The Hackaday Store Lives Again!

Once upon a time there was a store where you could find the most amazing Hackaday shirts and other swag. If you managed to get one of the rare Jolly Wrencher adorned shirts back then, it’s probably about worn out by now. Prepare to rejoice, Hackaday has a completely new store packed with T-shirts, tools, and stuff to help you fill up those waking hours with hardware hacking goodness.

We’ve had a little fun over the last couple of days with posts that hint (maybe a bit too subtly?) that this was coming. We always try to have a little bit of fun for those of you who are really paying attention. Now we’re wondering who will be the first to implement the one-time pad as a dedicated piece of hardware… project ideas need to come from somewhere, right?

Take a look around the general store and you’ll see this time we have more than just stuff you wear. Hackers need tools and we’ve selected a small but inspiring group of must-have’s. The kits and toys we’ve selected are surely a rabbit hole of personal challenges and evolving hacks for you. And the best part is that these choices are one more way for us to promote the virtue of Open Design (it is the way). The only question now is what other open hardware do you want to see added to those ranks?

58 thoughts on “The Hackaday Store Lives Again!

    1. ok cool well i guess not? didnt even warrant a reply? i mean.. grand opening and all? you could have made it cool like a brute forcing/guessing contest, restricted attempts, etc.

      oh well.

  1. I’m just waiting for my book to come in so I can finish my encoding/decoding script (well, currently unknown pads are assumed to be 1 to 1)
    And I hope to see secret items, coupons, or maybe even contests hidden in the pads…it’d be a shame just to see lorem ipsum or something

        1. We thought it would be cooler to have it be theoretically possible for someone to decypher the messages without the key.

          We probably haven’t released enough encyphered messages so that is possible yet, but if someone can manage to do a really great writeup on deciphering the message without the key, there’s some swag as a reward.

          1. dynamic? Try HK shipping house, or eating cost yourselves. NO WAY I will pay >$2-3 for shipping in the age of ebay free shipping.

            No wonder you hide shipping cost, there is no mention on the store page, no link with cost table, even adding to backed doesnt display any cost. You need to fill in all of your precious bodily flu^^^details first.

          2. You realise that “eat the cost yourself” is code for “add it to the product pricing”, right? And since most orders will be small, that basically means adding the cost of shipping everything individually to the price of every product.

          3. If most orders are in the US, adding a small price to the product to cover shipping costs across the globe might work.

            If there is no ‘shipping cost’, people are more inclined to spend $5 here, and later $10 there. Otherwise you save up your order, forget about it, and don’t order a damn thing.

            Whether it’s cost effective is up to HAD.

      1. Just put a paper in your printer, Instant sticker!

        Oh, you don’t have a vinyl cutter?

        Oh, you don’t have a 3D-printer?

        So just an Arduino board, eh?

        Then the shop should have stickers!

    1. you need a can transceiver to interface with the bus(in terms of signal conditioning etc), you would need this at minimum to allow a buspirate or any other device to do anything useful, not supprising they have also included a CAN controller, as it simplifies things greatly. The only thing i wouldnt be totally happy with is all OE canbus implementations have some kind of choke/filter on the data lines before going onto the tranciever chip, as far as i can see the tranciever chip in the can-pirate is directly connected to the bus.

  2. This really doesn’t look competitive or attractive.

    Your in an excellent position with the community you have built up here, why not take advantage of that. Add a ‘wish’ list to the website to get stats on what stock levels to keep on different products and what products ‘go together’. Even better, create ‘want’ lists so that customers can paste links to products (in their own list) that they ‘want’ but you don’t currently stock. You could also allow lists to be added as a BOM if you include the original part numbers that are commonly used like 7805 (Voltage Regulator) Z84C0020 (CPU), ATmega328 (uC) etc.

    Don’t build an online store based on the worst case scenario. The worst case is that the online store will fail and that is exactly what will happen if you build a store based on the worst case scenario. ie. If you think of everything that can go wrong with costs and logistics and build compensation into prices and policies while expecting a fixed profit then you will fail to be competitive. This is your ‘venture’ and not the customers so accept that it’s your risk and that profits will be lower to start as some of the profits will be lost into unexpected costs while your team gains the knowledge to do things more efficiently and you become better aware to your customers needs (this is key).

    I can’t overstate the paragraph above. I have watched so many businesses attempting to transition from traditional trading to online trading. Many fail the first time and most of those don’t try again which leaves vulnerable to the inevitable demise of traditional trading.

    I looked at the terms –

    If it gets lost in the mail then too bad for the customer. Well sure this is no big deal on $5 item but who is going to take that chance on a $150 item?? Customers are not going to try to nut out how to insure and what it costs etc, other online shops don’t expect that of customers. The trader is in the best position to make decisions about insurance and apply that to the sale price without expecting the customer to know the ins and out of what gets there reliably and what is better insured.

    Products returned for a refund MUST arrive back within 30 days. Lets look at that, 2 days to get out the hackaday door. 2 days for the customer to decide it needs to be returned and actually get it out there door. That leaves 14 days each way. Freight being what it is (irregular) you have to ‘gamble’ on weather your product will arrive back to hackaday in time for a refund if you live any distance from the US. Why not give a smaller time for the purchaser to apply for a refund online and then whatever time it takes to get it back (within reason). If it doesn’t get back then no refund.

    Now lets say your product arrives one day late to hackaday. You have paid for the original freight and then paid for the return freight and now that the product cannot be accepted as a return you have to either give up on it of pay for delivery again!

    Then there’s the $17 freight charge, really! Nothing kills an online store faster than high freight charges. Look at all the Chinese products that offer free freight on ebay! Look at all the other online stores that offer free or low freight charges. Of course we know that freight isn’t free but customers will buy when the freight charges are lower, which of course means that some or all of the freight cost are built into the price.

    While on freight – If all of you charges for products and freight are identical to a competitor and the competitor has in stock a 2 cent item that I also need then I will be buying from the competitor rater than paying the extra freight to a third party for a 2 cent item. The little stuff counts more than you expect.

    I really hope this work out well for hackaday. It would be excellent to have a supplier that is so well connected and responsive to the hacker community.

  3. FYI, deciphering the OTP product description yields no Easter eggs; it just yields..well a product description haha. A good practice to understand OTPs although! The product info seems like it cannot be deciphered until you receive the OTP though – this may bare fruits (or I’m being stupid and can’t figure out how to decipher it).

    1. Team up with friends and combine your order.

      Speaking as someone who just converted to using a fulfillment house from shipping stuff myself – yes, international shipping is expensive. Places like Amazon and other big online stores spoil us because they do the huge volume that allows them to get really low rates. Small shops like myself and HaD can’t do that.

  4. I’m impressed with the theme. It is dynamic to page width, and columns and left pane resize as well.

    Kudos to whoever designed it!

    I see it is shopify under the hood, can I ask which theme you based hackaday theme on?

    1. Thanks for the compliment!

      The theme was designed and built from scratch so it had no base. I did try and do my best to make it as responsive as I could. Still not 100% happy with it so there may be some minor changes in the future.

      1. Hey,

        Any plan on opensourcing it?
        Not the actual design element (b&w colors, logo, etc), but the design (css, html).
        Something like this:
        http://tuktuk.tapquo.com/microsites/tuktuk_app.html

        (This is the one I plan using on my new site).

        But I understand both way (open or closed source).
        I don’t think opensourcing gives any advantage to you
        (external contribution, bugfix), but still would be nice to see it in a github repo.

        Anyway really nice design, I like it very much, thank you for sharing some insight.

        Best,
        Laszlo

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