5.3 KiB
GearBox
What This Is
A web-based gear management and purchase planning app. Users catalog their gear collections (bikepacking, sim racing, or any hobby), track weight, price, and source details, and use planning threads to research and compare new purchases. Named setups let users compose loadouts from their collection with live weight/cost totals. Built as a single-user app with a clean, minimalist interface.
Core Value
Make it effortless to manage gear and plan new purchases — see how a potential buy affects your total setup weight and cost before committing.
Requirements
Validated
- ✓ Gear collection with item CRUD (name, weight, price, category, notes, product link) — v1.0
- ✓ Image uploads for gear items — v1.0
- ✓ User-defined categories with automatic weight/cost totals — v1.0
- ✓ Planning threads for purchase research with candidate products — v1.0
- ✓ Thread resolution: pick a winner, it moves to collection — v1.0
- ✓ Named setups (loadouts) composed from collection items — v1.0
- ✓ Live weight and cost totals per setup — v1.0
- ✓ Dashboard home page with summary cards — v1.0
- ✓ Onboarding wizard for first-time setup — v1.0
- ✓ Thread creation with category assignment via modal dialog — v1.1
- ✓ Planning tab with educational empty state and pill tab navigation — v1.1
- ✓ Image display on item detail views and gear cards with placeholders — v1.1
- ✓ Hero image upload area with preview and click-to-upload — v1.1
- ✓ Lucide icon picker for categories (119 curated icons, 8 groups) — v1.1
- ✓ Automatic emoji-to-Lucide icon migration for existing categories — v1.1
Active — v1.2 Collection Power-Ups
Goal: Make core gear management significantly more useful as collections grow — better search, proper weight classification, richer planning threads.
Target features:
- Search items by name and filter by category
- Classify items as base weight, worn, or consumable per setup
- Weight distribution visualization (chart by category/classification)
- Candidate status tracking (researching → ordered → arrived)
- Weight unit selection (g, oz, lb, kg)
- Planning category filter with icon-aware dropdown
Future
- Side-by-side candidate comparison on weight and price
- Candidate ranking/prioritization within threads
- Impact preview: how a candidate affects setup weight/cost
- CSV import/export for gear collections
- Multi-user accounts with authentication
- Collection sharing and social features (public profiles, shared setups)
- Auto-fill product information (price, weight, images) from external sources
Out of Scope
- Custom comparison parameters — complexity trap, weight/price covers 80% of cases
- Mobile native app — web-first, responsive design sufficient
- Price tracking / deal alerts — requires scraping, fragile
- Barcode scanning / product database — requires external database
- Community gear database — requires moderation, accounts
- Real-time weather integration — only outdoor-specific, GearBox is hobby-agnostic
Context
Shipped v1.1 with 6,134 LOC TypeScript. Tech stack: React 19, Hono, Drizzle ORM, SQLite, TanStack Router/Query, Tailwind CSS v4, Lucide React, all on Bun. Primary use case is bikepacking gear but data model is hobby-agnostic. Replaces spreadsheet-based gear tracking workflow.
Constraints
- Runtime: Bun — used as package manager and runtime
- Design: Light, airy, minimalist — white/light backgrounds, lots of whitespace, no visual clutter
- Navigation: Dashboard-based home page, not sidebar or top-nav tabs
- Scope: No auth, single user for v1
Key Decisions
| Decision | Rationale | Outcome |
|---|---|---|
| No auth for v1 | Single user, simplicity first | ✓ Good |
| Generic data model | Support any hobby, not just bikepacking | ✓ Good |
| Dashboard navigation | Clean entry point, not persistent nav | ✓ Good |
| Bun runtime | User preference | ✓ Good |
| Service layer with DI | Accept db as first param for testability | ✓ Good |
| Hono context variables for DB | Enables in-memory SQLite integration tests | ✓ Good |
| Prices stored as cents | Avoids float rounding issues | ✓ Good |
| Vite proxy dev setup | Required by TanStack Router plugin | ✓ Good |
| drizzle-kit needs better-sqlite3 | bun:sqlite not supported by CLI | ✓ Good |
| Tab navigation via URL params | Shareable URLs between gear/planning | ✓ Good |
| Setup item sync: delete-all + re-insert | Simpler than diffing, atomic in transaction | ✓ Good |
| Onboarding state in SQLite settings | Source of truth in DB, not Zustand | ✓ Good |
| Stay with SQLite | Single-user app, no need for Postgres complexity | ✓ Good |
| Lucide Icons for categories | Best outdoor/gear icon coverage, tree-shakeable, clean style | ✓ Good |
| categoryId on threads (NOT NULL FK) | Every thread belongs to a category | ✓ Good |
| Modal dialog for thread creation | Cleaner UX, supports category selection | ✓ Good |
| Hero image area at top of forms | Image-first UX, 4:3 aspect ratio consistent with cards | ✓ Good |
| Emoji-to-icon automatic migration | One-time schema rename + data conversion via Drizzle migration | ✓ Good |
| ALTER TABLE RENAME COLUMN for SQLite | Simpler than table recreation for column rename | ✓ Good |
Last updated: 2026-03-16 after v1.2 milestone start