General > General Technical Chat
Friends and your projects
Wilksey:
I'm sure you have all been there, you design something, with no real intention to sell them but for a personal need and you get someone that wants one, you say sure, add a few pennies for the trouble of you putting it together and they baulk at the cost.
So, to add some "meat" to my post, I have a Nexus dashcam that has some fancy parking mode, but it means that it has to be connected to a permanent live in the car, the dashcam says it'll turn off if the battery voltage gets to 11.2V, that is far too low for my liking, so I decided to put together a simple PCB that has a voltage divider a PIC12 and a relay to turn off the power if the voltage gets to 12V and stays off until it sees a voltage above 12.6V, it has a fuse and TVS as well as a few jelly bean components, and for my purposes it works well, I am planning for V2 to use a MOSFET for the switching instead of a relay and have a MOSFET for reverse polarity protection, the PIC ADC is good enough for what I need and the measurement between the ADC and multimeter is close enough for me, I store the values for OFF and ON in E2 so I can change them via UART if I need to, I used a Chinese PCB manufacturer and have 5 PCB's made and have a few spare as I used 3 of them for my own use, and the components I just bought from Farnell here in the UK, so they are not the cheapest but they were readily available and delivered within a few days, so the individual cost is around £25-£30 for raw component cost, I also found some small plastic boxes at a local hardware store that fitted quite well.
Now I was showing a friend the dashcam itself as it has a connection for a rear camera too and I was explaining to him about how I wired it it and how the parking mode worked and the conversation came around to my little "protection" box, and he asked if I would be willing to make one for him, and I said sure, i'll let you have one for the cost of the parts plus a bit of soldering / assembly time, he said that was fair and i'd let him know the actual price I would charge him.
I said I'd let him have one and help him install it but as I got the parts from a UK supplier it would be around £35, which I thought £5 to solder and assemble it was cheap, mostly SMT in anycase, and takes about 20 - 30 mins with programming / testing of the PIC. I hadn't heard anything back from him then he messages me this afternoon saying he's found one on eBay for £10 (from China) that is sold as a battery protector for a car and he has bought one so he doesn't need mine, I looked at the link he sent and it cuts the voltage at 11.5V which I think is too low still, and I looked at the relay (it comes bare board not boxed) and the one I used on mine draws 16mA as 12V the one on the Chinese one pulls 80mA at 12V, no fuse, no TVS and what I can only assume is a comparator, so I just said to him "Good luck", it doesn't bother me that he bought the Chinese one as he asked me if I would sell him one, I did it for myself not to sell.
I don't manufacturer stuff to sell, but I can only imagine that you just can't do consumer type stuff as people will opt to buy from China cheaper, you get a small discount for buying bulk in the UK but it only works out to about £4 - £5 if you buy something like 10k parts from them, is it only specialist items that you can make money on if buying from local electronic component retailers?
I was curious to know if anyone else has had this kind of thing happen to them and what their reponses were.
retiredfeline:
Fortunately (for both them and me) my friends show no interest whatsoever in my projects. :-DD
But seriously I understand your situation. I would always steer people towards off-the-shelf solutions in the first instance, both for hardware and software. Life's too short to spend on product support. :-+
BrokenYugo:
Most people just aren't worth dealing with in that regard, they simply aren't compatible with such a casual business relationship. I think I've got one friend and one or two family members who actually take my advice on anything I'm at all knowledgeable on and pay up if we've agreed I'm going to sell them some good or service in the future.
andy3055:
My situ is a bit different. I have very few friends with whom I talk tech. One of them listens to me and takes advice. The other is an enthusiast who has limited electronics knowledge to whom I gift a lot of things. I fix things free for him. All my old tech stuff I give him to keep or pass on. There are only a few things left behind I am trying to identify to dispose which I know are of no interest to him. There is absolutely no money involved as he is a comparatively poor guy who treats me like as if I am his dad! Comes running any time I need help. A couple of years back he kept my wife calm in the hospital when I had a major surgery! Now, my wife is another kind. Never wants to take my advice but will take the same advice from an outsider :-DD Strange creature.
Wilksey:
Yeah I don't tend to tout my projects between friends and family, I make stuff to give to them like light up things for the kids etc and I make stuff that I need like the project I mentioned above, I had already told my friend that I had made this "gadget" and for what reason, he's into I.T. and electronic stuff, buying, not making I should add, so I thought he might be interested in it, he has taken an interest in some of my other projects but never asked if I could sell him one before, but he casually dropped in "I could do with one of those for when I get my dashcam, can I take one off your hands i'll pay you for it", and I just kind of said "Yeah, sure" I mean what else do you do on the spot to a friend who you have just told you had 5 boards made and used 3.
I just hate wasting my time pricing everything up and then to be told they found a cheaper one on eBay which does pretty much the same as the dashcam itself, especially since he asked me.
I'll certainly not be confessing to having "extra" next time!!
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