Making money from home soldering

[coppercone2]

Oh wow I didn't realize assembly services had to go through all that.  I'm just looking for something that the parts an pcb are available to buy, an then sell on eBay.  I just have no idea what would be good to start with offering for sale.  I'm looking for some way just to make some extra money on the side, but without having to jump through 10 miles of hoops.  I've seen people assembling and soldering keyboards an selling on etsy an eBay,jist not sure where to start, or even what to advertise for sale.

well, it depends on what clients you have
I soldered a lot for pcb's in R&D and production company in France (clients named C-RAd for example), application: medical safety apparel, quite expensive, involving micro/dsp, lasers (we made industrial lasers also), motor controllers with integrated trajectory mgmt, wifi products (secure communication based on internal protocol).
NEVER used mats ang all sort of paranoia soldering tools, my boss proposed this but after some hundreds lasers fabricated and dsp motor controllers and microcontroller soldering and programming (bootloader+ eep + flash via bootloader), he realised the technique was more important then the mat, the anti-static bracelet and other gizmos
the importanty is good soldering equipment (metcal jbc and so on), respect to rules in soldering and electrostatic AND most important, finding the client
so don't listen to 1000 requirements iso99999 and so on, they are just sh...t on paper
find your clients, do the job with care and good hardware and you're done
I fear finding the client as you being a freelancer will be the problem, not the mat. of course if you don't dress correctly and you don't manipulate correctly electronics, you can fry devices.
by my side, if you do respect some basic rules, you'll never ever fry a diode, a micro or other sensitive dev
don't listen to paranoia requirements, test the market and if you find clients and succeed 2-3 correctly done and clean pcb batch, you're settled
I saw this done in a company in Budapest/Hungary, called CXE, they soldered the pcb's from our r&d, the pcb was made in europe and the components from china, france (like digikey, farnell... for the serious devs like dsp/microcontroller), germany and so on. you just need 2 things, client and savoir-faire
iso 9001 comes AFTER, I lived this in 3 companies as main iso9001 lead engineer

I think this is cocky, you might never get information about some product fails, you might cause damage that precipitates way down the line. I agree that the equipment might cause a false sense of security and might result as a worse job because of psychology, but you just cannot control the damage induced by invisible triboelectric forces. Not all problems are reported, companies often just chuck equipment worth thousands of dollars (great for my curiosity) without ever contacting the manufacturer about a problem because they have gigantic budgets, gigantic mega bosses trying to crush budgets. Hell some people might like that the equipment breaks because it makes spending the budget easier to help maintain the equipment budget at the very least without it being shrunk because someone is happy about something turning into a 'NRE cost'. It's also easy for sales to get involved and not report a problem if they think someone thinks that something breaking might be normal and they can sell another one.. please as if its encouraged to change anything on a assembly line ever .. (yeah find me one person that works near a line and has a boss that even wants to consider thinking about that kind of shit~! its 'give them one on the house' so the product keeps moving out the door!)

This is bad advice. Especially as technology gets smaller.

immune to ESD damage... hmphh why is that multimeter drawing 5mA quiescent turned off after all this years and grubby hands going into the battery compartment  ..

i hope you did not work on the pluton 

then again I sure want to finish my new shed made out of cement and discarded VFD's and drives. also I must say if your company cares about a 150$ for a mat and some wrist straps (realistically at least the mat will be in contact with the person at all times) I am scared to think about your water cooler. whats in there rain water?