ModMyPi: how one student turned over £867,000 selling Raspberry Pi cases | Hacker News Reader

ModMyPi: how one student turned over £867,000 selling Raspberry Pi cases

wired.co.uk

94 pointscrocowhile22 comments

For those curious about the case itself, here's a link

https://www.modmypi.com/shop

The case looks great! Congratulations on your successful business.

Nice article. There were of course lots of people who identified the need for a case as a market. The success here is that this young man got it to market and achieved enough traction to grow that into something more sustainable. I've met a couple of people who banked a few 10's of thousands of dollars selling cases for the Pi and then got out of the market when volume dropped to unsustainable levels. Not a lot of money per-se but a nice chunk of change to start on the next thing.

The webshop is impressive, but lacks a basic item: a simple GPIO-controlled solid-state relay. It is the simplest (apart from blinking leds) and only necessary building block to get the Pi to actually do something in the real world (such as opening/closing a garage door).

Quite unrelated, but can anyone explain to me how the first picture of the Pi in it's case stays static on the page until you scroll past a certain point (around the 4th paragraph) Then it scrolls just like any static image. Interested to know how this is done.

Something like this? https://github.com/bigspotteddog/ScrollToFixed

Brilliant, thank you! I'll try this :)

JavaScript + CSS. Initially the image has position: absolute; and then once you scroll down a bit it's changed to position: fixed; which fixes the element relative to the view port.

Something like Raspberry Pi in a nice, aluminium case with room and cooling for two 3,5" drives would probably sell well as a home server for geeks. I'm hoping that's what FreedomBox will be.

Why would you need two 3.5" drives on a Pi? It would not make a very special NAS or small server, as you access the drives trough USB, sharing it with everything else - LAN and any other things you want to add. Yes, it's cheap and cheap to run, but also very slow and hard to maintain.

I've got an rpi running as a NAS with USB External HDD's and it works a treat.

Took about half an hour to set up, everyone on the network can access it easily and my WD TV Live will happily play video directly off it without any significant time buffering.

Personally haven't had any issues with speed or maintainability, would definitely recommend giving it a go.

Slow, yes, but probably fast enough for most people.

Why would it be hard to maintain?

I'm probably some other kind of geek, feeling limited by a Gbit connection to the home NAS.

Hard to maintain: not sure about others, but I had stability issues with my Pies using USB devices like wifi adapters, memory sticks and webcams; I would not trust one to store anything important, especially on complex setups: onboard USB -> Powered USB hub -> USB to SATA adapter -> SATA HDD (with external power).

Well, among other things -- the CPU in the Pi is ARMv6 with a hardware FPU.

Until the Pi came along, most people compiled either for ARMv6 with no FPU or for ARMv7, so at the beginning you had to compile your own packages if you wanted reasonable performance.

Also, the Pi limits power draw to something like 100 mA; if you just plugged in a USB Hard Drive it'd more than likely shut down the entire board (especially in rev1). So you'd need to put a powered hub in the middle...

The previous post did say "something like an" - which I interpret as a low-power, low-cost board (presumably an ARM board), so it doesn't have to be a Raspberry Pi in particular.

Well, I'd just like to add that I'd totally buy that! A low-power and low-cost board with two S-ATA connectors and decent-ish performance? I'd fork over for a bunch of them.

You'd probably want something more like a BeagleBoard then, although at that price point a traditional NAS would be cheaper.

Well done to them! As an aside, I love the look of their shopping site (https://www.modmypi.com/shop).

Any ideas on what the shopping cart would be - eg is this a heavy customisation / BYO or does it look like something familiar to HN readers?

Looks like OpenCart to me

I bet that number is sales, not profits. I wonder how much he makes after production costs, shipping from the manufacturer, taxes to the manufacturer, shipping to the client, salaries to his two employees, profit taxes, etc.

Yes, that's the common interpretation of "turnover". It's also worth noting that he's successfuly expanded beyond his initial offering such that modmypi.com is a one-stop-shop for all things Pi. Plus modmypi donate 5% of all profits back to the Raspberry Pi Foundation.

Yes, thats exactly right, but its an impressive figure nonetheless.

I would love to hear how people get parts like this made -- what are the costs, minimums, timeline, and process (e.g. submit a 3D drawing, etc).

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