All my web scraping activity started with the desire to automate much of the work in creating new parts for Altium. When I started a full-time job, the company that I went to work for used a Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) system called Omnify . There was a utility to upload a csv file of parts, but our administrators didn’t allow us to use it. My next option was to use some sort of utility to click buttons for me and enter text into fields. Auto-Hotkey turned out to be perfect for this.
The beauty of what I ended up with is that it might take 30 seconds to 1 minute to pull a part number, where it used to take 15 minutes or so for each part. In the video below, I demonstrate going from a Digi-key part page to placing the component in Altium. In my previous article, I offered a free compiled script to to scrape a Digi-key page. In this one, I’d like to help people get started automating their interactions with Omnify, but for now I’ll just show what I did.
If you’d like to download my scraper for Digi-key, I can email it to you here: