Continue reading »]]> At the electronics market there are lots of booths of people selling iPhone cases, USB thumb drives, cell phone trinkets, and other useless but high margin plastic things. They prey on the thousands of visitors from around the world who are there to get useless “Made In China” crap for their families or get ‘amazing’ deals on electronics. There is no need for warranties or money back guarantees; most people will not be returning for quite some time, and those that would know better.

As it was one of my first days, and in the interest of recording for posterity, I allowed myself to fall victim at one of these booths. A tray of unpackaged microSD cards caught my eye, and I asked for one of the 16GB ones. Initially the price was over $20, as communicated through the large button calculators at every booth. Clearly this was not competitive with even Amazon, and I was not a fan. She chopped the price down to $10, but I wasn’t having that, either. Walking away is the first trick in lowering prices, and I played that card, quickly getting a call to return. Then I played the second card, which was asking for a second one, but at a discount on each, bringing the total to $15 for 2 16GB Kingston microSD cards. She hemmed and hawed, but ultimately accepted when I started to walk away again. Success! My first negotiation at a booth, and I had achieved more than 50% savings!

The fronts of the cards look legitimate.

The back of one of them even has an authentic looking sticker that says “Made in Taiwan.” It HAS to be good, right?

Not quite right…

The thrill faded when I discovered some things about these MicroSD cards. I put it in my laptop (my China laptop that had been formatted prior to arriving in China and would be separated from my home network, and I formatted the drive immediately) to check it out, and discovered that somehow these MicroSD cards had figured out how to be extremely efficient with data storage, because though it was formatted in FAT32, it only took 8kB of storage after being freshly formatted. It should have been much more than that.

Have you EVER been able to get a full 16GB off a microSD card? No. Except this time!

I ignored it and moved on. Someone needed some files, and I got to work transferring them to the drive. Everything went smoothly, and I checked some files to make sure it was all there. When they came back a few minutes later, though, it appeared that the file NAMES were all there, but not all the CONTENTS. Sure enough, only a fraction of the files had actually transferred. There were no complaints, and the first couple gigs worked great. I found a utility to test the card to verify my suspicion, and sure enough:

Huh. Well that’s not good.

So my 16GB drives were actually 2GB drives with different labels printed on them and the firmware rewritten to report as 16GB? Or maybe they were defects that should have been destroyed? Anyway, they were bad.

I don’t blame Kingston. I knew they were sketchy, and I knew I was taking a risk, but it does serve as a cautionary tale. When manufacturing in China, you need to be extremely aware of fake parts. It turns out I’m not the only person to have experienced this problem with MicroSD cards as well, and Bunnie Huang did an excellent investigation of this issue. Any part you purchase could be fake, could be rejected parts, or could be parts that are old and exposed to too much humidity or have oxidized and can’t be sold to discerning customers.

The problem goes the other way, too. Any product that you produce could quickly become a fake, retailed as if it were legitimate in shady markets. Your defects that should have been reworked or destroyed somehow make it out into the real world, and then support requests are made on products that never worked right to begin with and shouldn’t have made it into the market. This happened with Mitch Altman, inventor of the TV-B-Gone, who started getting support calls for his product, and after significant investigation discovered that someone else had copied his product entirely, down to the contact information, but unfortunately didn’t do as good a job at building the product. When this sort of thing happens, it takes away from profits, but it also pollutes the brand with defective products and potentially unknowing customers, who then have a negative experience with the brand.

Putting it all together in a pretty little package

It’s a wild world, and it’s hard to tell what’s real and what’s not. Quality control is essential and challenging, but there are people with no scruples who will destroy it anyway. It’s challenging to keep fake parts out of your products, and it’s nearly impossible to prevent your product from being cloned, poorly. The cloners will replicate everything, including the packaging, and there’s very little you can do about it. You just have to do the best you can, and as long as the clones aren’t happening in your market, don’t stress so much. Also, don’t source your components from disreputable sources, and NEVER buy a MicroSD card at the electronics market in Shenzhen.

Continue reading »]]> For the product I’m building (A portable electronic scoreboard), the enclosure is large; 18″x10″. This is pushing the limits of injection molding without using a giant press. It’s certainly too large for a 50 ton press, and the 200 ton is about right. I was looking for other options and wanted to try out thermoforming, which is also called vacuum forming. The theory is that you heat up a sheet of plastic, drop it over a mold, and then suck the air out between the plastic and mold so that the plastic gets sucked to the mold.

This is a much cheaper method of production, as well, because the tooling is much cheaper and easier to make, and the temperatures and pressures required are much lower. It is better for prototypes as well, because you can make a mold out of anything, including styrofoam, and get an idea for the feel of it.

Vacuum forming isn’t perfect, though; it’s only good for making shells because you are starting with a sheet. And the formed part still needs a lot of work afterwards, cutting the excess material around the part, adding side holes, sanding. There are tradeoffs, and I wanted to explore this option.

I managed to find a factory, though it turned out they didn’t do the thickness of material I wanted, or the type of material I wanted, and didn’t even have the machinery I needed. It was also a challenge showing him the design and telling him it was a prototype, and that I could make changes to make the design more manufacturable. There is definitely an expectation with factories that the designs you show them are set in stone and you need exactly what is on the paper, which has been a challenge for prototyping in China.

The trip wasn’t a total loss, though. I managed to get some photos and video of the process. This factory makes blister packs mostly, and packaging for bulk transportation of products. They use cheap thin materials and while fairly basic, they get the job done pretty well.

Continue reading »]]> After reading this post about rioting workers at Foxconn, I thought I should respond with what I saw when I was in Shenzhen.

The workspace where I’ve had my base of operations for the last two months has an employee who used to work at Foxconn as a test engineer. I asked him a few questions about his experience there, and while the language barrier was a significant problem, I managed to find some questions and answers that worked. He seemed reluctant to go into detail, though I imagine it was just as much because he was having a hard time understanding me and formulating answers.

He said living conditions consisted of dorms in which he lived with four people to a room. People worked eight hour days, but there was overtime of up to two hours a day. He said he likes his new job better, and that Foxconn was the best factory around. That was about as far as we got in the walk from the subway to the office.

His current job, working in R&D at Seeedstudio, seems remarkably normal for an engineer anywhere. Everyone arrives at 8-9, works until noon at their computers or in front of a lab bench, eats catered lunch either in front of their computer or with coworkers, then take a siesta for a while. Then the afternoon session starts and they work until 5-6, eating the catered dinner and going home in bunches.

I get the impression, not just from him but from other people I interacted with, that people generally have few complaints about working in the factories. They are treated well. Most if not all are young (college age or about), so living in dorms is partly social, partly time saving (often the dorms are right next to the factory, so there is no commute time), partly money saving (who ISN’T poor at that age?), and partly so they can send money back home, which they can afford since they are making so much more than they could back in village towns. Living in dorms isn’t forced; it’s a choice, and people often choose to pile in the places with the cheapest rent.

I’ll admit I didn’t particularly enjoy the catered lunches and dinners. Too many chicken necks and feet and random bones that had me flinching with every bite, and the boss liked spicy, so more often than not that’s what we got. But it was otherwise fine, and we could go back for seconds if we wanted, and lunch and dinner together cost about $3 a day.

I don’t mean for this post to be a generalization of all factories. Certainly there are places where workers are treated poorly. But the impressions I got from the people I talked to, the factories I toured, and watching people in public, things are generally not that bad, and could be compared to a college sophomore in the dorms, and a McDonald’s employee at work. Not ecstatic to be doing their job, but in a decent situation and making decent money.

Continue reading »]]> I’ve returned to the United States for a while. There are some things you just shouldn’t try to do in China, and I needed to do those things. If you 1) Need a good internet connection or 2) Need to do rapid prototyping and engineering, then the U.S. is better. China is the place to be when you have a complete product and have completely defined all the parts and assembly and you’re just looking to reduce costs and produce in mass quantities much larger than 1000. If you aren’t trying to do both, the overhead of transportation, communication, and exchange rates eats very large holes in profit margins. China makes sense for a lot of companies, but not all of them.

Anyway, I returned to the states to take care of things that I couldn’t do in China, and the return home has been very strange and probably not unusual.

I got up early in the morning, took a taxi to a hotel which was a coach stop, and in the middle of purchasing a ticket found a guy who had a private van and offered me a ride. The trip to the airport was nice and I got to chat with a stranger about manufacturing in China and learn that the things I’ve been learning over my 2 1/2 months are consistent with what he’s learned over the last decade.

At the airport, checkin went smoothly and I was ounces under the weight limit. Fortunately, nobody weighed my backpack carry on, because there was no way that was under the limit. I had all the parts to build 20 of my prototypes in there, and the circuit boards alone weighed 5.4 kg.

Once inside the airport, things got weird. I saw a group of college-age people whose accents indicated southern or Texas. They were messaging and chatting and acting as if they hadn’t just been in a rough foreign country for months. There were people chatting in the restaurant about how nice China was in various parts. I started to feel like I’d been experiencing a completely different China, and the truth is I had.

China didn’t want me to leave without a parting gift, so it gave me a stomach bug before my 15 hour flight. For the next 48 hours all I had was a single banana and some water. I was in a window seat of a full flight, and the four movies we were shown were all pretty bad. I was so happy for it to be over, but after the flight ended, the journey still had much more to it.

United States immigration and customs was, without exaggeration, a bunch of buzzcut idiots.

Him: Who do you work for?
Me: I have my own business.
Him: When I ask that, it’s because I want to know what you do.
Me: My company is Portable Scores, I do consumer electronics.

Not only did I give him a perfectly valid response to his first question (I work for myself, not for anybody else), but he got angry at me because he expected to get from his first question completely different information that what he asked for. Sigh. Getting into other countries that aren’t mine doesn’t suck as much as coming into my own country.  To all the foreigners coming into the United States, I’m sorry. We hire stupid people to be the first people you interact with, and we give them a sense of self-importance and power that makes them think they can get away with being awful people.

Getting Used to Home

My Tuesday was 36 hours long. I was still in pain from China’s various assaults on me, exhausted, but somehow so happy to be back. The weather was perfect; 70s, light breeze, everything green and growing and smelling nice. Traffic was reasonable and not honking incessantly. For the first couple days, everything felt so soft and comfortable, and smelled nice, and the weather was great and I wasn’t sweating and I was happy not to be run over by motorcycles on the sidewalk. Eventually, I was able to eat real food, and I worked up to being able to eat the things I’ve been missing, like salads, hamburgers, and dairy. The jet lag is killing me. I haven’t really slept more than a few hours per day/night. There are unintentional naps in which I fall asleep in seconds as my girlfriend watches, and late night sessions of work as I get bored lying awake in bed. Eventually I’ll return to a normal schedule, and eventually my body will recover, but going from one side of the world to another is not easy.

Seeing other people is weird. Everyone looks like me. So much so that I wonder what my place is. There’s no feeling of adventure or challenge in ordering food at a restaurant. I often craved the comfort of fewer challenges in daily life, but now that I have it, I miss some of those challenges and the learning curves. Everyone is bigger, too. I remember being excited the first time I saw an obese Chinese person weeks after arriving in China; here it was within minutes.

Everything is just different. It’s not a bad different, and it’s not all good different. Things just work different here, and it’s taking some getting used to. I’m still sorting things out.

NOTE: Just because I’m back doesn’t mean I’m done posting. I have quite a few posts that I’m still working on in my queue, some of which required video editing and a couple of which are series that took a while to compile. Additionally, I’ll probably be returning when I have made more progress on my product and have raised funding for mass production. This isn’t the end of the blog.

Continue reading »]]> I’ve discovered that white guys carrying manufacturing prototypes are like magnets for people who work for international freight agencies and are also traveling on the subway. All I have to do is sit here and other people come up to me and hand me a business card. This has happened a few times now. At first there is some awkwardness when they start talking to me in Mandarin, but then they hand me a business card and it all makes sense. They nod and smile when I understand, I thank them politely, and then the rest of the trip is silent.

Continue reading »]]> Since moving from my old moldy place to a spare bedroom in someone else’s, my morning commute has changed slightly. This puts me directly in front of Ichibenor, which is a chain of bakeries. Inside I found this roll. The green tint is because it’s green tea flavored. The red things are beans, which the Chinese use all the time in desserts. And no meal would be complete without some sort of rice or rice derivative, so the gooey inside is a rice jelly. It’s pretty tasty, and the convenience of having it on the way eliminates my need to go an extra stop for buns in the morning.

Ichibenor and King Arch are the two big bakery chains, and they are everywhere. You won’t see loaves of bread, but there are lots of smaller treats that you would find in the glass cases of a bakery.

mmmm. Green tea, beans, and rice jelly. Everything about this is so Chinese!

Continue reading »]]> Today I was browsing the internet in the apartment, and a strange ad came up on the Google maps web site. Normally Google doesn’t show ads on their own pages; especially ones that look like this.

What is this ad in the bottom right? It's covering up part of the page!

I started to do some investigating, and what I found was disturbing. It turns out my internet service provider, Great Wall Broadband, is inserting code into my web pages. So when I make a request out to Google, GWB is taking the response, modifying it, and then sending it back to me. This is very bad. Basically, any of my network traffic that isn’t encrypted can be sniffed and modified, so I have to be careful to always use SSL when I am logging in to sites, and it makes me happy that I have intentionally not logged in to Facebook or Gmail directly from within China.

I would be using a VPN all the time, but there are a couple problems with that. First, I can’t seem to log in while I’m at the apartment, and second, with the ridiculously awful bandwidth I have VPN just wouldn’t work anyway.

For now I’ve put in a block on all traffic from the domains they use, so while I may still get some weird insertions into my web pages, at least I won’t be seeing any more of these ads.

A few days ago we tried contacting the company to get faster internet, but apparently we’re already paying for 6MBps. There must be a translation issue here, because in reality it’s about 1/20th of that, making it only slightly better than dialup. The internet guy didn’t seem to think there was an issue (the internet works, right?), and after futzing with some unrelated wifi settings (that would make things worse, by the way), he declared the issue resolved and left.

Sadly, this is the way things are going in the states, too. ISPs are more and more frequently modifying the page contents to insert their own ads, and lines are so oversubscribed that it’s impossible to get the service you pay for, and things outside of basic browsing are often restricted or blocked entirely. The network monkeys who come by to install or fix things are rarely knowledgeable enough about their field to correctly identify, diagnose, and fix a problem. I’d help GWB out with a strongly worded email and changing of service providers, but without mastery of the language or knowledge of alternative options, I’m pretty much stuck for the next month.

At least when I return to the states I’m completely wiping my computer, and changing all my passwords everywhere. I’m not bringing this crap back with me.

Continue reading »]]> I recently met someone who has been in China for the last year and Shenzhen for the last two months. He had read this blog and thought ‘he says everything I’ve been thinking but have been too lazy to write.’ Many of the things I’ve described here have also been experienced by the friends who have been here for the last two months with me, and in casual conversations with other foreigners I’ve met.

One of the things I’ve said a lot in moments of frustration and incredulity to explain and cope with a situation is “This is China” or abbreviated to “TIC.” I have heard other people say this as well, independently of me. Basically, everyone here is going through the same things.

Continue reading »]]> This morning I barely avoided serious injury. I had the crosswalk telling me it was ok, I looked both ways, I even slowed down as I started because it looked like a bus was considering going anyway, but it changed its mind. As I crossed, a car on the wrong side of the street was speeding toward the intersection where people were crossing, blasting its horn as we scurried to dodge it while it flew through the red light and turned. To recap: wrong side of the street (which even had a median), speeding, running a red light, and going through a crosswalk with pedestrians. All in the span of about 5 seconds. Amazingly, he wasn’t being chased, but I gave him some unheard curse words as he disappeared.

It’s mind boggling what people do on the roads here. You have to be completely aware of everything around you at all times.

Continue reading »]]> Since I’ve been here I’ve seen a parade of disgusting everywhere I go. It’s relentless and it’s exhausting. Here are just some of the notable ones:

• As I came up the escalator from the subway, a woman was crouched on the sidewalk vomiting into a corner.
• At least she was kind enough to do it in a corner. I walked by a guy one evening covered in vomit as friends tried to help  him get out of the way of the car honking at him. This was on the sidewalk.
• Random piles of vomit everywhere
• Random piles of dog poo everywhere
• Spitting. Everywhere you go guys are hocking and preparing for big spits, which they then fling carelessly onto the sidewalk or street
• Snot rockets are another popular pastime
• Throwing garbage everywhere
• Throwing garbage from tall buildings to the streets below. Feels like a confetti parade sometimes. Every morning outside my patio is a fresh batch of random trash.
• Small children peeing everywhere. But that’s why they have crotchless pants! Still, parents pick the worst places to let their kids pee.
• At least the older kids have the sense to go in front of the nearby tree.
• It smells bad everywhere. The air quality apparently is much better than it used to be a few years ago, but it still stinks.
• The gutter oil scandal.

To deal with all of this, there is an army of workers in bright colored uniforms cleaning everything. The subways are under constant care and are probably the cleanest place in the city. Still, it’s never enough to get it all, and the fact that it happens everywhere and so pervasively means that it never feels clean.

My apartment recently succumbed to the onslaught despite my efforts, and I discovered that parts of the furniture, like the back my dresser and underneath some drawers, were completely covered in mold. It explains why I’ve been coughing extensively lately, and two nights ago I only got a few hours of sleep because of the coughing. Now I get to try to figure out how to get out of my lease and get my money back for rent and my deposit. My translator talked to the landlord and someone will come by to fix the AC. But that I have to clean the mold myself, and the AC will prevent it from coming back. And that I should drink lots of water and get some medicine. I may have to say no, and that while I’ve been submitting to China for the last two months, it’s hurting me and I need to fight back.

The back side of my dresser.