When you order from Adafruit you order confirmation email now includes direct links to product pages, tutorials and any additional information you may need to get started quickly with your purchase. Many people save their order confirmation emails for reference, now we include even more information to store, share and bookmark.
ZENCART ZENSDAY – Daily stats! Our zen-cart mods/hacks/tips & tricks. If you don’t measure something you can’t improve it, we like to view the daily stats at Adafruit each day, here’s a mod for your own Zencart install if you’d like to do this too.
We now have little labels on items with a barcode and our url shorterner (fits nicely!). This is part of the many things we’re doing to make it easier for our staff to ship orders and for our customers to find the links needed for products.
Zen Cart Mods! Our mods, hacks, tips and tricks for open source shopping carts. This week – Tariff information for each product. If you plan to ship items abroad, the package will end up having to pass through the recipient’s customs office. These offices basically look at whats in the package and send a tax bill for any import tariffs or VAT. To speed up shipping (especially with a automated shipping system) its handy to have each items tariff information attached to the product. This tutorial will show how we do this by creating three new product attributes that are stored in the database: Tariff Number, Country of Origin and brief description.
When you use the online USPS shipping label generator (we use it via paypal), it generates a full page of information. The top half of the page is the label you affix to the package, and the other half is full of extra info that isn’t needed for the shipping label. If you want to use full-page label sheets, you really don’t want to waste half the page each time you print a label. To work around this, we developed a script to split a PDF into top- and bottom-half PDFs, enabling you to only print the top half (the actual label) while leaving the bottom half of the label page usable for the next label you print.
For example, here’s a slightly-doctored image of the original printing label.
ZENCART ZENSDAY – Stashing inventory! This mod will let you ‘save’ 3 (or whatever #) pieces of inventory of each item. So if the true inventory is 50 pieces, the store will act like there is only 47. This will let you keep a stash around in case you need extras to replace customer’s damaged or lost packages, or if your inventory is off by a few pieces.
“Here is another business oriented tutorial (which is also, secretly a sensor tutorial). For measuring packages we have two serial-output scales. One can do up to 10lbs and the other 150lb (or 300lb). These are basically load cells with data output and precalibration. We use them for our automated shipping system but who knows what else they might be good for?”
We have had a lot of tutorials on electronic parts and Arduino lately, so we wanted to mix it up with some tutorials on the tools we use here every day at Adafruit. We have a very streamlined operation here and a lot of that has to do with the technology we’ve cooked into the business!
This tutorial is for the barcode scanner we use for shipping invoices as part of our custom shipping system. they can ‘talk’ rs-232 serial, ps/2 or USB so they are possible to connect to an embedded system. we have some usb HID interface example code as well for reading data directly from the barcode scanner.
Adafruit Industries I first found Adafruit Industries after I met Limor Fried at Analog Heaven New England a few years back (really she showed off a homemade production synth to a bunch of synth nerds in a high school music room). I think she had just finished the first run of her XoX BoX kits, a Roland TB-303 clone (which doesn’t do it justice, because it’s so much more than the 303). So, thinking that a DIY synth box was awesome, I checked out her website, which has grown considerably in the past few years. The first thing I got was a simple mini Persistence of Vision (POV) LED kit. Here’s the newer version of what I got years ago, the MiniPOV 3 kit.
The documentation is the best I’ve seen. Back then, for a noob like me, the instructions covered everything from part placement, to how to cut leads off resistors, to how to place ICs, to what soldering iron to get. The website had fantastic close-up pictures and the text explained exactly what to do. Since that first kit, I’ve made a bunch of Adafruit’s stuff and they continue to help explain all aspects of their products, which are educational and awesome in their own right. They have a great selection of really hip and culture-subverting kits designed in house. There’s a great selection of arduino shields and fun things like the TV-B-Gone.
If you’re just beginning to get into electronics, go to Adafruit first. I outfitted my intro electronics class with Ladyada’s Electronics Toolkits.
“The best way to get started is to put up a simple website and see how it goes,” says Limor Fried, who founded Adafruit Industries, which specializes in do-it-yourself electronics building kits. Personal blogs require no financial outlay, are easy to update with photos and descriptions of your work and can even net a few informal sales though PayPal. “Adding PayPal buttons for payment is very easy,” Fried says. “That’s how I started out.”
“I think, if your main reason for being in business is to maximize profitability, you must hate the work itself. We recently got in some custom-made-for-us tiddly winks made out of tagua nuts. They cost us $13 a set (of 25) and we sell them for $20 and donate the difference to charity. A profit-first business could never do that. It would miss out on the fun.
“It sounds stupid, but little unprofitable projects that aren’t huge time-resource sucks can pay their way without being profitable. Because they add to the fun, the make the business more interesting, and sometimes when you’re working on several projects that take a year or more to mature, you need quickies like this to keep you going. I value sustainability over that kind of profitability. I really want to be here as a business, because employing people is more important to me than super profitability.”
The shift from consumption toward production has powered the rise of an entire movement of makers, people who trade ideas for creating their own tools, machines, and technologies, attend giant “Maker Faires” in cities across the country, and devour magazines like Popular Science and the new magazine called Make. Phil Torrone is Make’s online editor-at-large. He works out of an office in New York that also houses Adafruit Industries, which sells a catalog full of DIY kits that help people make useful stuff like an iPad charger for pennies. Torrone and his partner Limor Fried promote what they call a “citizen engineer” approach to life that has attracted 100,000 subscribers for the magazine and even more visitors to their Web sites. Their open-source approach means that every design and invention created in their community is made available free and participants help each other in the way that neighbors once offered advice to their fellow backyard mechanics as they leaned over an engine.
Printable catalog (PDF) or (EPUB)
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