Tindie: Buy & sell homemade gadgets & parts | Hacker News Reader

Tindie: Buy & sell homemade gadgets & parts

tindie.com

66 pointsgrumps32 comments

I love this!

But, there needs to be some sort of category and search functionality. For instance, if I wanted to buy a homemade headphone amplifier, how would I find it? Right now all the electronics are just on a list sorted by... I don't even know. This system is not going to work as more gadgets get added and the site grows.

Search & Category browsing will be live later tonight.

How do you plan to differentiate yourself from Etsy?

This is now live!

Images are too big for most display resolutions. Check out http://browsersize.googlelabs.com/

I also suffer from wanting to view items side-by-side or at least multiple on the screen at the same time to have some way of making comparisons and feeling out this new service.

I'd say that's an issue for me too... one item to be viewed at a time on my work laptop. I'd prefer much smaller images.

Wow, yeah. On my screen, on the homepage, "PixelInvaders DIY Led Panels Kit" is larger than my screen.

smaller images coming this weekend (with prices, descriptions, and sorting on the homepage)

This is super cool, but I also need another service where I can hire hardware people to do simple projects (I cannot even solder), i.e. taskrabbit for electronics projects.

Check out the Wanted section:

http://tindie.com/wanted/

(I've already suggested adding a "bounty" field :)

For very simple projects where you have a tiny budget, vWorker may be suitable. Quality, of course, varies...

If you have something specific in mind, or just want someone to bounce hardware ideas off of, email me. Contact info in profile.

Looks very interesting.

I'd suggest to add a short one-line description below the titles. For some projects neither the name nor the photo gave me an idea what it was (e.g. what's a "Femtoduino"?).

thanks moe. working on a solution for this as well. will push in the update with search & categories

woah, I thought the stylesheet hadn't loaded properly - those images are giant!

looks fun though :)

Can this be the homebrew-hardware-gadgets equivalent to the Apple AppStore?

thats what I'm trying to do :)

(I made tindie)

From my understanding: It's Etsy for Handcrafted Electronics.

If this store sells physical objects which get delivered by mail, isn't it more like a regular online store?

I dont see a all how this is like an App store, unless you start selling arduino firmware as downloadable content. Its like the title says, Etsy for electronics

It would be 1000% more awesome if they handled board fabrication and stuffing for the sellers, ie they became "Shapeways for electronics". Perhaps they can team up with DorkbotPDX to get low quantity boards made.

Eh? There's already plenty of companies that will do that, for example http://4pcb.com/ was one of the earliest ones to specifically target low-cost prototype runs (I've been out of that world for a while, so that's all I've got). Shapeways basically was "Quick turnaround PCB house but for 3D printed objects" :P

Tindie is a marketplace: many-to-many. 4pcb.com is not a marketplace it's a manufacturing service. Shapeways is a both a marketplace and a manufacturing service. The beautiful thing about their marketplace is that they also provide the manufacturing (3D printing). So as a seller all I have to do is provide the 3D model STL file and people who buy the product get a physical object. It would be awesome if Tindie did the same thing with PCBs. Currently I don't know of any PCB marketplaces that provide manufacturing as part of their offering. Sparkfun will sell products for you but there are minimum orders, and I believe you have to purchase all the raw materials ahead of time. It would be awesome to have an appstore for PCBs. If you make one, email me and I will be an evangelist customer.

The BatchPCB marketplace sounds similar to what you are looking for (for PCBs):

http://batchpcb.com/index.php/Products

...and you might find Club Jameco interesting as a slightly different take on the Sparkfun idea:

http://www.clubjameco.com/

Is there some FCC waiver for getting compliance if you sell under a certain amount? Or is it only if you sell a "kit" ? I only ask because I see already assembled items on there and I think it runs afoul of the laws at hand.

Dont get me wrong, I dont endorse the FCC laws one way or the other- Just asking the question

Here are the list of allowable exemptions: http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/CFR-2010-title47-vol1/pdf/CFR-2...

AFAIK, "kit" does not protect against FCC requirements. MY interpretation of CE, however, does allow a lot of lenience for "kits and components" which cannot be used in their supplied form. I.E.: user must perform non-trivial assembly before being able to use said device. Having been through the FCC and CE processes, I'll take FCC any day. For most things, getting past irradiated and conducted emissions is easy enough - getting past ESD is a whole different matter.

I really like the idea, but the info isn't readily present. Can't say I'm a fan of the giant pictures with no context.

a new solution for this will be out this weekend. smaller photos with more context. this is my top priority at the moment

Wow, I want to know where they got the name. My wife and I were going to name our daughter Tindie, but only because Tünde is a family name and we wanted to spell it phonetically for the US. Quite a trip seeing something we both thought we made up out of thin air on HN!

Tin + Indie?

Where tin is a metal commonly used in solder.

I was just thinking of indie tech... tech & indie... tindie. I'm still shocked the URL was available

This is a great idea; an idea good enough to invest the time to create your own design and CSS instead of using bootstrap out of the box. One step at a time, I guess.

With that said, I hope this takes off and evolves into something big!

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