So some good news, it is worked.
I tried Tindie for the "coasters", listed 5 of them, and by the end of the day all sold and shipped.
It looks like they took around 10% in payment processing and their fees, not too surprised.
Now I have the challenges of sorting payment and VAT. I am sure I can, but I need to blog that I am sure.
It seems payment is Paypal, and PayPal sending to my bank account wants open banking access to see all transactions (WTAF?). Trying to add an account with no txns fails, what a surprise! So we need to sort that.
No clue of VAT, so will err on the side of HMRC to be on the safe side I expect. Invoice matching what is shipped.
But the next plan for Tindie is exactly as I said - some small volume boards, from time to time, and the example is an IronMan controller board.
I only need one, and maybe one as a spare, for a mate of my son that does IronMan at events and parties and so on. He has a suit. But the tech is all crap and broken.
So we can do way better, we already sorted the helmet, but the "chest" has speakers, a button, and several LEDs, which means more than one string (one RGBW and one RGB at least). The arc reactor has a nice outside ring with bright RGBW, and some inner RGB, but also a load of single "pixel" WS2812 in the suit.
So the board has :-
- ESP32S3-MINI-1-N4-R2 processor - Dual CPU, 4M flash, 2M SPI RAM
- Four LED outputs, well, they are just GPIO with an ESD diode, and power from USB-C and a big cap on the power from USB
- Two inputs, again GPIO with ESD diode, and 10k pull up, but suitable as buttons
- USB-C to power it all and do loading code, debug, etc
- Two (stereo) speaker outputs MAX98357A
- Two (stereo) microphones TDK ICS 43434 (not needed for Iron Man but cool, so did anyway)
- Micro SD card (for WAV files for the speakers).
- All WAGO connectors.
So plan is we use one, one spare, and 8 on Tindie. We'll see how that goes.
Update: Looks like at least two other "IronMan" specific boards as well (for gloves), so this will be fun.
Given you probably have a domain and server available have you considered self hosting a shop?
ReplyDeleteI use Abantecart https://www.abantecart.com/ for our pedalcar race site, it does paypal with no issues, can have cistom invoices and also allows other payment methods.
See it on our site at https://shop.pedalcarracing.info/
Funny how you only find out about ridiculous requests from paypal after they owe you money.
ReplyDeleteAt least that's what it looks like reading your post.
Tindie is pretty good also just because of the reach of the site, and it has a good name with "makers" etc, so you'll get people just finding it on the site randomly, passing a link for something "cool" on to friends and posting on forums/reddit etc.
ReplyDelete