Meet a Shenzhen Maker: Mr. Chen | Hacker News Reader

Meet a Shenzhen Maker: Mr. Chen

hoektronics.com

156 pointskentlyons55 comments

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).

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.

> 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.

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.

Those poor college aged kids and their sweaty dorms enjoying the benefits of youth, low overhead, access to information, and sharing knowledge.

Slaves, really.

And what of working retail, or in a factory?

> 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.

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.

Bigger problem is that Americans don't understand high density living. That's going to take a few generations.

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...

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.

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 :)

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)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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!

I've heard that Korea is similar, but with even higher-quality manufacturing. Do you know if this is true?

I'd love to come visit next time I'm around China. Send me an email and we'll connect?

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.

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.

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 ). 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.

"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.

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.

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 :-)

When you're getting ready to do massive runs, yes, you want to make sure your ICs are common, have pin-equivalent drop in replacements, and can be sourced from a reliable distributor. But that's not the point since such a run would take weeks or months anyway, more than enough time to properly source everything.

However, there's still no "3d printer equivalent" for electronics prototyping especially when using BGAs.

I've paid way more than $65 for overnight shipping from Digikey, Mouser, Arrow NAC, etc. Especially when ordering from multiple distributors (for some reason it always seems that my kits end up being a 90:10 split between Digikey:Mouser).

You might be interested in 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."

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.

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!

> 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.

And the American has an order of magnitude of better living conditions.

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.

I live in Shenzhen, have good sourcing relationships and know my way around the various electronics markets, so if anybody needs a thrustworthy contact in this part of the world, feel free to write me.

I am from Denmark originally and I live and work in shenzhen in the mobile phone industry.

You don't have any contact info in your profile.

Oh.. thanks :)

Thought my email was visible.

perhaps obscure your email address a bit so you get less automated enlargement spam

I also live in Shenzhen (originally from Canada). Would be cool to hang out some day.

Major props to Mr. Chen. Just because we think Silicon Valley is the hotbed of innovation doesn't mean it isn't happening elsewhere.

In fact I'd wager that a large part of the silicon valley culture is getting set in their ways and not willing to experiment with truly disruptive ideas.

I read this and realised I had not yet managed to join the 21 st Century. yet here in the UK I am a supposedly cutting edge developer - open source, experienced et al.

I need to run faster to catch up - and the whole country needs to run like Usain

花小钱,赚大钱 actually translates to, "you got to spend money to make money". Subtleties in the Chinese language.

Well, there's also the size nuance here -- that you need to spend far less than you'll end up earning. For the non-Chinese speakers out there, it literally means "Spend [a] small [amount of] money, make big money," with the same implication found in the techie epigram "Weeks of coding can save you hours of planning."

It roughly correlates to the expression, 'It takes a little bit of money to make a lot of money' -- implying the need to spend a little and also the contrast in relative quantities.

For those who are interested in Shenzhen's DIY scene, I suggest you take a look at http://www.szdiy.org/. There is also a Freenode channel #szdiy (which is not very active).

Awesome. I went to Huaqiangbei while I tagged along on my wife's business trip in Shenzhen and hoped to see some of the work guys like Mr. Chen are doing. Unfortunately being foreign there apparently screams "corporate buyer" and it reminded me a little of the old days of Circuit City when you'd be the only guy in the store and 25 bored, commissioned sales guys descended upon you.

In the UK there is a show called "The Jeremy Kyle Show". where stupid ugly people come on stage to blame each other for various family squabbles in the name of entertainment.

I caught 30 secs of it just after watching the OP video and realised that the old refrain "stealing our jobs" is not true - the Jeremy Kyle show fodder did not and would never have a job as a short run PCB manufacturer.

I do not know how we will share the wealth that the next generation of technology will generate, but I do know that 100 years ago Britain nearly revolted against a social system where the upper classes "worked not nor did they sow" - and now we shall have a class of people who cannot work nor sow.

It's an old meme in HN it just hit me this morning a bit harder

I believe that in former times the number of uneducated people with few skills were much higher than today. Unlike today there were plenty of jobs for those who had no education nor skills. Only the difficulty with finding gainful employment for those people - and the need for founders, makers etc. - draws our attention to them in the first place (a microtrend of glorification of those people through shows like the one you've mentioned nonwithstanding).

Regarding the upper class who does not work that maybe the trust fund kids?

Nice timing - I just heard about "Pick and Place" machines on the "New Disruptors" podcast. Turns out, for relatively small volume, you can build your own manufacturing line with a dozen or so of these devices.

It's not that unusual. Lots of companies start out the way this guy did. This happens all over the world, not just in China. In order to scale things up, you either rely on manual labor or automated machinery. And you can outsource both.

Nice to see an article about China here. When I read Fred Wilson or Paul Graham I always wonder what they think about China and all the weird stuff happening in this country, but they seem either uninterested or deaf.

He's living a small dream of mine.

I put a similar setup together through http://buildyourcnc.com/PickandPlaceMachineTheredFrog.aspx

Reply on news.ycombinator.com