Lol ... this implies that one of my dump unqualified comments is actually worth $27.27 ... and I've been giving them away for free to my room mate all the time ....

Anyway thanks a lot for the new toy !

You're welcome! Enjoy the bus pirate!

I'd love to, but I'll have to get it through German customs first.

My favourite customs office send me a letter last week. They could not find a invoice or a customs declaration attached to the package. Happened to me a few times before, when the customs declaration was on the bottom side of the package.

Anyway since this is Germany an everything has to be formal with a maximum amount of paperwork. Therefore they are not allowed to open the package and inspect the contents with out me being present or something like that. So if I don't show up at the customs office within the next two weeks they are going to send it to the return address.

The invoice part should be simple ... a print out of the order confirmation email usually does the trick. This time it might be a little bit difficult since the total sum is 0.00. Not sure what the customs officers will make of it. I'm pretty sure there'll be a lot of explaining and at least some additional paperwork for me. Though the worst case is that they 'have to' destroy it ... happened only once to me and they were wrong back then.

A bit more annoying is the fact that there is some road construction going on and it's a 56km drive to the customs office. Also they have the most inconvenient office hours ever. 

I'll keep you posted.

So here is the end of the story:

I skipped some of the earlier lectures yesterday to drive to the customs office. There I had to wait because of 6 guys that were in the room pretending to work, there is only guy responsible packages shipped to private persons. (So they claimed.) And he was at the phone.

So after I watched some glaciers speed by through the window (most glaciers actually move fast compared to employees of the german government) , the call was finished and I finally got to present the paperwork they send me. I was told the package was held for inspection because they could identify the content and there was no invoice included in the package. Which is why they could not verify the value on the customs declaration attached to the outside. I had to open the packages and explain the contents to them. Standard procedure.

At that point any sane person would have asked them why they did not simply google 'B-U-S P-I-R-A-T-E' since this is written in huge white letters on the red pcb. Luckily I don't consider myself a sane person and I've already asked these questions the first time I got there to pick up a package. On they other had they could have considered it an end user product and destroyed because of product safety concerns or something like that ... so maybe it was fortunate they did not do any research. Also I must admit they are really trying hard to do their job without actually working.

Instead of stating the obvious I stayed calm and handed them a printout of the checkout email, which was the closest thing to an invoice I got. Because that was not an actual invoice and the total was 0.00$ they asked for the paypal receipt.  Oh well ... I don't think paypal supports 0.00$ transactions yet. Also it seemed like the pcb looked like an expensive part for a precision instrument to the customs officer. At least that's what I can tell from his questions. Hence the 0.00$ invoice was not very believable from their point of view.

Of course I could have started to explain that I won the thing, since I posted a funny comment to an old photo from CERN. I would have gotten the package eventually, but it would have required even more time and explanations. These guys have neither humour nor fantasy.

So I decided to take shortcut and tried to pass of the bus pirate as an engineering sample I need for a project at the university. Since this is something covert by some kind of business process, it was suddenly all a matter printing out the right form and signing it. (I highly doubt that there is a business process for winning electronics.)

5 Minutes later I walked out the door with my new bus pirate. I even got back to university in time for my next lecture.

TLDR; 

German customs does not belief in customs declarations. Put an invoice into package when shipping to Germany. Also never tell them what really happened, tell them something they have a business process for.

They have no "business process" for winning a prize?

I'm not doubting you... I'm just flabbergasted that that's a possibility. Surely there have been some German recipients of olympic medals and/or nobel prizes. I guess those don't look like bus pirates?