Andrew Huang's Blog, page 30

Episode 4: Reinventing 35 years of Innovation

Episode 4 is out!

It’s a daunting challenge to document a phenomenon as diverse as Shenzhen, so I don’t envy the task of trying to fit it in four short episodes.

Around 6:11 I start sounding like a China promo clip. This is because as a foreigner, I’m a bit cautious about saying negative things about a country, especially when I’m a guest of that country.

I really love the part at 3:58 where Robin Wu, CEO of Meegopad, reflects on the evolution of the term Shanzhai in China:

I was one of the people who made Shanzhai products. In the past, everyone looked down on Shanzhai products. Now, I think the idea of the maker is the same as Shanzhai. Shanzhai is not about copying. Shanzhai is a spirit.

Episode 3: A New Breed of Intellectual Property

Episode 3 is out!

I say the darndest things on camera. O_o

Like everyone else, I see the videos when they are released. So far, this episode makes the clearest case for why Shenzhen is the up-and-coming place for hardware technology.

Most of the time my head is buried in resistors and capacitors. However, this video takes a wide-angle shot of the tech ecosystem. I’ve been visiting for over a decade, and this video is the first time I’ve seen some of the incredible things going on in Shenzhen, particularly in the corporate world.

Episode 2: Shenzhen and the Maker Movement

Woooooo episode 2 is out!

I wrote a post once about getting my phone’s screen fixed in Shenzhen. I’ve learned a lot from watching these phone repair guys do their thing in Shenzhen.

This video shows most of the process, from splitting the bonded LCD/digitizer assembly using a cutting wire and a heated vacuum chuck, to rebonding, to removing bubbles in the LOCA (liquid optically clear adhesive) by way of a vacuum chamber. There’s also typically a UV curing step that was probably left out of the segment for time reasons. The whole video is a good watch, but if you’re short on time, the segment on repairing a screen starts at 12:36.

Name that Ware, June 2016

The Ware for June 2016 is shown below.

Thanks to Liwei from TinyMOS for contributing the ware. He found it on his way to school many years ago. The function of this board is probably an easy guess, so bonus points to anyone who has a convincing idea about the larger system this was once a part of.

Winner, Name that Ware May 2016

The Ware for May 2016 was guessed within the hour of posting — it’s an Antminer S1 (v1.4 mainboards) from BitMainTech.

Tracing through the rapid-fire guesses and picking a winner was a bit of a convoluted process. Based on my primary criteria of awarding to the first person to home in on a make/model of a ware, the winner is Wouter’s post at 10:15PM (congrats, btw email me for your prize).

However, if make/model isn’t guessed, I’d go with an alternate criteria of thoughtful analysis, which would give the prize to Richard Ames’ conclusion that it’s a cryptocurrency compute module posted at 10:06PM. However, even that decision is contracted by 0x3d’s post at 9:53PM, earlier than all the rest, that this is an ASIC cryptocoin miner — no make/model, but still the correct genre.

Also, in response to Richard Ames’ question: HDB = Housing Development Board. It’s the colloquial term in Singapore for public housing, after the government agency in charge of managing public housing.

WIRED Documentary on Shenzhen

WIRED is now running a multi-part video documentary on Shenzhen:

This shoot was a lot of fun, and it was a great pleasure working with Posy and Jim. I think their talent as producer and director really show through. They also did a great job editing my off-the-cuff narratives. The spot in the video where I’m pointing out Samsung parts isn’t matched to the b-roll of Apple parts, but in their defense I was moving so fast through the market that Jim couldn’t capture all the things I was pointing at.

I haven’t seen the whole documentary myself (I was just called in to give some tours of the market and answer a few questions in my hotel room), so I’m curious and excited to see where this is going! Especially because of the text chosen for printing during my Moore’s Law explanation at 3:13 — “ALL PROPRIETARY AND NO OPEN SOURCE MAKES INNOVATION A SLOW PROCESS.”

:)

Name that Ware, May 2016

The Ware for May 2016 is shown below.

Xobs discovered this morsel of technology sitting in the junk pile at his HDB, and brought it into the office for me to have a look at. I hadn’t seen of these first-hand until then.

Despite being basically a picture of two large hunks of metal, I’m guessing this ware will be identified within minutes of going up.

Winner, Name that Ware April 2016

Really great participation this month in Name that Ware!

The Ware for April 2016 is a “LED-Handbrause” by miomare — in other words, a shower head with LEDs on the inside which tell you the temperature of the water. It has an integral paddlewheel that generates power for the circuitry via water flowing through the shower head, as evidenced by this more complete photo of the ware:

It looks like LW was the first to guess the function of the ware, so congrats! email me for your prize. And thanks again to Philipp Gühring for submitting a ware that sparked so much interesting discussion!

Circuit Classics — Sneak Peek!

My first book on electronics was Getting Started with Electronics; to this day, I still imagine electrons as oval-shaped particles with happy faces because of its illustrations. So naturally, I was thrilled to find that the book’s author, Forrest Mims III, and my good friend Star Simpson joined forces to sell kit versions of classic circuits straight off the pages of Getting Started with Electronics. This re-interpretation of a classic as an interactive kit is perfect for today’s STEM curriculum, and I hope it will inspire another generation of engineers and hackers.

I’m very lucky that Star sent me a couple early prototypes to play with. Today was a rainy Saturday afternoon, so I loaded a few tracks from Information Society’s Greatest Hits album (I am most definitely a child of the 80’s) and fired up my soldering iron for a walk down memory lane. I remembered how my dad taught me to bend the leads of resistors with pliers, to get that nice square look. I remembered how I learned to use masking tape and bent leads to hold parts in place, so I could flip the board over for soldering. I remembered doodling circuits on scraps of paper after school while watching Scooby-Doo cartoons on a massive CRT TV that took several minutes to warm up. Things were so much simpler back then …

I couldn’t help but embellish a little bit. I added a socket for the chip on my Bargraph Voltage Indicator (when I see chips in sockets, I hear a little voice in my head whispering “hack me!” “fix me!” “reuse me!”), and swapped out the red LEDs for some high-efficiency white LEDs I happened to have on the shelf.

I appreciated Star’s use of elongated pads on the DIP components, a feature not necessary for automated assembly but of great assistance to hand soldering.

It works! Here I am testing the bargraph voltage indicator with a 3V coin cell on my (very messy) keyboard desk.

Voilà! My rendition of a circuit classic. I think the photo looks kind of neat in inverse color.

I really appreciate seeing a schematic printed on a circuit board next to its circuit. It reminds me that before Open Hardware, hardware was open. Schematics like these taught me that circuits were knowable; unlike the mysteries of quantum physics and molecular biology, virtually every circuit is a product of human imagination. That another engineer designed it, means any other engineer could understand it, given sufficient documentation. As a youth, I didn’t understand what these symbols and squiggles meant; but just knowing that a map existed set me on a path toward greater comprehension.

Whether a walk down nostalgia lane or just getting started in electronics, Circuit Classics are a perfect activity for both young and old. If you want to learn more, check out Star Simpson’s crowdfunding campaign on Crowd Supply!

Hacking Humble Bundle

I’m very honored and proud to have one of my books offered as part of the Hacking Humble Bundle. Presented by No Starch Press, the Hacking Humble Bundle is offering several eBook titles for a “pay-what-you-feel” price, including my “Hacking the Xbox”, along with “Automate the Boring Stuff with Python”, “The Linux Command Line” and “The Smart Girl’s Guide to Privacy”. Of course, you can already download Hacking the Xbox for free, but if you opt to pay at least $15 you can get 9 more fantastic titles — check out all of them at the Humble Bundle page.

One of the best parts about a humble bundle is you have a say in where your money goes.

If you click on “Choose where your money goes” near checkout area, you’re presented with a set of sliders that let you pick how much money goes to charity, how much to the publisher, and how much as a tip to the Humble Bundle. For the Hacking Humble Bundle, the default charity is the EFF (you’re free to pick others if you want). For the record, I don’t get any proceeds from the Humble Bundle; I’m in it to support the EFF and No Starch.

If you enjoyed Hacking the Xbox, this is a perfect opportunity to give back to a charitable organization that was instrumental in making it happen. Without the EFF’s counsel, I wouldn’t have known my rights. Knowledge is power, and their support gave me the courage I needed to stand up and assert my right to hack, despite imposing adversaries. To this day, the EFF continues to fight for our rights on the digital frontier, and we need their help more than ever. No Starch has also been a stalwart supporter of hackers; their founder, Bill Pollock, and his “Damn the Torpedoes, Full Speed Ahead” attitude toward publishing potentially controversial topics has enabled hackers to educate the world about relevant but edgy technical topics.

If hacking interests you, it’s probably worth the time to check out the Hacking Humble Bundle and give a thought about what it’s worth to you. After all, you can “pay what you feel” and still get eBooks in return.