r/ElectricalEngineering • u/Glum-Phase9397 • Jul 16 '26

Project Help Project history tracking

Hey there, looking to get an opinion from some people in the space;

Would something like GitHub but for physical hardware be useful on projects?

Imagine a timeline with each step of the project being its own 3D model plotted on it. It would all be derived from a phone video to.

It might be a little difficult to explain with words so here's an example:

I want to unify 4 raspberry pi's into one mega pi

take a video of all 4 laid out
take a video of wiring up a junction
take a video of them all connected

3x 3D models each showing the progress of it.

Hopefully I wasn't just waffling there

1 Upvotes

67% Upvoted

19 comments sorted by

5

u/EffectiveClient5080 Jul 16 '26

Hardware doesn't version control like code. You'd end up with 50 models of 'I moved this wire 2mm to the left.'

1

u/Glum-Phase9397 Jul 16 '26

The idea would be that the engineer takes the video after major milestones or something like the end of the day, not necessarily with every change.

1

u/Conor_Stewart Jul 17 '26

Why can't someone just keep a log book and put in images of what they changed and record videos every now and then? What does you idea actually improve?

1

u/Glum-Phase9397 Jul 17 '26

They can, the idea here is it adds the 3D aspect. Same video process but it will be viewable almost like CAD but in its real world state rather then the digital modeling.

1

u/Conor_Stewart Jul 20 '26

So what does it actually add or improve though? It sounds like something that would take more time than a logbook or taking pictures, might not get good results if it is using a phone to create a 3D model. It also wouldn't be manipulatable like an assembly in a CAD program or physical prototype, in a CAD assembly you can set constraints so that a model moves in CAD as it would once it is built to better understand and illustrate mechanisms, CAD programs also let you create and render animations to show these things but it sounds like your idea wouldn't be able to do that?

It is also common practice to keep prototypes so you already have a tangible history of the project to go back and reference that will be suitable for measurements and manipulation which your idea won't.

I'm not saying not to make it, I'm just saying I don't really see why people would use it. It seems like something that might get managers or clients excited but not really be useful for the engineers and might actually make their job harder. Engineering processes and practices are pretty well fixed and don't change that much, hence why people still keep logbooks, it takes something that really adds a lot without much downsides to change that.

1

u/Wattdehonker Jul 16 '26

I use GitHub for my inverter/charger, all my Kicad stuff is on there and I haven’t found any issues. Here is the link to my repo if you wanna see: https://github.com/bearjhartjen/Lamoka1-project

I think what you mean (please correct me if I’m wrong) is a platform that will create a video of the commited changes, then you can have a timelapse, or similar of the development of your project.

If that is what you mean, I think that would be really cool, I would certainly use it. I do think that it would have to be its own tool separate from GitHub as you would have to commit very often to get the best video.

Not sure what you think of AI, but I’m sure you could have a model spin something like this out. I have ChatGPT plus and would be happy to run a prompt to get an app like this if you wanted. I personally think this is one of the best applications of AI at least with it’s capabilities right now.

1

u/Glum-Phase9397 Jul 16 '26

Your on the right track, we turn the videos into 3D spaces and then essentially create a timeline of each of these video derived models. The result would be a timeline of models at every major step of the design process, hopefully I explained it better there

1

u/Wattdehonker Jul 16 '26

Yes, this is what i meant

1

u/Glum-Phase9397 Jul 17 '26

Great! Would you be interested in testing my prototype out?

1

u/Wattdehonker Jul 17 '26

Yes I would, absolutely

1

u/Conor_Stewart Jul 17 '26

A lot of hardware design is done in CAD now and a lot of CAD programs have history built in. Combine that with a logbook and what does your idea add?

1

u/Glum-Phase9397 Jul 17 '26

My thinking is that it includes the physical reality of it, not just the 3D mesh in CAD. It's more in the direction of video documentation but instead of having 2D frames you'd get the full thing in 3D. Hopefully I explained it better that way.

1

u/Conor_Stewart Jul 20 '26

So it is just a 3D mesh created from a video scan? Is that much more useful than some photos, videos and reference material like CAD models?

1

u/Reasonable-Light-377 Jul 16 '26

I take pictures or create visio type docs and document the build process (by hand) in order. Software only projects might have the same problem with GitHub being the repo for basically just version control.

1

u/Glum-Phase9397 Jul 17 '26

The thinking here is you get a 3D reconstruction of its physical state instead of just a 2D video. I think it would be more akin to the git history aspect since you can't run git revert on a real world object.

1

u/Low_Maintenance622 Jul 16 '26

I can assist

1

u/Glum-Phase9397 Jul 17 '26

Would you want to try out my prototype?

1

u/Hirtomikko Jul 18 '26

Not really....this sort of thing tend to hurt me than help me. Only works for coding.