The New Essential Guide to Electronics in Shenzhen | Hacker News Reader

The New Essential Guide to Electronics in Shenzhen

bunniestudios.com

446 pointskungfudoi152 comments

I own this book. It was invaluable navigating Shenzhen electronics markets. In Shenzhen it is easy to find any electronic part you need and has an extensive recycling ecosystem. You can find parts on the street which find it's way upstream and end up in completed phones. Those phones are then resold.

That was my goal when I was there to build an iPhone in my hotel room by buying every individual part. And except for the thumbprint(because it needs to be reflashed) everything worked perfectly. I even named it my non-Sweatshop iPhone.

That sounds like an amazing vlog/blog article. Any chance you made one?

Not OP, but: https://www.strangeparts.com/how-i-made-my-own-iphone-in-chi...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14100989

EDIT: Noticed that's Naomi Wu with the top comment on that HN discussion.

It's been a while since last time I've seen her, is she okay?

How much cheaper was it?

It doesn't have to be about saving money.

> I even named it my non-Sweatshop iPhone

Are the conditions at the parts factories any better than at the final assembly factory?

Probably. I guess the final assembly requires the highest amount of cheap relatively unskilled labor.

Actual chip foundries are no sweat shops.

On the Assembler side of things, my experience is that the right temperament is much more important and difficult thing to find than any specific skill.

Regardless of the skill set needed to do the job, being able to tolerate repetition with no pause outside of break times and adhering to instructions whether they understood their necessity or not was what made for a good Assembler; it wears most people out. I would joke that to be a successful assembly line/cell worker you needed to view each new unit as a visit from an old friend and not own guns.

My experience (in BC) is that the amount of skill/cost of your assemblers can vary.

Where I have worked, low volume production of relatively complex products required more skilled/trainable people because they ended up putting the whole thing together and they were paid well; some sub assemblies could be handled by less technical/skilled Assemblers.

On higher volume lines, if we needed highly skilled workers then it was a sign that we should look at the process and break up or farm out the steps that needed them.

^Actual chip foundries are no sweat shops.

I know nothing about semiconductor production, but maybe they can be sweaty shops? A room can 21 degrees, but if you're in a bunny suit...

Ha. I was thinking about that exact video when I saw the title.

Note this not so veiled warning in the text:

"The other reason there won’t be an electronic edition is that unlike bunnie, I’m a Chinese national. My offering an app or download specifically for English-speaking hardware engineers to install on their phones would be… iffy. If at some point "I" do offer you such a thing, I’d suggest you not use it."

Especially the "I" bit.

There used to be some hacker tours of Shenzhen via Dangerous Prototypes and Noise Bridge. Any other recent or current ones?

Placed my order out of respect for Bunnie and Naomi. Legends for different reasons but for any real hardware hacker they are worthy of due respect for their work, their communicating of it, and their sharing.

Bunnie's "Hacking the Xbox" is still one of my favorite books ever. First read it as a teenager, it was my intro to bootloaders, encryption, copyright law, and so much more.

Is there any niche of vendors somewhat equivalent to free software zealots in Shenzhen? E.g., "you can boot this little keychain thingy without blobs."

There are another few bunnie blogs [1] on that. The concept is called gongkai. It means open in the sense of IP is shared freely.

1. https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=4297

Hm, if that's the case then why don't Western open source hardware projects just send a bilingual tourist over to Shenzhen to muck around until they connect with someone who can give them the docs needed to bootstrap the relevant firmware/drivers for the boards?

My guess: legal concerns. What is legal (or at least tolerated) in China with respect to gongkai is not necessarily legal in the Western world.

I'm just surprised there seems to be no bridge whatsoever between the two.

Like the developer asks, "what's the address to set this bit?" and the tourist responds with whatever it is.

Because that costs money.

Why wouldn't they be able to ask in IRC/Discord/whatever still works in Hong Kong? Or, just have a Taiwanese hacker guy in the group?

Do you know what he's up to?

I remember he was working on some super encrypted FPGA phone ages ago.. and then I haven't hear his name in .. years?

He is still working on it, the precursor, they're just starting development of the messaging app that will run on that dev platform and eventually run on the betrusted final device.

Ah yes. The Precursor is real now, you can read more at https://precursor.dev. As a baseline it can function as a password/authentication token manager, but as another user mentioned we're adding messaging features now.

Another thing I'm working on is IRIS, a non-destructive method for inspecting silicon chips after mounting on a circuit board: https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.07406 It's part of a long yak-shaving arc to make the Precursor more accessible by migrating from an FPGA-based system to an ASIC.

That is still one of the most interesting reverse engineering blog posts ever. In the 80's I was pretty good at this stuff, especially figuring out various over-the-wire protocols to get hardware to do stuff that it wasn't intended to do. But this is on an entirely different level.

Gongkai sounds like what happens in piracy scenes, or perhaps more specifically the game modding and ROM hacking scene. People innovating and modifying without giving a crap about who-owns-what.

He he, that only tends flow in one direction, from what I've seen.

There's plenty of free software thieves (the GPL violating kind) in Shenzhen. Sadly, there isn't a goddamn thing we can do about it.

Go ahead, try enforcing the GPL in China. They'll just laugh in your face whilst trying to sell you the next shoddy widget on AliExpressazon.

So, exactly like in the West?

False equivalence

https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/11452/have-th...

How many of those are in mainland China?m

Even the neighboring country of Taiwan is careful about GPL

https://www.leetsai.com/ltp-special-column/legal-issues-that...

Incidentally, don't call Taiwan a "neighboring country" when in mainland China.

It is a neighbor and a separate country though.

I get the impression that Western companies (and Chinese companies with non-disposable brands marketed in the West) can have GPL enforced against them.

For example: https://sfconservancy.org/activities/

I know one of the other dynamics is when the GPL copyright holder is more of a crunchy-granola hippie guru, who might just want to lovingly bring the lost soul into the fold, because they know not what they do.

That's really not a deterrent to the people who know exactly what they're doing.

Personally, I'd like to see copyright holders be less flower-child toward abusers, and more like a Scout who was helping an elderly person across the street, when they were attacked by a group of violent racists. It's not time to turn the other cheek, but to grab a heavy stick.

Yeah, no, they can’t. Plenty of western examples, such as Mikrotik.

> Go ahead, try enforcing the GPL in China.

Naomi Wu has actually done that.[1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vj04MKykmnQ

The same Naomi Wu that recently was visited by CCP goons who told her to mind her p's and q's? Yeah I don't see this happening again.

How is that relevant to enforcing GPL?

See this peer comment - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38669000

As far as I know it was because of "reactionary" tweets, not GPL enforcement.

No, it was after she went to a business that violated gpl.

She put it on YouTube and then she got silenced.

Assuming this linked video is accurate, your statement is not quite correct.

https://youtu.be/3p7bl7eFaEo?si=kAXZHfA2lxbXlLv-

It got the attention of the government.

And she doesn't advocate gpl anymore too.

The one doesn't exclude the other.

That's not how autocratic systems work. In any autocratic system you allowed to be somewhat independent. How independent? It depends on you position in hierarchy. But if you cross the line, you will get punished for all your independent actions and even thoughts. There is no "because of this and that". The only thing that matters is that you crossed the invisible line.

ReallySexyCyborg?

Yeah, she tried that and then guess what happened...

> Ok for those of you that haven't figured it out I got my wings clipped and they weren't gentle about it- so there's not going to be much posting on social media anymore and only on very specific subjects. I can leave but Kaidi can't so we're just going to follow the new rules and that's that. Nothing personal if I don't like and reply like I used to. I'll be focusing on the store and the occasional video. Thanks for understanding, it was fun while it lasted.

https://twitter.com/RealSexyCyborg/status/167748080945083596...

She stopped uploading YouTube videos 6 months ago after 7 years.

More here: https://www.hackingbutlegal.com/p/naomi-wu-and-the-silence-t...

That wasn’t anything to do with attempting to enforce the GPL though.

It was all around the same time. A security vulnerability and gpl enforcement are the things she stopped since then.

Except trying to start her business, which she still does.

First off - we don't know why pressure against her increased recently. We just don't. We can make up stories about it, and try to assess their plausibility, but we don't know what really happened.

That said, I think that the evidence we have is against this being notably related to GPL and her defense of it. She published her complaint against MediaTek almost two years before she "got her wings clipped" - the timelines don't really support the GPL issue as being a notable part the matter. Also, the situation for IP protection in China is on an upwards trend (https://carnegieendowment.org/2019/10/16/china-s-record-on-i...), and part of that is government led. I have a difficult time seeing police give her so much trouble for this.

My preferred theory is that the straw which broke the camel's back was her minimally filtered commentary on the response to the June 2023 Plaza Hollywood Hotel stabbing. Naomi Wu feels strongly - and I believe, reasonably - that this was an anti-lesbian hate crime, and was furious that nobody in media was willing to acknowledge it as such. Male chauvinism and gendered violence, LGBT rights, public questioning of the results of a police investigation, and all in a venue which is easily accessible to foreigners - these are all things which are far more politically sensitive in China than IP compliance.

For some examples of what she was saying, scroll through her comments here: https://twitter.com/search?q=(from%3ARealSexyCyborg)%20until..., especially this thread: https://twitter.com/RealSexyCyborg/status/166501414504826880... (Twitter account required for both).

Wow, the police sent plainclothes thugs to her home to harass her, and her partner who is an Uygher is banned from leaving the country.

I've known a few people with partners from Xinjiang, only one of them got out eventually. It took wining and dining the police for about 5 years AFAIK. (Source: Was invited to and attended one of said dinners.)

Winnie the Pooh don’t play

I think many Chinese companies freely share code between them, regardless if it's open source or not. They just don't care about licenses and IP the way the West does.

So, if you want to get the source code for X, you just have to learn Cantonese, go there and ask nicely.

As a former good Cantonese speaker, now terrible, let me assure you that there is no way to ask anything nicely in Cantonese. It's a rough-and-tumble, loud, crude, obnoxious gutter language. It's awesome. So much better than Mandarin. There's a reason why Cantonese is always the go-to language for "misc bizarre foreign language spoken by asians in the background" in movies, well that and the very high number of first-rate actors available from Hong Kong's movie industry. It's my favorite language in the world.

There's not a lot of info about the Shenzhen SEZ Visa on arrival, but I can say that if you use the Luohu/Lo Wu port, aim to get there as they open because they don't get through many before they stop for lunch.

I got over half a dozen of those. Never remember there being much traffic anyways at the office where they issue those. Time period is ~2016--2019.

My single data point is October 2023. I don't know if they're slower than they used to be.

I’ve gotten that visa countless times at the Lok Ma Chau border crossing, never had to wait more than 15-30 minutes really.

There’s now also 15-day visa free travel if you’re one of 6 countries: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-67516777

If you are coming from HK then Shekou port on arrival visa is also fast and painless (If you don’t show up in the lunch break like I did).

I have a hard time imagining how you can get into business with people in Huaqiangbei without speaking Mandarin even with that guide in hand but without an interpreter. But maybe it can work out with pointing and writing down arabic numbers?

Real time voice translation is getting really good. Standard text translation is pretty much perfect for technical details, but just may miss idioms. You just have your smartphones out, type your message, and show the translation to the other person. They read it and start typing on their phone, then show it to you. I got through China pretty painlessly this way, and it is so normal for many, especially the young. I went to one restaurant where they got the younger waiter when they saw me walk in, who I thought would speak English. She just knew the phone text translation ritual, but was an expert in that.

But for millennia, people have gone to far away lands where they don't speak the language, and somehow managed to build trade routes without even having a dictionary or calculator. It is not that hard to work out a pidgin. Tons of things you can do with pointing and gesturing. Marco Polo would have killed to even have Google Translate circa 2010.

I'll also assert with no evidence that it is generally harder for an English speaking engineer to successfully communicate a technical idea into business speak for English speaking VC investors than it is for an English speaking engineer to communicate a request to buy a specific part to a Mandarin speaking engineer.

> I'll also assert with no evidence that it is generally harder for an English speaking engineer to successfully communicate a technical idea into business speak for English speaking VC investors than it is for an English speaking engineer to communicate a request to buy a specific part to a Mandarin speaking engineer

sounds like a fun challange, probably true

I've never done this in China, but I've done it in Vietnam (before I learned more of the language) and in Japan.

It is surprising how much you can communicate by drawing circuit diagrams, sketches of oscilloscope traces, and equations! It works quite well!

However one problem I encountered was that many (maybe most) vendors were not engineers and had no understanding of the parts sold. They just knew the name of the parts they had in stock, and how much they could sell them for, and that's it. Often they weren't even being paid -- it's a family business and they were just the niece or nephew that got roped in to vaguely watching the store while playing games on their phone.

This was much more of an issue in Vietnam (Nhat Tao market) than in Tokyo (Tokyo Radio tower). In the latter there appeared to be quite a few retired engineers who were quite enthusiastic to meet someone who was looking for something specific. It was pretty neat, and I occasionally encountered someone with a wealth of knowledge!

My baby son doesn't talk yet, aside of 5 words, but he still manages to transmit me what he wants by using his hands, muttering and mumbling on different tones. If I still don't get it, he grabs me by the hand and go show me what he wants by pointing his finger.

I somewhat did the same when traveling to foreign countries and meeting people that don't speak any of the languages I speak.

They usually have a calculator to show you prices. Translation apps that aren't Google work to some extent. Some speak enough English to haggle, so numbers mostly, and it's not hard to learn Chinese numbers.

It's not quite as bad as that. I speak no Mandarin but managed to purchase parts in the markets just by gesticulating and having part numbers (where appropriate).

A surprising number of the vendors had at least a little english - enough for commerce anyway.

>I have a hard time imagining how you can get into business with people in Huaqiangbei without speaking Mandarin

By speaking the same language as they do, which is Cantonese?

You know, I got that idea from the Crowdsupply page that says "... sourcing tool for non-Mandarin speakers".

It’s MOSTLY Mandarin you will hear spoken in Shenzhen, while it is true that Guangdong province is generally Cantonese speaking - Shenzhen is a city mostly made up of migrants from all over China so Mandarin is the lingua franca.

Somewhat related, as a result of this, Shenzhen is a great place to try out many different regional Chinese foods.

Most people are in Shenzhen are from other parts of China, you'll hear Mandarin (the default) Cantonese, Hakka, Hokkien etc - most people probably speak some dialect of Mandarin as well as their birth language

Buy and read the book - you can point at stuff in it, it's designed with that in mind - take a hand calculator so you can type numbers/prices - point at things, smile a lot

Do learn a little Mandarin, start with Nihao = hello, Xièxiè (shay shay) == thank you - na = that, zhe = this - bu = no, dui = correct - also yuan/kuai the currency (kuai is used interchangeably, a bit like "bucks").

It's all pretty easy, everyone wants to do a deal, they want you to come back as a repeat customer

This comment could well serve as a template for a guide to use by anybody in a country where they don't speak the language.

I'd add: be nice.

Google translate, except for connector gender

I don't plan on ever doing business in China, much less purchasing electronics, but the book looks very interesting from the index. Might buy a copy.

I bought the first one to send a copy to the Internet Archive for long term physical archival. Going to do the same with this release.

I love the cover. Nice mix.

Is it safe for Americans to go to Shenzen/China these days?

>>> Since ... 2016, the population of Shenzhen has grown by over 2 million people, the metro system has added over one hundred kilometers of track, and dozens of new stations have been opened. The city’s taxi and bus fleets were converted from gas to electric. The entirety of Huaqiangbei Road - the center of the electronic market district - has been torn up and replaced with a pedestrian boulevard.

Holy crap. As a Brit we have recently spent 100 billion and twice that time to fail to build a railway between two cities, London still runs almost all petrol bus and taxis and ...

As we have (hopefully) an election coming soon and might see some change I would be interested in why the UK - who about 150 years ago woukd have growth stats very similar to that - has got well, meh.

The usual suspects for such terrible performance are

- much lower starting point. It's easier to setup mobile phone masts than replace the POTS.

- too much regulation (from safety to public consultations that allow NIMBYism to slow things down)

- we are not growing - if the number of people buying mobile phones in year X is twice the number of people who already have a phone, then you can see a different market than if everyone keeps their phone for one extra year. Does something else play out for cities, streets and factories?

- just money coming in. The UK is having serious lack of growth and presumably shenzen is not.

Or is it, that "ooomph" ? a level of belief that tomorrow will be better?

The West has safety regulations that are followed.

If a building collapses or a train crashes in China, they just brick over it and build a new one.

Move fast and break things.

Yes. Also, rules and regulations on expropriation of land, relocation of people etc, with plenty of long appeal processes.

China? "Go away or else".

I don't know where you live, but in France and surrounding countries expropriations are certainly "go away or else". It's very common for the cops to evict people for industrial projects that have been found illegal by tribunals, and it's not unheard of that the mafia itself beats up small owners until they "give up" their land. It's also common for people to get maimed protesting industrial projects (lose an eye, hand, foot due to military grenades), and not unheard of for them to die killed by the State (Vital Michalon, Rémi Fraisse, etc).

In France, most appeals processes you can have when your eviction has been decided can in fact not delay the eviction. You can be evicted before having your appeals hearing. The Grand Paris has already expropriated so many small owners (from popular districts) for the olympic games madness, and it's so common for farmers to be expropriated away from their lands to build crazy useless projects, such as the NDDL airport where residents had to defend themselves with molotov cocktails against more than 500 riot cops trying to destroy their homes back in 2012.

So, maybe it's better where you live but please don't pretend the West is a marvelous land of human rights. I'm of course not saying China is a dream-like State of human bliss and safety ; they're a tyrannical regime crushing their population. I'm just saying if you scratch the surface, it's not wildly different here (although comparatively better in some regards).

That is not at all how the system in China works..

While mainland China's land ownership is more like a series of 99-year leases, those leases are notoriously difficult to break. There are loads of examples of buildings in China being built around a few land holdouts. In fact, it's so common that real estate developers in China call them "nail houses[0]".

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holdout_(real_estate)#Nail_hou...

As a westerner myself, i think you have a misguided view of the West that's biased by a higher socio-economic status.

Safety regulations are often not followed in the West. See for example "Greenfell tower", "rue d'Aubagne Marseille" or "East palestine train derailment".

That's so biased, it reads like xenophobia. Have you seen the state of trains, railways, bridges, etc. in the US? China is a much safer place to travel on bridges, rail, etc.

As always, engineers on hacker news have like 2-3 year delay of news out of China. The rest of the world has already moved onto other countries.

1.) "just money coming in"

Outflows of foreign direct investment in China have exceeded inflows for the first time as tensions with the U.S. over semiconductor technology and concerns about increased anti-spying activity heighten risks. FDI came to minus $11.8 billion

https://asia.nikkei.com/Economy/Foreign-investment-in-China-...

Moody’s Cuts China Credit Outlook to Negative on Growing Debt Risks

https://www.wsj.com/finance/moodys-cuts-chinas-credit-outloo...

2.) "the metro system has added over one hundred kilometers of track"

China’s Cities Are Buried in Debt, but They Keep Shoveling It On

China has long pursued growth by public spending, even after the payoff has faded. Cities stuck with the bill are still spending — and cutting essential services.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/28/business/china-local-fina...

China orders local governments to cut exposure to public-private projects as debt risks rise

https://www.reuters.com/markets/asia/china-orders-local-gove...

3.) "we are not growing"

Shenzhen reports decrease in population

The southern boomtown of Shenzhen reported a slight population decrease for 2022 — a first since the city's founding in 1979.

https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202305/10/WS645b514ba310b605...

> China’s Cities Are Buried in Debt, but They Keep Shoveling It On

Finance is fictional, trains are real. In the anglospheric West, when a spreadsheet and real world disagrees, Beancounters will believe their spreadsheet.

There are a lot of contributing factors:

1. Shenzhen is sort of a tech center of Southern China so it requires good and new infras

2. Local governments are economically and politically encouraged to build infra (Google 土地经济) in general

3. Infra is built faster and cheaper in China so Shenzhen is not an outlier. Usually it starts with some planning to build a line in a remote area (to save buyout costs) -> line gets built -> other infrastructures including super markets, post offices, whatever get built -> apartment buildings get built -> government gets paid back by taxes collected from real estate companies, super markets and other expanded economy entities

4. Some cities actually lost the bets on building new infras and this created a whole range of issues (Google 地方债 and 地方融资平台公司债)

A well-know thing is, rebuilding things was a fairly common (and for some, important) method for the local gov to raise funds.

One instance in our city almost 10 years back, they built a perfectly acceptable 4-lane city road, and then completely rebuilt it again just few years later.

Of course that method is no longer be used as wild as it did under chairman Xi and his uh... successful economic policy which greatly reduced the need of roads. But things are bit different back in 2016.

SF spent $1.6 billion and 10 years to make 2.7k line that no one rides

https://sfist.com/2023/03/16/central-subway-ridership-alread...

I love public transportation when it's good (Tokyo, Singapore, HK, Seoul, Paris, London, Berlin, Amsterdam, ...) but I have zero expectations for public transportation to get to "good" levels in any city in the USA except the 3 where it's already just so-so (NYC, Chicago, DC)

As long as it's seen as "the thing poor people who can't afford a car use" it will always be funded and run as such. ... and feel like it. I never feel safe on SF nor NYCs public transit.

As a Sydneysider, I feel offended that you left us out ;-). Or included in the “…”

Ny, chicago are not doing a good job of improving. I look less known cities to leapfrog them in 20 years.

London's black cabs are now 50% electric and rising https://electrek.co/2023/12/07/half-of-londons-iconic-black-...

https://www.wired.co.uk/article/levc-geely-london-electric-b...

For a while Shenzen had both - but charged a 2 kuai tax if you got in a petrol cab (the electric ones were blue) - now they're all electric

This animation gives you a great idea of how fast it has grown

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Shenzhen_Metro_evolution....

It's a modern subway (puts NY to shame) - I've been going since ~ 2010, almost every year a new line or two has opened up.

From the beginning you get on the subway in Hong Kong, take a train to the end of the line, exit the subway, go thru customs, walk over a bridge, thru CN customs, and down into the green line subway station in Shenzhen. Now days there's also a high speed train from Hong Kong/Kowloon

Do they still have the arcades (markets) right at the train stop selling all kinds of fake goods? I used to go there and buy all kinds of knock-offs but they were not the best quality.

Also, all my friends in HK said don't stray to far from that mall as it gets dangerous at night (This was around 2002) and I know "dangerous" is relative.

That market is still there, there's a floor of fabric, and floors of tailors, you can get anything made.

I didn't start going until after 2010ish I think it's very safe at night, I've wandered all over, certainly safer that some US cities, there are a lot of cops around

It's good to know that Naomi Wu is still allowed to communicate with the outside world, a little.

Out of the loop, what happened with her?

Heavy hand of the CCP.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37154414

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37154745

Thanks!

Happy to help!

She tried to enforce the GPL on a Chinese company and the mainland Chinese government threatened her with... something. Speculation is rampant. Naomi had a Uighur wife, and mainland China is both homophobic and currently doing ethnic cleansing of Uighurs in Xinjiang. In fact, her wife isn't even allowed to leave the country, so it's entirely possible that they said "shut up or we jail her".

The way that authoritarianism[0] works is that there are two sets of laws. The real laws are secret and ever changing. Sometimes they will change for just one person. The published laws are the excuses and punishments they will use against you for violating the real laws you were never told.

[0] In any form of liberalism, the real laws will always be a subset of the published laws. The government is free to not enforce a law they think is obsolete, but they cannot invent a new law without telling anyone and make up a punishment for it.

Thanks for your comment! The part about enforcing the GPL is something I hadn’t heard till now. But still, that’s kinda odd isn’t it, a government being pissed off enough by an individual asking a company to follow GPL rules?

(I’m disappointed nonetheless by the threatening part of course, but surprised yet by the rest.)

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