Selling your hardware hacks is a great way to multiply your project’s impact, get your creations into others’ hands, and contribute to your hacking-related budget while at it. If you’re good at it, your store begins to grow. From receiving a couple orders a year, to getting one almost every day – if you don’t optimize the process of mailing orders out, it might just start taking a toll on you.

That is not to say that you should worry – it’s merely a matter of optimization, and, now you have a veritable resource to refer to. At Supercon 2023, [MakeItHackin]/[Andrew] has graced us with his extensive experience scaling up your sales and making your shipping process as seamless as it could be. His experience is multifaceted, and he’s working with entire four platforms – Tindie, Lektronz, Etsy and Shopify, which makes his talk all that more valuable.

[MakeItHackin] tells us how he started out selling hardware, how his stores grew, and what pushed him to automate the shipping process to a formidable extent. Not just that – he’s developed a codebase for making the shipping experience as smooth as possible, and he’s sharing it all with us.

His research was initially prompted by Tindie, specifically, striving to make the shipping process seamless. If you go the straightforward way and use the Web UI to copy-paste the shipping data in your postal system, it’s going to take you a good few minutes, and it’s an error-prone process. This is fine for a couple orders a year, but when you’re processing dozens of orders at a time, it starts to add up. Plus, there’s a few issues – for instance, the invoices Tindie prints out, are not customizeable. As for Etsy, it is less than equipped for handling shipping at all, and you are expected to have your own system.

There are APIs, however – which is where automation can begin. The goal is simple – spending as little time as possible on shipping, and as much time as possible on designing hardware. He shows us a video with a simple demo – cutting down the shipping label creation time from a couple minutes, down to fourteen seconds. That alone is a veritable result, and, there’s more.

On the way there, he’s had to reverse-engineer a couple APIs. In the talk, you get a primer about APIs – how they work, differences between external and internal APIs, ways to tap into internal APIs and make them work your magic. APIs are one of the keys to having the shipping process run smoothly and quickly, and [MakeItHackin] teaches you everything, from managing cookies to using browser inspect element tools and Selenium.

Another key is having fun. [MakeItHackin] gives us another demo – an automated system that stays in your workshop, powered by a Raspberry Pi and assisted by an Arduino, which does the entire process from start to finish without human input, save for actually putting things into envelopes and taking them to the post office. Of course, the system is also equipped with flashing lights and sirens – there’s no chance you will miss an order arriving.

Then, he goes into customs and inventory management. Customs forms might require special information added to the label, which is all that much easier to do in an automated process completely under your control. As for inventory management, the API situation is a bit dire, but he’s looking into a centralized inventory synchronization system for all four platforms too.

The last part is about working with your customers as people. Prompt and personalized communication helps – some might be tempted to use “AI” chatbots, and [MakeItHackin] has tried, showing you that there are specific limitations. Also, careful with the temptation to have part of your shipping process be cloud-managed – that also means you’re susceptible to personal data storage-related risks, so it might be best to stay away from it.

In the end, we get a list of things to watch out for. For instance, don’t use your personal details on the envelope, whether it’s the “From” address or the phone number, getting substitute ones is well worth it to protect your privacy. On the practical side, using a label printer might turn out to be significantly cheaper than using an inkjet printer – remember, ink costs money, and, there’s a dozen more pieces of advice that any up-and-coming seller ought to know.

Of course, all this is but a sliver of the wealth of information that [MakeItHackin] shares in his talk, and we are overjoyed to have hosted it. If you’re looking to start selling your hardware, or perhaps you’re well on your way, find 45 minutes for this talk – it’s worth its metaphorical weight in gold.

If you ever wondered just what it takes to build a modern device like a phone, you should have come to last year’s Supercon and talked with [Jose Angel Torres]. He’s an engineer whose passion into investigating what makes modern devices tick is undeniable, and he tells us all about where his forays have led so far – discovering marvels that a Western hacker might not be aware of.

Six years ago, he has moved to China, having previously been responsible for making sure that their Chinese subcontractors would manufacture things in the right ways. Turns out, doing that while being separated by an ocean set up more than just the timezone barriers – they were communicating between different worlds.

[Jose] tells us of having learned Chinese on the spot, purely from communicating with people around him, and it’s no wonder he’s had the motivation! What he’s experienced is being at the heart of cycle of hardware life, where devices are manufactured, taken apart and rebuilt anew. Here’s how he tapped into that cycle, and where he’s heading now.

One day, he sat down with his phone, connected to a computer, ADB prompt open, and enabled a logging routine. He saw a myriad of debug messages scrolling past – despite the phone being, for all intents and purposes, turned off, it was still alive. That made him think – now, what makes a phone tick? Which parts of it are responsible for this activity? How much control do you have over this, and can you replace these parts?

To get to the core of these questions, he headed down into dark places, where phones are taken apart, their motherboards laid bare, people working away with hot air guns and tweezers in hand. Trays of freshly desoldered BGAs, to be put into bespoke testing jigs and verified, so that they can be repackaged into tapes anew and resold to customers unconcerned with an increased failure rate.

On the streets where blocks are entirely owned by different companies, in stores overflowing with parts you couldn’t imagine to have existed, he has met a handful of friendly faces, each introducing him to different facets of the hardware world – from Macbook repairs that are officially not supposed to happen, to full-board reverse-engineering services.

If you need a PCB taken apart layer by layer, component by component, carefully imaged, and turned into CAD files, here is where you can get this done. What about a phone? What if you wanted to rebuild a phone? Well, not only can you fully reverse-engineer its PCB here, but they have tons of custom tooling for all the even somewhat popular models.

He glanced at a Huawei phone he’s just recently had bought, and decided to use it as a case study. The Ifixit diagrams can tell you about every single component on it, but only here can you walk up to a table and see piles and bins full of all sorts of different components for this specific model. Need a specific BGA? Here’s where you get a strip of them for $10.

What if you want to recreate the entire manufacturing process for a specific phone, from schematic to test jig, complete with all the different little parts like custom antennas and shells? That’s where you refer to a reverse-engineering company. This kind of company will take an example board, desolder all components, sand off all layers to get to even the internal copper, put all that data into a digital format. All passives that are taken off? Measured with an LCR meter. All ICs? Carefully documented, and, again, you can get a strip of them for $10. After a few weeks of work, you get Gerber files and Altium sources you can modify to add any feature the board might be missing. A schematic usually not included, but you can pay for it to be rebuilt too. And, of course, you get a BOM. Now, this is most of what you need to get a batch of identical phones assembled, starting from just one.

Now, what about if you need some test fixtures for bringup? Here, you can even use a phone of the same model as a test fixture – extend the connectors with separate FPCs, and use that second phone to test any of the different components you might be working on. All of these practices tie into the smaller seller culture, where every part you buy is marked with a seller’s stamp, so you can try and bring it back for a refund if it’s faulty.

[Jose] ends by showing a small curiosity he’s found – an I2C-connected daughterboard for a certain phone lineup, that almost, just barely, fits the SAO standard, with proximity and ambient light sensors on it. If you ever wanted to build a secure phone, you want to understand it, and if you want to understand what makes a phone tick, China will give you insights from the place this phone was born.