Month: December 2017

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#27: Visit to the Sonoff factory and ITEAD

UPDATE: I’ve been asked by several people how they can get in touch with factories so they can go on tours. Please DON’T DO THIS unless you are serious about doing business with that company. Factories are not amusement parks, and the staff who work in them are busy doing their jobs. If you want to manufacture a product and you seriously want to do business with a factory, then it’s easy to arrange a tour. But don’t do it just because you want to have a look! That wastes their time.

ITEAD, makers of the super-popular Sonoff home automation devices, very generously allowed me to visit their head office, their factory, and their warehouse so that I could see how the Sonoff is made.

Come with me on a quick trip to China to learn a little about the amazing city of Shenzhen, see its enormous electronics markets, and go inside the Sonoff factory to watch them progress from a bare PCB to a finished product.

ITEAD: www.itead.cc

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The Makers Road to Shenzhen

My friend Karl von Moller came along with me and a few others on a recent trip to Shenzhen, China. Karl is a film-maker so he documented the trip extensively, and the first episode about the trip is up now:

He’ll be following up with more videos about what we saw on the trip, and my own video about our tour of ITEAD and visit to the Sonoff factory will be up soon too.

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Checkout problems in the online store

I’ve heard from a few people that they’ve tried making purchases from my new online store, but haven’t been able to complete checkout. A couple of people have reported that they couldn’t checkout, then tried again later and it worked – even though I hadn’t changed anything.

My theory is that the problem is with the Australia Post shipping calculation plugin that I’m using with WooCommerce. When you get to the part of the checkout where you enter your address, it uses the size and weight of your order to look up the shipping cost with Australia Post before you can complete the checkout. For some people this doesn’t seem to work, so it just sits there and goes nowhere.

Obviously this is really frustrating and I’d like to make sure it’s fixed, so if you have any problems with the online store please email me at jon@superhouse.tv. Having more information about exactly when the problem shows up would be a big help.

I’ve checked that all the products have weights and dimensions specified, but perhaps it has problems with some countries or specific destinations.

Sorry about the inconvenience 🙁