Skip to main content

Shipping times from Chinese gadget sites

I like buying cheap novelty items from Chinese gadget sites. I have bought hundreds of items from various sites so far, and have had a surprisingly good experience with them overall. Incredibly I have never had an item lost thanks to AusPost.

Most items are as described and satisfactory as long as you have done your research and know what to avoid. In general, I try not to buy gadgets involving flash memory chips and batteries, because most times, you are getting inferior stuff. Lower tech items are generally OK eg. toys, phone/tablet accessories, houseware etc.

The sites I have used so far are DealExtreme, DinoDirect, Lightake and Focalprice. I am eying a few others like TinyDeal and TMart. The only problem with buying from these sites is the long shipping times. I am using this post to keep track of the delivery times of various purchases to Melbourne (Australia):

DinoDirect: Printer Ink Refill
Ordered: 9 Sep
Shipped: 13 Sep
Received: 26 Sep
Time taken:  18 days

DealExtreme: Novelty Candy Dispenser
Ordered: 2 Oct
Shipped 3 Oct
Received: 16 Oct
Time taken: 15 days

DealExtreme: Pocket Illuminated Microscope
Ordered: 1 Oct
Shipped: 3 Oct
Received: 17 Oct
Time taken: 14 days

More to come...

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Cooling mod for the X96 Air #2

Previously, I added a USB cooling fan to the X96 Air TV box . The problem with this mod is that the fan is always running, and it runs at full speed. Ideally, the fan should kick in only when the CPU temperature is above a certain threshold. It would be even better if there is a way to control the fan speed. Dan McDonald left me a comment pointing to his project on Github . He basically connected the fan to a USB relay that can be controlled by Python script. His project inspired me to make a similar mod that would make use of the spare D1 Mini boards I have lying around. The plan is to hook up the fan to a MOSFET (2N7000) and control it via PWM. Here's the very simple circuit: The code simply reads a single character from the serial port (0 - 9). 0 will turn the fan off, while 1 - 9 will generate a proportional PWM to drive the fan, with 1 being the lowest and 9 being the highest. Here's the Arduino code: #include <Arduino.h> void setup () { Serial . begin ( 9600 ...

Installing and customizing CoreELEC in X96 Air

I previously installed CoreELEC on another TV Box ( Ugoos X3 Pro ), which unfortunately died after only 9 months during the summer (due to the unit overheating, which I learned is a common problem for cheap Android TV boxes). So this time I purchased a X96 Air  (4GB/32Gb) and had to do the whole thing again. So this is a note-to-self in case I ever have to install CoreELEC again on some other device. Installation of CoreELEC is simple enough by following this guide . Basically, it involves downloading and writing the firmware to a microSD card using usbimager . Then insert the microSD card, reset the unit and hold the reset until the logo appears. The unit will then proceed to boot into CoreELEC. First thing is to connect to WiFi, then enable SSH. This allows me to login via ssh and execute: ceemmc -x from the terminal. This writes CoreELEC to the built-in eMMC storage, after which I am able to remove the microSD card and reboot the unit into CoreELEC via the built-in sto...

DC-DC Buck Stepdown Converter for ESP8266

I am working on a project that requires a step-down converter from 12V to 5V, that will then power a WeMOS D1 Mini. I saw this new mini buck converter based on the usual LM2596 MP2307 , so I thought I'd give it a try. Unfortunately, it didn't work. Although it is supposed to be able to supply up to 1.8A, the D1 Mini was not able to boot up. The 5V pin was being properly supplied, but the 3.3V pin measures at only ~1.3V. So I had to go back to my usual LM2596 module, which is much larger, but works to power the D1 Mini with a 12V source. Here's a great review of the mini buck converter I found while trying to figure out how to make it work. The fact that it has high quiescent current (~60mA) is also mentioned in a few other sources.