Assemblies and slots

Real equipment is made of parts, and the parts get swapped. Zimmet models this as a tree: any item can be installed inside another item.

Slots

A type’s components define the slots its items expect:

Drone
├── GPS Module × 1
└── Battery × 2

A slot has a component type, an optional label (for example “Front camera” and “Rear camera” for two slots of the same type) and an optional quantity. A slot without a quantity accepts any number of items.

On an item page, each slot shows what is installed and how many are missing. An item can also hold children that don’t match any slot. They are listed separately as extra components.

Installing, swapping and moving

From an item page, or by dragging in the tree on Assemblies (/assemblies), you can:

• Install a free item into a slot.
• Swap an installed part for another one.
• Move a part from one parent to another.
• Remove a part, which leaves it unassigned.

An item cannot be installed inside itself or inside one of its own components, so the tree never has cycles.

Every install is recorded in the activity feed, and the parent’s watchers are notified (if the assignment rule is on in Settings).

Seeing through the assembly

Assemblies work in both directions:

• A parent’s status includes the worst status of anything inside it. See Status and rollup.
• A parent’s page lists the documents of its components, so a drone’s page shows the GPS datasheet.
• Comments can optionally include comments from components.