Tidbits from my daily-life

Seeedstudio, who’s motto is: “Electronics can be art”, popped into my life when I was looking for an asian distributor of Arduinos for my SM3604 class. I would usually make my purchases at Sgbotic (based in Singapore), but when I wanted to place a group order for my class, they happened to be offline. (I suspect some issues related to renewing their domain name or pay their hosting bills )

Seeedstudio is a company based in Shenzhen, China. For those who do not know, Shenzhen is the city making the border between Hong Kong and China. It is a very fast-growing city where buildings seem to pop-out like mushrooms.
They are a group of electronics enthusiasts that share their manufacturing resources through their online shop (the depot) and  promote global open source electronics projects.

Simply reading at the description of the company and their ideals, I got seduced. Open Source is very dear to me as I advocate the use of Open Source applications and most of my day-to-day use of computing takes advantage of Open Source technologies. My PhD project is extensively based on a home-made cluster of debian-based machines and most of my programming based on open SDKs.

One of the other very positive aspects of this company is the fact that they are just across the border. Shipping is cheap, fast and if I wanted I could actually go to the shop myself. ( I just so happen to have had dinner a couple of blocks from their offices last weekend)

They also produce some custom-made boards and arduino clones. I have ordered some Seeeduinos and will try and make a writeup about them when they finally get here, within the next week.

Edit: Stuff ordered on Monday, Shipping done on Wednesday evening, Received this morning at 10am. Added some pics:

SeeduinoV2.12

Seeeduino purchases

Seeeduino purchases

TiltSwitch, RangeSensor, MotionSensor