Selling projects

[Enzo]

OK, first off I have not tried this and I have no involvement, I just saw it and am passing it along. At least it is a company I know, so not likely a scam.


We use large part houses like Mouser and Digikey for general supplies, but much smaller Jameco is a cool company that often has useful parts. Jameco is more oriented to the hobbyist than a place like Mouser.

They have started something called Club Jameco Home | Club Jameco And it is potentially a place to sell your projects.

As I understand it, you designs some circuit for something you think others might want to build. You send the circuit to Jameco, and they create a kit for it. They can even arrange to have PC boards made.

You write up a brief project description and submit it. If they think it has merit, they publish your brief in the club, and members can comment - like we do here, really - and vote on it.

If the thing does become a kit, you get a 5-10% royalty on all sales.

I'd be interested in anyone's experience if they do this. I don;t see it as a substitute for making your own thing and selling it, but if you like designing stuff, but not going into production, this might be a way to go.

[J M Fahey]

May be interesting.
The main point lies in the diffusion.
In the old times, magazines such as Popular Electronics, or those great British similar ones (Ozzies had a couple good ones too ), did exactly that: you submitted them a project, they put it on the front page plus 3 to 6 pages inside, and you had a guaranteed 50000 kits sale or more.
Market will be *much* smaller today, mainly because lazy people got used to buying things instead of building them, but anyway I'd give it a try.
You are a very experienced and practical guy and I'm sure there's a couple things you must be thinking "why the @#~€¬ç[]{} doesn't somebody make it?"
Well, here's your opportunity.
What do you have to lose?
Do you have a direct link to their current kit line?

[Enzo]

The main web site is Jameco.com, and I am sure a complete listing of kits for retail is there. If you look at the club web site, for example I just selected audio, and about 4 pages of briefs comes up, you can select from them. SOme are now projects, most are just ideas, with a few comments.

Explore Projects | Club Jameco Try the audio/video section for starts.

No delusions this would make me rich, maybe a few dollars if it works, but if folks like your project, your name is on it.

COntrast Popular Electronics - which I studied as a kid - this deal they don;t have some space/page limit. PopTronics only had so many pages, and it took a fairly complete and salable project to get in its pages. Here, you can design eye blinkers for teddy bears if you want. SO the payoff was much greater then, but today it is a lot easier to get on the bus.


I lament the passing of hobby electronics. In my learning days, we had PopTronics and a few similar, plus Electronics World for the harder core, and of course QST. But any project in those days meant a metal chassis, make holes for tube sockets. Get out the old Stancor PS8415 (if I recall the number), wire it up et voila, antenna preselector amplifier. Boost my short wave reach. Today it SHOULD be easier, power supply needs are simpler - fewer of them and lower voltage - plus between breadboards and available pc boards, you just solder parts in place. But today you can just BUY ready made things that do just about ANYTHING you can imagine, and cheap. 50 years ago, the sorts of projects we built just were not on the market. Or they were a circuit within a Collins radio. Collins was to Radio what Mercedes is to cars.

Later, Popular Electronics had shifted to transistor stuff, and their Southwest Technical Products operation made circuit boards and often complete kits available for published projects.

Somewhere I still have files of projects from the 1950s-1960s. The one I always wanted to do but never had the wherewithal was the RF spectrum analyzer. Tubes. CRT. See what freqs are active in a band. I copied it from a magazine, QST maybe, and in those days, the library copy machine made negatives. Schemos came out white lines on black, not to mention the text was negative.

We do build guitar amps here, and over at DIYaudio they build hifi amps. Ham radio has shrunk. Used to be exciting to listen to BBC or Radio Budapest, or as a ham actually talk to someone in Australia or New Zealand. But today, I can chat with Tubeswell or Fahey any time I want right here. It isn't so far off as it was. But I bought a copy of Monitoring Times recently just to see, think of it as the radio geek equivalent ofr say Guitar World. Radios are available even at reasonable price that have PLL and freq synthesis, so if you want 39.487263MHz, by god you can have it. And some even had that spectrum display right on the front. 50 years too late, sigh. I know the haqm world still builds things... some of them do anyway. But what other segments of life even warrant home made projects? Yeah, I could invent a timer valve for my lawn sprinklers, but the $30 from Home DEpot works just fine thanks. And there was a time when a little LED yes/no box was a fun project, but I think we are too jaded to find that very amusing these days.

Maybe a project to light up teddy bear eyes, AND make him talk. Oh wait, Radio Shack already sold speech chips.

I don;t do much little time wasters these days. I do design circuits, but they are mostly custom controllers for my clients. Interfaces, stuff like that. Pretty specific to the client.