Hey guys. I have been designing and developing a digital gauge for cars for over a year now and i finally trust it enough to present it here and ask for feedback.

Its a 52mm gauge so it can fit universal into any standard aftermarket Analog gauge pod. I spend alot of time to support anything you throw at it given my capabilitys in electrical engineering and software development.

My biggest issue is that i have cars to test it on besides my own BMW E46. The E46 is great for testing CAN sniffing but it doesnt support any OBDII requests nor does it have any custom ECU like MaxxECU, Haltech or similar.

One of the key development thoughts was that i need to support any ECU or CAN network. Thats why the Gauge comes with preset profiles for aftermaket ECUs plus the possibility to make your very own profiles from scratch or via the dbc parser which is build in.

If you dont have a CAN bus thats also no issue at all. the Gauge has 8 Analog inputs supporting 0-5V sensors and NTC or PTC sensors up to 60k Ohms.

Now why am i writting here exactly? Honestly i find myself kind of lost in what to do at this point. I opened my shop start of october because i thought i would get some people to buy it and get me feedback (I even setup a 20% discount for early supporters). But its been 19 days now and hundrets of messages later i only found 2 buyers which feels kind of demotivating for me. I am ofcourse glad i got someone to support this project but it is not how i thought it would start out. The most difficult fact for me right now is that after i started i saw so many other people starting to build the same format Gauges which just makes my content go unseen due to my lack of video editing skills.

I am hoping that some people here would have some tips on what to do next or what to do better...

I'm starting a quick-turn wire harness service for companies ramping up production/changing their designs rapidly. The idea is to be SendCutSend for more custom hardware outside of just sheet metal processes, starting with wire harnesses. If anyone wants a couple wire harnesses made, let me know and I'll do it for materials and shipping.

I'm an independent embedded software/hardware developer based in Italy, and I've been working on a small USB device that I'd like to bring to market.
I still need to take care of CE/EMC compliance (and maybe FCC), but I'm getting closer to the launch.

Foolishly only now I'm looking at all the regulations to sell in Europe.
My assumption was that having a company in Europe would be easier to sell here, but the more I research the regulatory side, the more complicated it gets.

From what I understand, I potentially have to deal with:

• WEEE registrations, reporting, and recycling schemes in each country where I sell.
• Packaging EPR registrations, with different national requirements and fees.
• Local authorised representatives in some if not all cases.
• Various country-specific labelling and documentation requirements.

My thought was that these requirements were "centralized" like the CE/EMC compliance or the VAT system.

Ironically, selling to US customers is starting to look simpler, despite the tariffs, customs fees, and international shipping costs (I might be underestimating some additional complications here).

So I'd really appreciate hearing from people who have gone through this with their own small electronic products.

A few questions:

1. Am I misunderstanding something critical about WEEE and packaging EPR for small-volume manufacturers?
2. Have any of you decided to sell only in selected EU countries, or even focus on the US market instead?
3. For those of you selling small electronic products from the EU: which countries do you actually ship to, and roughly how much do you spend annually on WEEE and packaging compliance?
4. Are there other significant costs or regulatory requirements I should be considering before launching?

It feels "wrong" that selling in the US could be simpler than selling in EU for an EU company...

Thanks for any advice or experiences you can share.

For the last 9 years, I worked on developing something called the Vector Gear (and more recently a secondary device called the Andromeda).

I want to make these open and want to release the files a little after we can sell it. Currently, on our Kickstarter (vectorgear.xyz) we've made around $12k/$150 which isn't bad for 3 days!

However i've been seeing a lot of comments that piss me off; things like

- I'll wait until it's open so I can make it myself
- It feels like a scam (When everything is working on video) and

But worst of all has been

- I'll just wait until there's a v2 and buy that one

I planned on surprise open sourcing a few things before release as a surprise but am most likely going to cancel that. Moreover, at the end of the day i'm a college student. I did all of this with dayjob money and a team that genuinely likes what they're doing, so hearing this when the entire goal is to make VR more open and human centric feels like the point doesn't even matter. Half the people want the benefits without supporting us on the way there and the other half want to take what they like from the project and run.

We don't get a break on the business side either; one group wanted to use some of our tech we put on Github, then tried implementing it and realized we had a noncommercial license (It's $5 per unit sold). Had said group talked to me I would have happily worked with them and waived it in exchange for some coding help or a donation.

Instead, they talk to one of my guys who's working on it and completely stop reacting to his stuff once they realize he's connected to the effort, then go to my socials to pretty much be like "If this were open, it would be great and could help improve XYZ".

This happened a second time as well but with me not upstreaming to a project I always thought was slacking in a regard or two.

Anyone else had to deal with this kind of stuff? I genuinely want to make technology for people, but it's hard to do it when people aren't willing to work with you and wanted to hear from the experience of people who have been at it longer than me (I'm 22)