Find the project. Compile the BOM. Source the complete build.

Source-linked robotics project discovery, bill-of-materials compilation and parts sourcing — with missing evidence kept visible instead of guessed.

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RoboPartPicker treats a robot build the way PCPartPicker treats a PC build. You point it at an open robotics design; it reads the repository, compiles the bill of materials from the project's own artifacts, matches each line to a canonical component, and shows what the build actually costs — including the lines it could not resolve.

It currently indexes 2,445 published robotics projects, 34,760 components and 1,653 normalized BOM lines across open hardware, robotics software and manufacturer showcases.

Screenshots

Discover — server-ranked by information completeness, filterable by source type, robot category, licence, ROS support, BOM evidence and price range.

Project — upstream source, revision, licence, BOM line count, and cost/time estimates, each with its evidence basis.

Bill of materials — every line keeps its source locator, supplier identity and verification state. Unpriced lines stay visible rather than being quietly dropped.

Home — a completeness-ranked featured rail over live catalog metrics.

What it does

• Discovers designs. Every project keeps its upstream source, maintainer, revision, licence and verification freshness attached.
• Compiles BOMs from evidence. Explicit BOM files (CSV, TSV, XLSX, Markdown, HTML, JSON, YAML, XML, KiCad), plus project documentation, URDF/robot-description files and CAD metadata. Every source object is accounted for and every line keeps an evidence locator.
• Normalizes component identity. Aggregates only on exact manufacturer-plus-part-number matches, so two similarly named parts are never silently merged.
• Sources the build. Observed supplier prices, offer coverage and a sourcing estimate that shows which lines block a complete build.
• Serves machines as well as people. A public read-only HTTP API and an MCP server, so an agent can search projects, pull BOMs and compare components directly.

For agents

A public, read-only MCP server is live — no auth, no install:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "robopartpicker": {
      "type": "streamable-http",
      "url": "https://robopartpicker.com/mcp"
    }
  }
}

Tools: search_projects, get_project, search_components, compare_components, validate_rpps. Published to the official registry as com.robopartpicker/robopartpicker; client config and install notes live in robopartpicker-mcp.

API base	https://robopartpicker.com/api/v1
OpenAPI 3.1	https://robopartpicker.com/openapi.json
MCP discovery	https://robopartpicker.com/.well-known/mcp.json
Developer docs	https://robopartpicker.com/developers
llms.txt	https://robopartpicker.com/llms.txt

Data honesty

This is the part most catalogs get wrong, so it is stated plainly:

• An observed price is an observation, not a quote. Supplier coverage is partial and prices drift, and the catalog says so wherever a price appears.
• Unresolved lines stay visible. A BOM line that cannot be matched to a commercial identity is labelled unresolved or unpriced. It is never dropped and never replaced with a guess, because a build plan that hides its gaps is worse than one that shows them.
• Software projects and manufacturer showcases are labelled as such. A commercial robot with no manufacturer BOM reports that state rather than inventing parts.
• No synthetic activity. No seeded reviews, invented users, fake build counts or manufactured traffic anywhere in this product or its data.
• Upstream rights are respected. Projects, CAD, firmware, documentation and images remain under their own licences; a RoboPartPicker record grants no rights beyond them.

Product surfaces

Surface	Purpose	Status
Projects	Discover, import, publish, inspect, reproduce, fork	Live
BOMs	Versioned bills of materials with line-level completeness and evidence	Live, corpus coverage growing
Sourcing	Whole-BOM estimated baskets with constraints and unpriced lines	Live estimates
Components	Canonical parts, specifications, revisions, media, offers	Live
Build workspace	Persistent reproductions and BOM decisions	Live
Marketplace	Parts, robots, fabrication, services, wanted requests	Live listings, no platform payments
Public MCP	Read-only project/component/BOM data for external agents	Live at /mcp
Private MCP	OAuth-scoped actions with confirmation gates	Live at /mcp/private
Firm supplier quotes	RFQ package and response reconciliation	Workflow live, outbound delivery integration-dependent

Stack

Layer	Choice
Edge runtime	Cloudflare Workers (run_worker_first, streamable-HTTP MCP)
Data	Cloudflare D1 (sequential SQL migrations) + R2 (content-addressed media)
Frontend	React + Vite + TypeScript + Tailwind, Hono on the Worker
Server rendering	Worker-injected prerender for crawlers, with an app cleanup handoff
AI	Source-cited description generation with immutable model/prompt/source fingerprints
Tests	Vitest — 677 unit tests, 72 worker/integration tests

Local development

Requires Node.js 22 or newer.

npm ci --include=dev          # see the note below
cp .dev.vars.example .dev.vars
npm run db:migrate:local
npm run dev                   # http://127.0.0.1:8080

Note: if NODE_ENV=production is exported in your shell, npm omits devDependencies and you lose wrangler, vitest, cross-env and the Vite plugins. Use npm ci --include=dev or unset NODE_ENV first.

Local variables required: BETTER_AUTH_SECRET, BETTER_AUTH_URL, INGESTION_SECRET. Email, Google sign-in, AI, malware scanning and outbound supplier delivery are optional integration boundaries — when absent they must produce an explicit unavailable or draft-only state, never a silent success.

Migrations are sequential and immutable once applied; schema changes ship as new migrations. Runtime data access goes through the DB and FILES bindings only — never a local database file — and browser code talks to the same-origin /api/* surface without importing Worker internals or secrets.

Quality and verification

npm run typecheck        # tsc -b
npm run lint
npm run contracts:validate
npm run test             # unit + worker suites
npm run build            # production bundle
npm run check            # all of the above

A feature is not complete because a card renders. Public workflows must load real records, preserve uncertainty, cross API and storage boundaries, and fail honestly.

Repository layout

worker/        Cloudflare Worker: routes, D1 repositories, SEO and MCP services
src/           React frontend, shared types, generated data (queries, glossary, comparisons)
migrations/    Sequential D1 schema migrations
contracts/     Versioned machine-readable ingestion schemas
standards/rpps Vendor-neutral RPPS draft, examples and conformance profiles
scripts/       Ingestion, publication, audit and verification tooling
tests/         Worker integration tests
docs/          Architecture, schema, ingestion contract, deployment, screenshots

Detailed references: backend architecture · database schema · ingestion contract · deployment · local development · MCP · RPPS draft.

Contributing

Catalog corrections are the most valuable contribution right now — a wrong price, a missing supplier, a BOM line that should have matched, a project that should not be listed. Open an issue with the URL and what you expected to see.

Engineering contributions: keep the honesty rules intact, add a failing test before production logic where practical, and run npm run typecheck && npm test before opening a pull request. AGENTS.md documents the architecture invariants the codebase is expected to preserve.

License and status

No licence is granted for reuse of this source at this time. It is published for transparency and review, which is consistent with the intellectual property policy the live product publishes: the brand, interface, original text, software and data organization remain protected, and no trademark licence is granted. Robotics project data returned by the API stays under each upstream project's own licence.

If you want to reuse or fork this code, open an issue and we will answer explicitly rather than leaving it ambiguous.

RPPS 0.1 is a portable draft, not an established industry standard or engineering certification.