General > General Technical Chat
Small home or cottage business ideas - what have you got?
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mikeselectricstuff:

--- Quote from: bd139 on October 30, 2018, 02:22:42 pm ---You need multiple customers here at least. IR35  >:(

--- End quote ---
Not necessarily - AIUI if you have your own equipment etc. and can in principle take work from anyone you don't come under IR35.
bd139:
Depends if it’s a good or bad day at HMRC. Had the latter before.
TERRA Operative:

--- Quote from: DTJ on October 30, 2018, 01:10:40 pm ---
I wondered if anyone did automotive electronics work. I imagine there might be a good side business in repairing some dash board instrument clusters.

Did you have to rig up a full test system for the ECUs?

--- End quote ---

Nah, nothing so fancy. The problems with these ECU's were 99.9% leaky capacitors. I never had one not work after a cap replacement, and sometimes a PCB trace repair.

Gauge clusters would be easier to make a jig for I reckon, just feed in a signal from a sig gen for speed and tacho, and variable voltages for other gauges, assuming it's not all canbus...
Red Squirrel:
This is something I've briefly pondered.  With costs of living (hydro, gas, city taxes etc) constantly going up, I'd like to eventually buy cheap land in an unorganized townshp (less/no bylaws = more freedom) and live mostly off grid so I'm not so much at the mercy of those costs.  From there I could find a hobby that could generate income.  Since cost of living would be cheap it would not need to be that much income, but enough to pay for the few things I may want like internet, and rest would just go to savings to pay for one time purchases like house upgrades etc.

I'm thinking an easy route might be wood working, if you get decent at it you can build some commodity items that people will buy at a decent price.  Things like crates maybe even skids.  Furniture if you get really good.  Not exactly electronics but could do that too.  With a decent size off grid property and nice shop the possibilities are greater.
tpowell1830:
Seems like a number of us are looking for a semi-retirement small business. I wonder what a consortium of service type businesses would look like, something like an exchange, where we had a website and private forum that we could all use to share small jobs. For example, if I had a small TV repair service and ran into a customer who needed a small microcontroller done for a project, I could pass it on the the exchange for someone else. Or, a project for the European area, for example, that couldn't practically be done in the US, I could post the link in exchange for a European member to consider.

My thoughts are not real clear on how this exchange could work, but we could call for help with projects that are stumping us as well and get free help on the exchange.

Help me out here to define this exchange idea, how else could it work to help a small business? Small businesses are the least to get help from any source, maybe even some kind of financial help for small capital expenses, say for a specific piece of equipment? Any thoughts?

It is very difficult to scratch start a small business and there aren't many resources where you can easily get help. How can a consortium/exchange be modeled so that the small business person at least has other small businesses as resources? Knowledge base, source base, there a number of ways it would be beneficial.
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