Avoiding the sentiment of the other comments here (which are not completely confusing, but nonetheless a little over my head), I have a practical question:
How does one relate to and incentivize the Chinese people, then? Where are good places to start learning more?
Context/example:
I'm tentatively interested in approaching China from a "hobbyist with a tiny bit of money" standpoint. I want to do limited runs (3 to 4 zeros, or if circumstances allow, less!) of small handheld electronic devices - PCB, thin removable enclosure, possibly some buttons/keys on the front.
Plastic caps directly over tactile buttons is cheap and compact, but rubber-dome systems seem to have a higher-quality finish. The challenge here is that rubber-dome "mats" are likely expensive to tool for, while sticking the dome under a plastic cap means extra thickness. I'd need to find out what my options are here (if I could achieve making a small keyboard, with full key-click - like the Psion Series 5 or HP palmtops - that would be amazing).
As a separate thing, I'm also really fascinated by the chip-on-board techniques used to manufacture credit-card-thin solar calculators. It would be amazingly fun to be able to play with those manufacturing techniques, but going on the cheapness and sheer numbers of devices like this out in the wild (and the fact that I'm seeing the same designs on eBay as I saw in electronics catalogues from 1999!), it seems reasonable to think that the tooling to make these is probably eye-watering, sadly. But I don't know.
I'm not asking for solutions or answers to these problems/questions here (although if anyone wants to comment...); they're just for context. My point is that I have no idea how or where to start in terms of contacting people and going through all the machinery; I know the volume I can promise is effectively nil, and I read this article from the standpoint of knowing I have an extra job of convincing to do because of that.
I also recently read https://lwn.net/Articles/504865/ (found in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15138028; replies say the main focus of the (2012) article is outdated; I'm curious if the bits I'm quoting are relevant). It's a transcript of a talk about some teething problems with trying to do runs of hardware to run KDE on. It reads
> ... the manufacturers are "all about volume" ...
and
> Because the volume of devices that [Make Play Live] could promise to sell was fairly low, the manufacturer had little interest in consulting or even notifying the company about the changes.
and
> In the Q&A session, Seigo further explained some of the problems that MPL had run into. Unless it can promise a quarter of a million (or some other six-digit number) of units, MPL won't be able to get any input into the process.
This info will likely be old hat to some. But I begin to wonder that whoever agrees to do small production runs will just be amusedly humoring me - because if the speaker of the transcripted talk linked above said '"Our order is a rounding error"'... what does that make my run? (Would it even need a receipt? :P)
So I'm interested to understand Chinese culture more - particularly with manufacturing, and in terms of learning more about the tech scene - so I know how and where and the best place(s) to jump in.
> ... [T]he most impressive I've seen were some calculators I saw in Shenzhen a few years ago which looked like simple solar-powered 4-function ones, but were actually programmable and had several tens of KB of memory. Trying to use that functionality with a 8-digit 7-segment display, however, was quite challenging.
That's awesome. That's the sort of thing I mean by "scene" and what I want to learn tons more about.
"I know the volume I can promise is effectively nil, and I read this article from the standpoint of knowing I have an extra job of convincing to do because of that."
Convincing of what - people to work for effectively nothing? Because according to your logic, that is what you are trying to accomplish. Convincing people to work for nothing. But it's not just you, it is the majority, dare I say nearly everyone, that comes to China. Nearly everyone is trying to get something for nothing. People just seem to lose their ability to comprehend that people in China have the same constraints on time, and particularly the value time, as everyone else outside of China.
I own a factory in China and I see this all too often. For example, people come to us with complicated electromechanical projects with half-baked designs. Designs that would require at least 3 additional months of prototyping before we'd even be ready for tooling. That means we are very likely going to spend 6-12 months working on your project. Too often, they don't have a dedicated engineering staff so there are a lot of gaps we must cover. Verification and validation of designs. Resultant CAD changes. Circuit design changes. Prototyping. Strategic sourcing. Lifecycle testing. Safety and agency. Packaging, packout and shipping. More, much more. It can easily consume 1000+ man-hours even 2000+ man-hours from a team of 8-10 professionals working on it. And then, lets say I quote $35,000 USD nonrefundable engineering fees or labor and overheads for 1000+ manhours. That's about the cost of a secretary with an associates degree from my home state in WV. What do I usually hear? Crickets. I hear nothing back because people are too busy expecting that they are going to work with a factory here in China and get something for nothing.
And in the end, they are all wondering "why didn't I get what I tried to buy from China?"
> Convincing of what - people to work for effectively nothing?
Not quite. Things cost money; trying to get something for less than it honestly costs is delusional, disrespectful, wastes everyone's time, etc. I don't want to do that. (I'll admit I didn't convey the sentiment I was getting at in my last message particularly well.)
Rather, it seems that there are few options if want to make something that isn't going to be superscalar in terms of volume demand. Instead of "we need ten production samples of this design to judge tolerance, and then our plans are to do a volume order of xxx,xxx items"; I want to do the minimum order possible (for reasonable and non-irritating (!) values of "minimum").
Essentially I'm in the same part of the spectrum typically catered to by hobbyist 3D printing, but I'm trying to do things that are tricky to manage with just a 3D printer. I mentioned keyboards before as an example; I've wondered about how much it would cost to tool for custom keyboards for a while.
> People just seem to lose their ability to comprehend that people in China have the same constraints on time, and particularly the value time, as everyone else outside of China.
FWIW, I think this is because China is viewed as a kind of magical place that makes so much of everything with such amazing prices that there must be some superhuman magic in there somewhere. :P So all reason and logic kind of goes out the window. Somehow stuff is being made for impossibly cheap, so surely that must mean that the actual manufacturing cost is cheap too, right? (It would seem that these people don't comprehend economies of scale. I get the impression that the reason that (for example) a given cheap toy is only ~a dollar is because some super-wholesaler did an order for ~a million and paid ~$8xx,xxx (?), and then forwarded their costs on to a bunch of toy stores.)
> I own a factory in China and I see this all too often. For example, people come to us with complicated electromechanical projects with half-baked designs. Designs that would require at least 3 additional months of prototyping before we'd even be ready for tooling. That means we are very likely going to spend 6-12 months working on your project. Too often, they don't have a dedicated engineering staff so there are a lot of gaps we must cover. Verification and validation of designs. Resultant CAD changes. Circuit design changes. Prototyping. Strategic sourcing. Lifecycle testing. Safety and agency. Packaging, packout and shipping. More, much more. It can easily consume 1000+ man-hours even 2000+ man-hours from a team of 8-10 professionals working on it. And then, lets say I quote $35,000 USD nonrefundable engineering fees or labor and overheads for 1000+ manhours. That's about the cost of a secretary with an associates degree from my home state in WV. What do I usually hear? Crickets. I hear nothing back because people are too busy expecting that they are going to work with a factory here in China and get something for nothing.
I see I have a lot to learn about. (I'm very curious where I should start. On the one hand I'm yet another confused tangle of dime-a-dozen ideas, but on the other hand I do think I have the patience and determination to manage a couple of them down the track a bit.)
Reading this makes me think of the line "Reproduced by (...) from camera-ready copy supplied by the authors." at the front of one of the textbooks I have upstairs. It sounds like I could eliminate significant cost by applying similar diligence and aiming to deliver complete specifications that are immediately usable. I presume it's possible to request that mistakes be pointed out so I can do the work to correct them on my end. That said, I say this 100% naively; I wouldn't be surprised if this is actually infeasible :)
> And in the end, they are all wondering "why didn't I get what I tried to buy from China?"
I remember having a brief conversation with someone selling kitchen supplies at a kiosk in a local mall (IIRC) many years ago about manufacturing arbitrary things in China versus elsewhere. That's when I learned that the main reason "Made in China" has such a bad reputation is because it's the customers on the non-China end that are always trying to "optimize" their costs - and that end quality was judged acceptable by sampling at the receiving end, not the source.
That's kinda saddening, but it seems that the prices people expect to pay for different things have been pretty much been locked-in since the manufacturing boom of the ~60s-80s, so anybody who wants to pay the factories a tiny bit more for better output quality is going to have a very hard time competing.
The angle I've been coming from here is biased a bit towards manufacturing in general - I've mentioned toys, everyday objects, etc, as I have little awareness of the technical/industrial side of manufacturing at this point.
I spent a reasonably significant amount of time figuring out the Psion series 5 LCD and Keyboard interface. I built my own controller for the keyboard, and interfaced the display to a Gumstix. That was many years ago...
I've also done some prototyping in Shenzhen. CNC and 3D printed parts are cheap. If you've modeled it, everything apart from the membrane itself should be straightforward (and cheap in small quantities, <100USD). DirtySLA and itead provided cheap SLA printing options.
The membrane itself is likely more problematic. But you can make FPCBs, flexible circuit boards. In small quantities and at relatively low cost. Because the membrane is quite large I'd guess maybe 500USD? Getting domes in it probably is harder. I wonder if you can deform Polymide in some kind of jig. Alternatively could add a thin, 3d printed spacer perhaps?
If you really wanted to do it properly, I don't think that would be massively expensive either. Having a prototype might help. There are a bunch of companies that /do/ agree to do small runs. And I know many people how have done this. Often you end up having to visit the factory a bunch to push them to do what you want, and have occasional failures. But it's often still far easier than it might be elsewhere.
Wow, you figured the LCD out. I'm very curious how the LCD actually works - how is it updated? Through some kind of serial protocol? I get the impression it's pretty fast - I made a program in OPL a while ago that created a borderless window a metric stupid number of pixels high and EPOC was able to scroll it up the screen remarkably quickly (I was trying to see whether it could do haptic scrolling, it definitely could). It also seemed that I could drag windows around the screen faster than the liquid crystals could keep up - there was no choppiness here, it was rather an organic problem, so the LCD controller bandwidth/implementation seemed really good.
Flexible circuit boards are such a cool technology. To clarify, though, you're saying the Psion's keyboard is large? I presume the $500 is for initial tooling and that individual membranes will be a couple of dollars to run.
Another keyboard approach I think is really cool is that found in the original BlackBerry 850/950. I've admittedly only seen pictures of these but it looks quite usable.
> If you really wanted to do it properly, I don't think that would be massively expensive either.
That's incredibly encouraging, thanks.
> Having a prototype might help. There are a bunch of companies that /do/ agree to do small runs.
Oh okay, cool to know.
> And I know many people how have done this.
:D
> Often you end up having to visit the factory a bunch to push them to do what you want, and have occasional failures.
Hmm, plane tickets...
> But it's often still far easier than it might be elsewhere.
Older LCDs have a lower level interface. From memory, there's a pixel clock, line clock and frame clock. Then a parallel bus with the pixel value. The cirrus logic ARM SoC in the Psion 5mx interfaces with the LCD directly. You also need to supply it with some weird voltages (+/- 15V?). When I was doing that I found that part more difficult, I think I'd find it easier now...
The interface is pretty standard, so the gumstix (TI OMAP3something) can also drive it.
The keyboard is pretty big for a FPCB. I'm just guess 500USD, for maybe 10 pieces. Because that's the prototype level pricing I've seen before (check itead.cc or Seeed, they both do FPCB now I believe).
The process they actual use in membrane keyboards is different, I don't know what that process is called.
Hmm. When you say "talks to the LCD directly", there's still a tiny low-level controller attached to the LCD, right?
While highly nonstandard, but I want to see how feasible it is to truly drive an LCD directly. To me that sounds like a) huge pin count, b) "fun" prototyping costs, and c) difficult conversations with manufacturers who don't want to explain how their controllers work (and I guess d) a lot of work on my end to support all the different LCDs I'll use). My motivation is to see whether it's possible to control an LCD and touch panel or keyboard from a single chip.
> The interface is pretty standard, so the gumstix (TI OMAP3something) can also drive it.
Good to know.
> The keyboard is pretty big for a FPCB. I'm just guess 500USD, for maybe 10 pieces. Because that's the prototype level pricing I've seen before (check itead.cc or Seeed, they both do FPCB now I believe).
Oh okay, so $50ea for prototyping. Cool.
> The process they actual use in membrane keyboards is different, I don't know what that process is called.
I was curious about integrating LCD control into a single processor because the security implications are really interesting. Just an idea at this point though.
I remember looking inside cheap electronic organizers and seeing a lone blob on the PCB. So I know managing simple LCDs is doable.
How does one relate to and incentivize the Chinese people, then? Where are good places to start learning more?
Context/example:
I'm tentatively interested in approaching China from a "hobbyist with a tiny bit of money" standpoint. I want to do limited runs (3 to 4 zeros, or if circumstances allow, less!) of small handheld electronic devices - PCB, thin removable enclosure, possibly some buttons/keys on the front.
Plastic caps directly over tactile buttons is cheap and compact, but rubber-dome systems seem to have a higher-quality finish. The challenge here is that rubber-dome "mats" are likely expensive to tool for, while sticking the dome under a plastic cap means extra thickness. I'd need to find out what my options are here (if I could achieve making a small keyboard, with full key-click - like the Psion Series 5 or HP palmtops - that would be amazing).
As a separate thing, I'm also really fascinated by the chip-on-board techniques used to manufacture credit-card-thin solar calculators. It would be amazingly fun to be able to play with those manufacturing techniques, but going on the cheapness and sheer numbers of devices like this out in the wild (and the fact that I'm seeing the same designs on eBay as I saw in electronics catalogues from 1999!), it seems reasonable to think that the tooling to make these is probably eye-watering, sadly. But I don't know.
I'm not asking for solutions or answers to these problems/questions here (although if anyone wants to comment...); they're just for context. My point is that I have no idea how or where to start in terms of contacting people and going through all the machinery; I know the volume I can promise is effectively nil, and I read this article from the standpoint of knowing I have an extra job of convincing to do because of that.
I also recently read https://lwn.net/Articles/504865/ (found in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15138028; replies say the main focus of the (2012) article is outdated; I'm curious if the bits I'm quoting are relevant). It's a transcript of a talk about some teething problems with trying to do runs of hardware to run KDE on. It reads
> ... the manufacturers are "all about volume" ...
and
> Because the volume of devices that [Make Play Live] could promise to sell was fairly low, the manufacturer had little interest in consulting or even notifying the company about the changes.
and
> In the Q&A session, Seigo further explained some of the problems that MPL had run into. Unless it can promise a quarter of a million (or some other six-digit number) of units, MPL won't be able to get any input into the process.
This info will likely be old hat to some. But I begin to wonder that whoever agrees to do small production runs will just be amusedly humoring me - because if the speaker of the transcripted talk linked above said '"Our order is a rounding error"'... what does that make my run? (Would it even need a receipt? :P)
So I'm interested to understand Chinese culture more - particularly with manufacturing, and in terms of learning more about the tech scene - so I know how and where and the best place(s) to jump in.
I read https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15138739 a couple of days ago; to quote:
> ... [T]he most impressive I've seen were some calculators I saw in Shenzhen a few years ago which looked like simple solar-powered 4-function ones, but were actually programmable and had several tens of KB of memory. Trying to use that functionality with a 8-digit 7-segment display, however, was quite challenging.
That's awesome. That's the sort of thing I mean by "scene" and what I want to learn tons more about.