Seeed and Kickstarter

Recently as you may know, Kickstarter has become a popular vehicle to fund and launch open source hardware products. Typically how it works is the Maker posts the idea on Kickstarter along with the amount of money needed to turn the idea into a product. Usually an initial prototype or design has already been completed giving potential customers the confidence it will come to fruition. The Maker offers a reward which is often the product itself along with an estimated ship date and over the course of the Kickstarter period, typically 30 or 60 days, customers pledge various reward amounts. After the period is up and if the funding limit was reached, the Maker gets the money and then fulfills the rewards. If the funding limit was not met, nothing happens and no money changes hands. For their troubles for the successfully funded projects, Kickstarter gets 5% and Amazon, who collects the payments, gets another 3%-5% of the amount of funding generated.

Here at Seeed, we are very proud to have supported several Makers in their quests to turn ideas into successful products on Kickstarter. For most of them, we’ve taken care of the manufacturing and distribution which can be very cost effective due to our close proximity to manufacturers here in Shenzhen, China combined with our fulfillment capabilities. For the Kickstarter projects in particular, usually we’ll drop ship direct to the customer based on the Kickstarter customer list the Maker sends us. Here’s the Kickstarter projects we have supported so far, all of which have been successfully funded.

B-Squares: Modular Solar Powered Electronics

Gameduino: An Arduino Game Adapter

Trigger Trap: The Universal Camera Trigger

BoardX: The Open Source Miniature Motherboard

ClockTHREE Jr.:  A Word Based Clock

We’ve also funded a few KICKSTARTER projects like the Protei, an Open Source Oil Spill Cleaning Sailing Robot.

Here’s the Kickstarter project we’re currently working on. It’s Al Linke’s Droidalyzer, an open source alcohol detector accessory for Android phones. After a night out drinking with friends, pair the Bluetooth enabled device to your Android phone and then breathe into the alcohol sensor to check your alcohol level from your phone. What’s also cool is that it doubles as a full blown IOIO (pronounced yo-yo) board. IOIO is an open source microprocessor, kind of like Arduino, but designed specifically for the Android platform. So in addition to the alcohol detection function, its fully hackable and expandable, just check out the IOIO Wiki. For this project in addition to the manufacturing and distribution, we did a good portion of the design in collaboration with Ytai Ben-Tsvi, the creator of IOIO. Check out the project here.

Do you have the next great idea? Drop us a note and we can talk about it.

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