried for whatever information Digikey has. I was focused on getting the package type as well as a link to the data sheet. In addition to giving confidence to customers, this solution also would provide for SEO benefits to my friend's website. Most of these parts are sold out from Digikey, hence the gray market.

The solution I proposed was to integrate my tool into my friend's website so that the design and overall experience of the website would be unchanged and there would simply be more information in the places that they should be. However, since this was still a proposal and demo, I had no intention of gaining access to and modifying my friend's website. My approach was to create a proof of concept tool that demonstrated all of the required functionality as well as a clear path for integration into the website. The demo I came up with involved scraping my friend's entire inventory to get a list of all of the part names. I made a simple web app which showed a list of all of those part names and when one is clicked, then there is another widget which shows all of the data retrieved from the Digikey API.

Challenge

The only real challenge for this project was to integrate with the Digikey API. It turned out that Digikey is actually not so friendly with sharing their information, which is not a surprise. The only way to get API access to Digikey is to use OAuth authentication, which has to be done on the front end. In other words, they only want you to make a tool for a Digikey customer. Essentially doing their work for them. They do not want you to wrap Digikey and provide a service. This actually made the web app a requirement, not a feature.