12 ms·

Reading stories about Shenzhen makes me terrified for the future of electrical engineering in the United States. Here in Silicon Valley I often have to wait a

Reading stories about Shenzhen makes me terrified for the future of electrical engineering in the United States. Here in Silicon Valley I often have to wait a week to get a board fabbed and another week to get it assembled. I usually have to order the parts myself from Digikey, which takes a few days, and then manually build the kits. If something goes wrong during the bring up, I need to either spend boatloads of money on overnight shipping (and get the order in before _ pm) or... well... there is no other option as pending time going to Jameco or Halted would likely be wasted, especially with even slightly uncommon or specialized parts. In Shenzhen, however, everything is within reach and ridiculously fast. All of the factories and assembly houses are there and they even have malls that contain just about every electronics part you can imagine so if you need some rare IC you are almost guaranteed to have it the same day. Not to mention the EE communities like bbs.eetop.cn which contain not only software that is almost impossible to find through English channels (stuff that is prohibitively expensive specifically), but also many many datasheets and documentation that is usually under NDA and can sometimes be impossible to get if you can't convince the manufacturer that you might buy tens or hundreds of thousands of chips in the future. What strikes me is how practical this guy's setup is. He isn't a Maker, he is a hobbyist manufacturer. I don't often see DIY pick n places and other more industrial manufacturing equipment this side of the Pacific (although this may just be a result of my ignorance).

alaskamiller 14y ago
Imagine if the massive empty complexes along the 101 in Silicon Valley gets repurposed to be hacker spaces and dorms, imagine if RadioShack and Fry's makes a comeback and returns to their roots of supplying bare parts, imagine if 3D printers become affordable and everywhere, imagine if crowd funding sites can wire funds within a day, imagine if the distribution channels can also mail out products the next day. Imagine the number of cycles microevolution that can be achieved throughout a single year.
- i386 14y ago
  > Imagine if the massive empty complexes along the 101 in Silicon Valley gets repurposed to be hacker spaces and dorms I sympathise with your intent but that sounds like a sweatshop to me.
  - lifeisstillgood 14y ago
    I kind of agree. However if you put up an advert here saying " three years in a dorm in SF - running your own Shanzen style mini fab company, no time wasters". You will get hundreds of genuine people willing to do the sweatshop thing.
  - alaskamiller 14y ago
    Those poor college aged kids and their sweaty dorms enjoying the benefits of youth, low overhead, access to information, and sharing knowledge.
    - batgaijin 14y ago
      Slaves, really.
      - msutherl 14y ago
        And what of working retail, or in a factory?
  - derleth 14y ago
    > that sounds like a sweatshop to me. No, for one fundamental reason: The people in real sweatshops don't have any other realistic option. The people in the proposed complexes along the 101 would have the ability to say "screw this" and go do something else. I once had the idea that wealth really means having options. I don't know if that's universally true, but it certainly applies here. Silicon Valley is fundamentally wealthier than the areas where sweatshops which are sweatshops spring up.
- muyuu 14y ago
  Silicon Valley rent prices and living costs make it impossible to ever be competitive with China in EE manufacturing. But not only China, also Taiwan, Korea, Japan and even parts of Europe and the rest of the US. Nothing wrong with it though. This only sustains because there are more profitable industries there now.
  - alaskamiller 14y ago
    Bigger problem is that Americans don't understand high density living. That's going to take a few generations.
    - nnq 14y ago
      The one thing I loved when first coming to the US was how spread out and spacious everything was (compared to most European cities), bar NYC. It's amazing how you Americans strive to change exactly the things that foreigners absolutely love about your country... for me "high density living" is a mind wrecking nightmare that only those with the "hypesocial city rat" personality type can enjoy...
      - muyuu 14y ago
        Depleting oil reserves are quickly forcing this change. I'd take "medium" density any day though. Enough density so people don't need to move miles daily, not enough density so people can't afford some healthy living space. NYC and SanFran are way over the top.
        nnq 14y ago
        Agree, probably your "american style medium density" is what I would consider "low-ish density", healthy and pleasant too... ...but using the "depleting oil reserves" and other eco arguments to make people leave in what I see as much lower quality conditions is inhumane and cruel in my pov - just build good quality public transportation, make it electrical (even trains are efficient) and go all nuclear to power it all, putting up with all the eco-consequences of it ...or maybe Elon Musk's Hyperloop will redeem everything :)
- pm90 14y ago
  One of the biggest shocks for me when I came to the US for the first time was to see what Radio Shack had turned into. Especially because it is often cited as one of the reasons for technological progress in america (easy availability of electronics)
  - alaskamiller 14y ago
    They pull $4B a year from over 7,000 locations around the world, it's hard to turn a ship that size. Especially when mobile phone subsidies is becoming a big part of their income stream. That's like crack to them now, hard to turn away from that. But if this DIY/3DP movement is going mainstream in the coming generation then they need to make a big move. Imagine if Radio Shack makes a comeback consolidating the parts market by buying up the likes of Sparkfun, Quirky, and IndieGogo while partnering with Digikey for retail distribution. Then imagine they developing mobile apps that can quickly identify and give contextual information to individual parts so the average consumer hobbyist can be empowered to chase their dreams. I would bet on that instead because empowering others will always be a better purpose. Otherwise they're going down like Sharper Image or Best Buy because Amazon is here coming to eat their lunch.
  - mapt 14y ago
    What is disgusting to me is that the Apple Stores, marked by extreme profit margins, and high turnover due to a scarcity of locations, have become a model copied by every chain retail store in the US, ten to a shopping mall. Big amounts of sleek empty space separate units to toy with, and ten employees wander around begging you to let them assist you. Cell phones are commodity items, not modular case+fans+CPU+GPU+PSU+motherboard+X+Y+Z purchases. You can (and some markets do) fit $100k of product into an 8'x8' stall and have plenty of space left over. Cell phone plans are perfectly centralized, and can be purchased online or over the phone. At the same time, online reviews are essentially the only reasonable place to seek unbiased advice, and are plentiful. This is a market demand that, while it may have reason to exist, could be filled by 10% of the current locations selling cell service & phones. Instead, T-Mobile needs a storefront, Verizon needs a storefront, Apple needs a storefront, and half a dozen adjacent electronics stores or electronic departments sell cell phones on the side, in every large strip mall or indoor shopping mall in America. In a functional market economy, profitability is minimized through competition; It's a waste that we tolerate in order to incentivize performance. By 2013, the cell phone companies & retail established have established de facto agreement that it's better for them to plow profits into essentially purchasing large quantities of well-manned empty space in every major electronics store in the nation, rather than lower prices or improve their infrastructure.
newhouseb 14y ago
It's really irritating - whenever I'm in China, I feel like I'm in a desert of the free information (see: GFW & Github) and when I'm in the US I'm in a desert of accessible components for EE work. Now that I'm out of college, and have a better idea of what a EE builders paradise looks like, I should see if Taiwan bridges the gap here.
- jjccforth 14y ago
  Not that bad. You can accesss any site like in the other countries. The only tool you need is a VPN account. GFW doesn't really block everybody. They can easily block the few big VPN providers but they've never done that. (I'm using StrongVPN). I don't think that's because they are ingnorant.
  - newhouseb 14y ago
    Oh I know, my family lives in China and I used to administer OpenVPN servers for them. Things have gotten a lot worse in the past couple of months as they start to deploy DPI and shut down suspicious connections. I believe my family uses Astrill for the moment which goes in and out.
- muyuu 14y ago
  Taiwan is great. I loved walking around Neihu in Taipei and seeing all the brand names in components right there, plus others you don't know because they make the stuff other companies brand.
  - newhouseb 14y ago
    Do you mean you can buy components in Neihu or just see the companies HQs? When I lived in Taipie, it was before the metro reached Neihu so I never fully explored it.
- imrehg 14y ago
  I'm in Taiwan, and they really really really trying to bridge the gap here. Because it's a small country (23million people), the entrepreneurial opportunities are different, and most people are looking towards China instead as a big market for all kinds of things they make. Having said that, I love being here (physicist at a local research institute), where there are places like Guanghua computer market, basically most electronics imaginable http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guang_Hua_Digital_Plaza http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guang_Hua_Digital_Plaza Many of the things are still harder to get (e.g. I'd love to have in country source for the Atmel chips that are used in Arduinos), but loads of things are so cheap and ready to grab. Just trying to get Taipei Hackerspace off the ground, to bridge the gap between the local opportunities and the vision that is quite often got imported by foreigners here. It's an explosive combination, I really want to help this forward, and see it to succeed. :) Come visit sometime!
stbtrax 14y ago
I'm not sure who you're using but 1-day turns on PCB and assembly are not at all uncommon in the Bay Area.
- akiselev 14y ago
  Please link me to your suppliers. I've never had less than 3 day quotes for assembly (400+ parts per board with BGAs, 3-5 boards) and they usually cost $3k+ just for the setup of the Pick n places.
coryrc 14y ago
If you are building a product, you don't really want to be using rare ICs. When you are making a decent number, you don't want to always be hunting for reliable suppliers (i.e. counterfeited SD cards http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?page_id=1022 http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?page_id=1022 ). I like that when I'm buying parts from Digikey, I get what I actually ordered. When or if I want to take my chances and cut costs, I have the option to have it built overseas. But prototyping parts cost is a rounding error in any decent product run. Oh, and spend 'boatloads of money on overnight shipping' -- $65. How much is a programmer per hour in Silicon Valley? You could also move to Thief River Falls :) I like buying cheap junk from dealextreme, but when I need something reliable that'll be around for a while, I'm glad to pay more for something from a real company. Also, SparkFun has a few pick&place and I know a few people with them around, being used to varying levels.
- dear 14y ago
  "Rare" is a relative term and is location dependent. If I am an enthusiastic DIY'er, I want my parts now, not tomorrow. Also I wonder where Digikey gets their "reliable" parts from.
- AlexDanger 14y ago
  I'm sure consumer electronic companies had the same debate 20 years ago with the same arguments. As you say, there are clear cases where this cheap overseas model isnt going to work. But to dismiss them completely is like saying Kickstarter is no good for video games because AAA publishing houses already exist. Low volume cheap prototyping or niche manufacturing is an area ripe for disruption. Actually its not even disruption since AFAIK there are no established players (in the West at least). People like the OP's Maker seem to be driving the way for low cost, low volume electronics. 3D printing seems to be slowly leading the way towards cheap custom molds for enclosures. Once the two meet.... Personally I welcome the revolution.
- HeyLaughingBoy 14y ago
  You could also move to Thief River Falls :) I laughed at that, even with the smiley. I live about 6 hours from Thief River Falls (home of DigiKey) and it's about -12F here right now at 7:30AM. Just checked the Thief River Falls weather and it's a balmy -24F there right now. I don't think we'll be seeing a flood of Bay Area HN'ers moving here any time soon :-)
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
olalonde 14y ago
You might be interested in http://www.haxlr8r.com http://www.haxlr8r.com. From their website: "HAXLR8R is a new kind of accelerator program. For people who hack hardware and make things. Join us for 111 days in Shenzhen, China and San Francisco."
- bobbaddeley 14y ago
  He (Zack, the author of the article) is involved in HAXLR8R. He's actually the Program Director. Or I guess you meant the parent comment.
icelancer 14y ago
I wrote an article on my blog about this very topic. A common theme amongst college graduates with no job is that they "want a fair shot." Not quite. They don't want a fair shot against Chinese nationals with their same skill set with an order of magnitude less in wage requests!
- derleth 14y ago
  > They don't want a fair shot against Chinese nationals with their same skill set with an order of magnitude less in wage requests! That isn't a fair shot, though. The Chinese national has an unfair advantage due to the order of magnitude wage differential.
  - icelancer 14y ago
    And the American has an order of magnitude of better living conditions.
  - kyllo 14y ago
    Not for long, with inflation being in the double digits in many parts of China. Soon, China is going to be a lot like the US only with 10x as many old people.

alaskamiller 14y ago

Imagine if the massive empty complexes along the 101 in Silicon Valley gets repurposed to be hacker spaces and dorms, imagine if RadioShack and Fry's makes a comeback and returns to their roots of supplying bare parts, imagine if 3D printers become affordable and everywhere, imagine if crowd funding sites can wire funds within a day, imagine if the distribution channels can also mail out products the next day. Imagine the number of cycles microevolution that can be achieved throughout a single year.

i386 14y ago
> Imagine if the massive empty complexes along the 101 in Silicon Valley gets repurposed to be hacker spaces and dorms I sympathise with your intent but that sounds like a sweatshop to me.
- lifeisstillgood 14y ago
  I kind of agree. However if you put up an advert here saying " three years in a dorm in SF - running your own Shanzen style mini fab company, no time wasters". You will get hundreds of genuine people willing to do the sweatshop thing.
- alaskamiller 14y ago
  Those poor college aged kids and their sweaty dorms enjoying the benefits of youth, low overhead, access to information, and sharing knowledge.
  - batgaijin 14y ago
    Slaves, really.
    - msutherl 14y ago
      And what of working retail, or in a factory?
- derleth 14y ago
  > that sounds like a sweatshop to me. No, for one fundamental reason: The people in real sweatshops don't have any other realistic option. The people in the proposed complexes along the 101 would have the ability to say "screw this" and go do something else. I once had the idea that wealth really means having options. I don't know if that's universally true, but it certainly applies here. Silicon Valley is fundamentally wealthier than the areas where sweatshops which are sweatshops spring up.
muyuu 14y ago
Silicon Valley rent prices and living costs make it impossible to ever be competitive with China in EE manufacturing. But not only China, also Taiwan, Korea, Japan and even parts of Europe and the rest of the US. Nothing wrong with it though. This only sustains because there are more profitable industries there now.
- alaskamiller 14y ago
  Bigger problem is that Americans don't understand high density living. That's going to take a few generations.
  - nnq 14y ago
    The one thing I loved when first coming to the US was how spread out and spacious everything was (compared to most European cities), bar NYC. It's amazing how you Americans strive to change exactly the things that foreigners absolutely love about your country... for me "high density living" is a mind wrecking nightmare that only those with the "hypesocial city rat" personality type can enjoy...
    - muyuu 14y ago
      Depleting oil reserves are quickly forcing this change. I'd take "medium" density any day though. Enough density so people don't need to move miles daily, not enough density so people can't afford some healthy living space. NYC and SanFran are way over the top.
      - nnq 14y ago
        Agree, probably your "american style medium density" is what I would consider "low-ish density", healthy and pleasant too... ...but using the "depleting oil reserves" and other eco arguments to make people leave in what I see as much lower quality conditions is inhumane and cruel in my pov - just build good quality public transportation, make it electrical (even trains are efficient) and go all nuclear to power it all, putting up with all the eco-consequences of it ...or maybe Elon Musk's Hyperloop will redeem everything :)
pm90 14y ago
One of the biggest shocks for me when I came to the US for the first time was to see what Radio Shack had turned into. Especially because it is often cited as one of the reasons for technological progress in america (easy availability of electronics)
- alaskamiller 14y ago
  They pull $4B a year from over 7,000 locations around the world, it's hard to turn a ship that size. Especially when mobile phone subsidies is becoming a big part of their income stream. That's like crack to them now, hard to turn away from that. But if this DIY/3DP movement is going mainstream in the coming generation then they need to make a big move. Imagine if Radio Shack makes a comeback consolidating the parts market by buying up the likes of Sparkfun, Quirky, and IndieGogo while partnering with Digikey for retail distribution. Then imagine they developing mobile apps that can quickly identify and give contextual information to individual parts so the average consumer hobbyist can be empowered to chase their dreams. I would bet on that instead because empowering others will always be a better purpose. Otherwise they're going down like Sharper Image or Best Buy because Amazon is here coming to eat their lunch.
- mapt 14y ago
  What is disgusting to me is that the Apple Stores, marked by extreme profit margins, and high turnover due to a scarcity of locations, have become a model copied by every chain retail store in the US, ten to a shopping mall. Big amounts of sleek empty space separate units to toy with, and ten employees wander around begging you to let them assist you. Cell phones are commodity items, not modular case+fans+CPU+GPU+PSU+motherboard+X+Y+Z purchases. You can (and some markets do) fit $100k of product into an 8'x8' stall and have plenty of space left over. Cell phone plans are perfectly centralized, and can be purchased online or over the phone. At the same time, online reviews are essentially the only reasonable place to seek unbiased advice, and are plentiful. This is a market demand that, while it may have reason to exist, could be filled by 10% of the current locations selling cell service & phones. Instead, T-Mobile needs a storefront, Verizon needs a storefront, Apple needs a storefront, and half a dozen adjacent electronics stores or electronic departments sell cell phones on the side, in every large strip mall or indoor shopping mall in America. In a functional market economy, profitability is minimized through competition; It's a waste that we tolerate in order to incentivize performance. By 2013, the cell phone companies & retail established have established de facto agreement that it's better for them to plow profits into essentially purchasing large quantities of well-manned empty space in every major electronics store in the nation, rather than lower prices or improve their infrastructure.

newhouseb 14y ago

It's really irritating - whenever I'm in China, I feel like I'm in a desert of the free information (see: GFW & Github) and when I'm in the US I'm in a desert of accessible components for EE work. Now that I'm out of college, and have a better idea of what a EE builders paradise looks like, I should see if Taiwan bridges the gap here.

jjccforth 14y ago
Not that bad. You can accesss any site like in the other countries. The only tool you need is a VPN account. GFW doesn't really block everybody. They can easily block the few big VPN providers but they've never done that. (I'm using StrongVPN). I don't think that's because they are ingnorant.
- newhouseb 14y ago
  Oh I know, my family lives in China and I used to administer OpenVPN servers for them. Things have gotten a lot worse in the past couple of months as they start to deploy DPI and shut down suspicious connections. I believe my family uses Astrill for the moment which goes in and out.
muyuu 14y ago
Taiwan is great. I loved walking around Neihu in Taipei and seeing all the brand names in components right there, plus others you don't know because they make the stuff other companies brand.
- newhouseb 14y ago
  Do you mean you can buy components in Neihu or just see the companies HQs? When I lived in Taipie, it was before the metro reached Neihu so I never fully explored it.
imrehg 14y ago
I'm in Taiwan, and they really really really trying to bridge the gap here. Because it's a small country (23million people), the entrepreneurial opportunities are different, and most people are looking towards China instead as a big market for all kinds of things they make. Having said that, I love being here (physicist at a local research institute), where there are places like Guanghua computer market, basically most electronics imaginable http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guang_Hua_Digital_Plaza http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guang_Hua_Digital_Plaza Many of the things are still harder to get (e.g. I'd love to have in country source for the Atmel chips that are used in Arduinos), but loads of things are so cheap and ready to grab. Just trying to get Taipei Hackerspace off the ground, to bridge the gap between the local opportunities and the vision that is quite often got imported by foreigners here. It's an explosive combination, I really want to help this forward, and see it to succeed. :) Come visit sometime!

stbtrax 14y ago

I'm not sure who you're using but 1-day turns on PCB and assembly are not at all uncommon in the Bay Area.

akiselev 14y ago
Please link me to your suppliers. I've never had less than 3 day quotes for assembly (400+ parts per board with BGAs, 3-5 boards) and they usually cost $3k+ just for the setup of the Pick n places.

coryrc 14y ago

If you are building a product, you don't really want to be using rare ICs. When you are making a decent number, you don't want to always be hunting for reliable suppliers (i.e. counterfeited SD cards http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?page_id=1022 http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?page_id=1022 ). I like that when I'm buying parts from Digikey, I get what I actually ordered. When or if I want to take my chances and cut costs, I have the option to have it built overseas. But prototyping parts cost is a rounding error in any decent product run. Oh, and spend 'boatloads of money on overnight shipping' -- $65. How much is a programmer per hour in Silicon Valley? You could also move to Thief River Falls :) I like buying cheap junk from dealextreme, but when I need something reliable that'll be around for a while, I'm glad to pay more for something from a real company. Also, SparkFun has a few pick&place and I know a few people with them around, being used to varying levels.

dear 14y ago
"Rare" is a relative term and is location dependent. If I am an enthusiastic DIY'er, I want my parts now, not tomorrow. Also I wonder where Digikey gets their "reliable" parts from.
AlexDanger 14y ago
I'm sure consumer electronic companies had the same debate 20 years ago with the same arguments. As you say, there are clear cases where this cheap overseas model isnt going to work. But to dismiss them completely is like saying Kickstarter is no good for video games because AAA publishing houses already exist. Low volume cheap prototyping or niche manufacturing is an area ripe for disruption. Actually its not even disruption since AFAIK there are no established players (in the West at least). People like the OP's Maker seem to be driving the way for low cost, low volume electronics. 3D printing seems to be slowly leading the way towards cheap custom molds for enclosures. Once the two meet.... Personally I welcome the revolution.
HeyLaughingBoy 14y ago
You could also move to Thief River Falls :) I laughed at that, even with the smiley. I live about 6 hours from Thief River Falls (home of DigiKey) and it's about -12F here right now at 7:30AM. Just checked the Thief River Falls weather and it's a balmy -24F there right now. I don't think we'll be seeing a flood of Bay Area HN'ers moving here any time soon :-)

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

olalonde 14y ago

You might be interested in http://www.haxlr8r.com http://www.haxlr8r.com. From their website: "HAXLR8R is a new kind of accelerator program. For people who hack hardware and make things. Join us for 111 days in Shenzhen, China and San Francisco."

bobbaddeley 14y ago
He (Zack, the author of the article) is involved in HAXLR8R. He's actually the Program Director. Or I guess you meant the parent comment.

icelancer 14y ago

I wrote an article on my blog about this very topic. A common theme amongst college graduates with no job is that they "want a fair shot." Not quite. They don't want a fair shot against Chinese nationals with their same skill set with an order of magnitude less in wage requests!

derleth 14y ago
> They don't want a fair shot against Chinese nationals with their same skill set with an order of magnitude less in wage requests! That isn't a fair shot, though. The Chinese national has an unfair advantage due to the order of magnitude wage differential.
- icelancer 14y ago
  And the American has an order of magnitude of better living conditions.
- kyllo 14y ago
  Not for long, with inflation being in the double digits in many parts of China. Soon, China is going to be a lot like the US only with 10x as many old people.