Get Paid to Publish Your Project

[Bored@Work]

I remember when the gadgetgangster guy toured several electronics forums and got laughed at. At that time it was a free PCB and parts to lure people into doing kits for him.

And this Electronics Labs thing? Electronics Labs is one of these annoying "aggregation" sites. The project section and "blog" don't have original content, just stuff scraped from the web and publications like datasheets, freeloading on the work of others. There are a few of those electronic sites around. Circuit Projects is another. They "conveniently" forget to attribute their sources. And don't get me started on Hack a Day. If you follow these sites you quickly figure they all copy from each other.

[EEVblog]

I remember when the gadgetgangster guy toured several electronics forums and got laughed at. At that time it was a free PCB and parts to lure people into doing kits for him.

And this Electronics Labs thing? Electronics Labs is one of these annoying "aggregation" sites. The project section and "blog" don't have original content, just stuff scraped from the web and publications like datasheets, freeloading on the work of others. There are a few of those electronic sites around. Circuit Projects is another. They "conveniently" forget to attribute their sources. And don't get me started on Hack a Day. If you follow these sites you quickly figure they all copy from each other.

Isn't Hack-A-Day just a blog which show-cases others people's work (with attribution)? If so I don't see the problem, that's the nature of many blogs. Or is there something else more sinister going on I'm not aware of?
They have posted a few of my videos and I certainly appreciate the extra hits!

Dave.

[Simon]

I remember when the gadgetgangster guy toured several electronics forums and got laughed at. At that time it was a free PCB and parts to lure people into doing kits for him.

And this Electronics Labs thing? Electronics Labs is one of these annoying "aggregation" sites. The project section and "blog" don't have original content, just stuff scraped from the web and publications like datasheets, freeloading on the work of others. There are a few of those electronic sites around. Circuit Projects is another. They "conveniently" forget to attribute their sources. And don't get me started on Hack a Day. If you follow these sites you quickly figure they all copy from each other.

reminds me of a book "about" PIC's I bough and resold very very quickly, after half a small book of some basic explanations about general electronics in a book that was soley about PIC MCU's and some not very laughable humour he then duplicated a number of fairly advanced projects from the microchip website, ok he gave credit but the whole book was a rip off. It's just a thing of today's society and personally I'd like to see all books reviewed by a competent body before been published.

[Zero999]

I've posted my concerns in the thread on Electronics Lab and might post a link to this thread.
http://www.electronics-lab.com/forum/index.php?topic=20610.msg93599#msg93599

The first project has been published.
http://www.electronics-lab.com/projects/test/012/index.html
There's a 10µF capacitor which appears to be connected backwards and there's no explanation of how 5V is derived from three AA cells with a reverse polarity protection diode in series (3.9V). This doesn't look very good, maybe if you have a project you're unsure about or can't get to work you should submit it, you'll get $80, a thread will be created by someone who's trying to build it and a load of people will correct the project for you.

Also note that the terms and conditions only state that it can't be published elsewhere on the Internet, which means it can be in a book magazine and you can still sell kits, as long as you don't publish a manual with he schematic and code on the Internet.

[EEVblog]

Ask the people at Elektor, they have a huge European / American / Global circulation and are always looking for advanced projects to publish. They have PCB / kit support too.

FYI, Elektor (and Silicon Chip) turned down my uWatch project.
But then Elektor went and published a thing on it in an old gear "retro" column, go figure.

The reasons?
Silicon Chip claimed there was no call for calculators any more!, and no one would ever want to build one.
They were wrong on both counts. It sold more kits than a few of my previous published Silicon Chip projects, and most of the projects they publish for that matter.

I got no reason from Elektor. I presume it's because it wasn't easily "kit-able" for them. I'm sure they make a shit-load on kits.

Dave.

[armandas]

i personally would be more inclined to put a project on my own website or ebay in kit form or just the instructions, at least it's a more ongoing thing than a one off payment for as project that could be bigger than you thought it would be

You obviously don't get the idea of getting a project published.

Getting your project on Electronics Lab is hardly "getting published"!

Dave.

I was talking in more general sense. If you want your project to be successful, you need as much publicity as possible. Of course, if you are going to sell kits, you will not want to give away "some rights" for a one-off payment.

In my case, I had a ready report on design of a VHDL based project. If I could get $80 for allowing the report to be published on someone's website, I'd consider it a win

[Simon]

to be honest I'd not touch that site, if they publish that rubbish they're not worth it

[Mechatrommer]

The first project has been published.
http://www.electronics-lab.com/projects/test/012/index.html

this is cool. they publish all the detail. i think its going to be a fantastic eeinfo site. but for a serious profitable idea, i dont think so. so i guess we can publish our simple elcheapo ideas there.

[Simon]

yea it's worth a shot to they might buy a schematic of a light bulb and a battery and we can sell our good projects ourselves

[Bored@Work]

Isn't Hack-A-Day just a blog which show-cases others people's work (with attribution)? If so I don't see the problem, that's the nature of many blogs. Or is there something else more sinister going on I'm not aware of?

Nothing sinister in the case of HAck-A-Day. It is just that I don't like that kind of blog. They grab everything they can find, produce no own original content and don't provide any added value for me.

In case of Hack A Day they write  half-assed summaries, have little or no taste when selecting "hacks" and lack understanding of what they write about. But a lot of chest thumping how great they are. And I hate their site design with dark, ugly background colors.

[JohnS_AZ]

I'd have to disagree about Hack-a-day. As a reader, while I agree that they produce no original content and their signal to noise ratio isn't perfect, they manage to pull together many items in one place that I would have to search dozens if not hundreds of blogs to find. I actually follow three tech blogs: Hack-a-day, Hacked Gadgets, and the Make blog. Together they save me a boat load of time.

As an occasional blogger myself those sites are invaluable. Post a tech story or project and send it to all three. If one or more of them repost your item it'll appear in another few dozen blogs and the final hit rate can be amazing.

I posted a positively -stupid- simple article about building a one-zone sprinkler timer. The first couple days it got a hundred or so hits. I sent it to Hacked-Gadgets who posted it. Hack-a-day and Make snagged it from there. In short at the end of one week the article had more than 20,000 hits, and by the end of the cycle (3 weeks) it had received more than 50,000. Looking at the site stats I found that it had been picked up by 30+ blogs plus stumble and a couple other referral sites. Now, several years later and thanks to Google, that article STILL gets a couple hundred hits a month.

As for the black background ... *shrug*... It's a matter of taste.

[nmcclana]

Hey There!  I'm the Gadget Gangster guy,

I came up with the idea about 2 years ago.  Initially, I thought people could make decent projects just on perfboard, but it doesn't work well.  Now, we mostly do custom PCB's for submitted projects - it's great for builders (easier to put together) and designers can create more sophisticated projects, but it means we have to be much more selective on the projects we publish.  We also do a lot of 1st party stuff, including development tools for the Propeller. 

$80 for doing a writeup on your project isn't bad, as long as you maintain the rights.  If it is something you're going to do anyway, then it's just a bonus.

[JohnS_AZ]

Hi there!

So I should ditch the perf boards you sent me ... oh ... 18 months ago? 

What kinds of projects are you guys looking for these days?

[nmcclana]

Ha!  You can still submit a project using the old boards, although most projects are better off on a custom PCB.  You can either submit gerbers or send us boards.  We do the kitting, order processing, shipping, etc.  A few designers will also just send us pre-kitted projects (e.g., VGA AV).

Best sellers are R/C (e.g., Simple Servo Tester), Audio (e.g., SidStick), and Development (e.g., Propeller Platform).  Our component inventory is limited, but if there's something your project needs, we can usually add it in.   

Designing kits for resale is challenging.  The most common mistake I see is designing something that's too expensive.  You also have to design something that people actually would find useful or fun.  A lot of designers do projects that were fun for them to create, but may not fill a market need.  If you have an idea you want to pass by me, just shoot me an email: nick (at) gadgetgangster.com

[JohnS_AZ]

(Nick, sent you an email about old business)

Not so much this forum, but judging by some of the others I follow (like Make) I think there could be a strong market for a series of low part count educational kits. Along the lines of Radio Shack's old P-Box kits (seriously showing my age there) There are plenty of simple kits out there, but none that actually TEACH the builder anything. It's all about writing the manual.

Just my two cents.