Rating: 8.0/10.
Book by hardware hacker about experiences manufacturing in China and hacking hardware to do interesting things, the author Andrew “Bunny” Huang is an influential figure in the hardware and security hardware community. It describes various experiences related to manufacturing in China, as well as several projects involving electronics (mostly for advanced hobbyists), and his general philosophy towards hardware and copyright.
In the first few chapters, he gives his experiences working with Chinese electronics manufacturing and factories. When he visited factories in Shenzhen, he was impressed by the variety of components, the scale of the factories, and the skill and dedication of the employees who would stay up until 3 AM to make sure things were done, resulting in per-unit prices an order of magnitude cheaper than in the US. There were certain issues like having communication difficulties and a need to be onsite (to resolve issues quickly instead of waiting weeks due to shipping delays); poor quality can result when workers are not supervised properly. But still, with all these challenges, costs are usually much lower than making products in the US, except for very small order quantities. This means that manufacturing for any mass-produced product essentially needs to be done in China.
A common theme when visiting some including non-Chinese ones like the Arduino factory in Italy, was that most steps were automated, but frequently a few steps were difficult to automate and had to be done manually, like sorting the orientation of a zipper component components. This is often done with significant human effort to avoid a design that feels cheap, including adding a tiny notch in the zipper, but even though the human labor is tedious, it’s relatively affordable and the alternative gives the product a cheap feel.
When sending an order to a factory, you must include detailed information on the BoM (the Bill of Materials), including cardboard packaging and manufacturer for critical pieces. Be aware of the minimum order quantity and lead time for each component. When making changes, you must properly document with the ECO (Engineering Change Order). Design with tolerances in mind for electrical and physical values so that natural variation in components doesn’t cause product defects. Design and test jigs for the factory to test each product, and they should be equipped to run and produce a pass and fail result to check if it was assembled correctly. Understand the breakdown of the cost quote to avoid surprises, and be nice to the factory and leave them a healthy margin; otherwise, they would do things to try to recoup their costs in unexpected ways. For orders of less than 1,000 units, it may be easier to do it in the US instead of China.
Part 2 is on Chinese attitudes towards hardware and intellectual property. Chinese hardware engineers have a relatively loose intellectual property system where all the blueprints required to build a device are open and shared, so that people can easily make creative mixes of phones in creative ways or build an ultra-cheap but functional phone for $12. The same isn’t really possible in the West, but it’s possible to reverse engineer hardware and release drivers for them under fair use laws. The Chinese system sometimes has problems, like the author investigates a bunch of defective Kingston SD cards and finds suspicious labels and serial numbers, supporting that they are likely fake or have supply chain quality control issues. Many fake parts are quite high quality and difficult to detect, such as used and refurbished parts, engineering samples, factory rejects, etc, and this is especially a problem for US defense equipment, which needs very old parts with an unreliable supply chain.
Part 3 describes a few different projects that the author was also a lead in involving hardware. He was the lead hardware developer of Chumby, which was a fully open source device with a screen that could be connected to various sensors. But after launching in 2008, it shut down after a few years because the recession hit, the value proposition wasn’t clear enough, and the iPhone had just released and had a lot of overlap in the same features; the speed of hardware development couldn’t keep up with the market changing.
His second project was the Novena laptop was launched around 2014 and aimed to be an open source and highly customizable laptop with the ability to swap out the screen, speakers, battery, etc. It sold a few thousand units but quickly stopped due to lack of demand. The author described challenges in engineering the case, the power supply, etc. Chibitronics was a project in electronics education involving stickers in a notebook and included challenges in designing flexible electronics and making sure that the notebook spine was non-conductive.
Part 4 is on trying to hack and reverse engineer hardware, eg, reverse engineering the SD card’s microcontroller’s internal error correction mechanisms and bypassing security protections, making an overlay for a TV stream without decrypting the copyrighted data, which would be illegal, and this requires a combination of engineering as well as navigating legal loopholes. Although he is not a biologist, there is a chapter on analyzing genetics and biological systems in a similar way as hardware; in many cases, a small edit to a gene can break a much larger organism, similar to hacking machine code, biological gene databases can even be queried with Unix shell commands. Making edits to living organisms is difficult, and there is CRISPR, which is a mechanism found in bacteria, but it’s not used in larger organisms.
The final chapter ends with some interviews where he explains his values of openness and control over hardware over commercial success, and focus on learning by reverse engineering and building something that is very useful for a niche group of enthusiasts with Kickstarter backing rather than mass commercial success.
