szy.io

They’re here! Check them out on eBay! I finally got all the parts to put more Nixie breakout kits in stock, so now there’s 50 more available.

Get them while they’re hot!

I’ve just recently acquired some Tek TM500/other modular test equipment mainframe modules and have listed them on eBay for sale, thought I’d give you all a heads up in case it’s something that interests anyone here!

Please note that, as per the listings, these are all UNTESTED. They all appear to be in good physical condition and all the knobs, switches, etc. seem to function very well without any stickiness or catching. I don’t have a mainframe to plug these into so it’s not really possible for me to test them myself, unfortunately. As such, they are being sold as for parts/as-is.

Main Triggering Amplifier/Dual Time Base

FG 501A 2MHz Function Generator SOLD!

DM502 Digital Multimeter

The circuit boards for my next batch of nixie tube breakouts have arrived! I’m moving soon so I won’t be listing them for sale until I’m moved in and such, but hopefully they’ll be up for sale early next week sometime. I won’t be able to list all of them because I’m waiting to receive more nixie pins, but I’ll at least be able to sell some of them!

In other news, today’s the last day of my internship and I’ve officially been offered to return next summer, so that’s awesome. No need to hunt for internships this year. 

See you all on the flipside when I’m moved into school again!

So as I mentioned in a previous post, I will no longer be using Tindie to sell things that I also sell on eBay. After what happened today, I will definitely not be using them to sell anything in the future, and can’t recommend them to anyone anymore.

To preface this, I’ve had my Tindie account for a very, very long time. So long that when I went to set up my store again, the email address I used for it was no longer in service, so I couldn’t receive any Tindie emails. I could still log in, since I did so through my GitHub account, but I still wanted the proper email on file. However, I searched through my account and profile settings and couldn’t find anything related to changing my email on file with Tindie. I contacted support, and apparently this is only something you can do if you contact them. It’s 2018, every website in existence lets you change the email on file from the comfort of your own account dashboard, but apparently Tindie isn’t with the times in that regard.

So after getting the email changed, everything seemed alright except for slight annoyances with shipping rates, etc. that I’ve talked about before. Then today happened.

I received an email from Tindie support today saying they disbursed my funds and I hadn’t accepted the transfer on PayPal yet, and were making sure I didn’t have any problems or question about the process. Awful nice of them, except I didn’t initiate a disbursement nor did I see anything in my PayPal account. I email them saying just this, and they say that funds get automatically disbursed every 30 days (nice to not have any email confirmation or alert of this…) and they sent the funds to my PayPal account. The PayPal account under my old, non-functional email. Nice!

So I informed them that they had successfully dumped about $9 into the void and I couldn’t find a single spot on their website that allows me to change my PayPal disbursement settings, at which point support gave me a link to a page that does just that. I tried to change the email and it failed each time, saying “Your PayPal email is already set to [old email]”. After informing them of this constant error, the support person had to remove the old email first, and then I could set the new one. Yet again something that every other storefront website on the planet would allow you to do from the comfort of your own account dashboard, without ever having to contact another human being.

Eventually, things were fixed and I was able to get my money properly transferred into an active PayPal account. However, I can’t say I’ll ever use Tindie again and can’t really recommend them to anyone to use for selling things. The fact that their website completely misses the mark on so many basic things makes me seriously distrust their ability to handle any serious matters, such as if a customer had a problem with an order I sent them. 

Back to eBay.

When I started selling my nixie tube breakout board kits, I decided to list them both on Tindie and on eBay. Tindie because I’ve heard of it in the past, and knew it as the “etsy for electronics” – so I felt it would be a perfect fit for my product. I used eBay because I’m incredibly familiar with selling there, I enjoy how easy it is to purchase postage right from the site, and I have a bit more of a seller reputation there. As it happens, I ended up getting many more orders through eBay than through Tindie, and I noticed it’s much more difficult to set up shipping methods via Tindie and in general, I don’t feel like it’s worth my time to keep two listings when one isn’t attracting almost any attention at all.

So I’ll now be discontinuing selling kits on Tindie and will be using eBay exclusively. So if you go looking for my products on Tindie and can’t find them, this is why. It’s much more worth my time to use eBay and they provide shipping discounts that Tindie doesn’t.

I just ordered some new, slightly-redesigned nixie breakout boards, 50 of them in fact! I’ve added my name and website to the boards, completely forgot about that with the first run I ordered. With the boards and all the parts I ordered I’ll have plenty of stock for any future orders. Get them while you can!

I also made a bit of a discovery: turns out that when I’m ordering in these quantities, buying pre-cut header pins is cheaper than buying long strips to cut myself. Saves me some time that way too!

I’ve rebooted this site for the umpteenth time. This time I don’t have any kind of posting or schedule goal, I just want to have an archive of my projects and a way to keep track of what I’m working on, I guess.

So now for what this one is about: I’ve finally created a kit to sell online. This one is an IN-12A/B nixie tube breakout board. It simply adapts the nixie tube to 0.1″ headers for prototyping, with a location on the board for a current limiting resistor, or a jumper to bypass it. I’ve created a Hackaday.io project page for it here. I’m also selling the kits, either on Tindie or on eBay. The kits include the PCB, headers, resistor and nixie tube pins. Everything you need to get started except for the nixie tube itself.

Hopefully others will find this kit as useful as I do.