Embedded - 140: Physics Is the Same Everywhere

Episode Date: February 25, 2016

Andrew "Bunnie" Huang spoke with us about manufacturing in China, writing books, and crowdfunding. Bunnie's new book is The Essential Guide to Electronics in Shenzhen. It is available via crowdsupply and the price goes from $30 to $35 when pre-ordering ends on March 17, 2016. Bunnie's blog is at www.bunniestudios.com, many of his professional projects can be found at www.kosagi.com including more information about the Novena open source laptop. Hacking the XBox is available for free from No Starch Press.  

This is Embedded FM. I'm Alicia White, here with Christopher White. We are excited to talk to Andrew Bunny Wong, author of Hacking the Xbox, creator of Chumby, and the open source Novena laptop. I could go on and on, but I'd rather talk to Bunny than about him. One thing first, though. As mentioned last week, our multimedia empire is growing. Please check out our blog at embedded.fm slash blog. There's neat posts that went up this week.

You might like them. RSS works, and we will get a newsletter together soon. But now, now we get to talk to Bunny. Hi, Bunny. Welcome. Thanks for talking to us today. Hi, yeah, thanks. Glad to be here. get a newsletter together soon but now now we get to talk to bunny hi bunny welcome thanks for talking to us today hi yeah thanks glad to be here could you tell us about yourself tell you about myself um yeah i mean i'm just uh just a guy i'm hacking hardware doing the hardware thing i actually missed that I thought the next thing was the lightning round

That's fine So what do you want me to tell you about? Just, you know, if you were on a panel or you met somebody at lunch What would you say about your background? This is also one of those really hard questions i never can answer well i mean i just i do some of these stupid things there's mit and a phd and a double e degree and then there's years spent but it all sounds like bragging and it's like and the thing you know the honest thing is like after you've been around and seen like these degrees and how little they mean but some people are when they get them i'm like the first thing you open a

conversation with yo i got a phd from mit it's like dude is that all you have to like talk about something you did like 20 30 years ago in your life when you had no clue what you're doing and you're guided by all these people in the cloistered area. It's like if you're, you know what I mean? I don't know. The thing is I meet plenty of people who just open with that. I'm like, okay, great, thanks. Now what have you done, right?

So, yeah, I mean, I guess, you know, the thing is I'm pretty, you know, the one common thread through my life is I really enjoy doing hardware and I enjoy helping people. And I like to try to do things that combine the two together. Yeah, I'm such a big nerd that I spent 10 years in college and got a PhD at MIT, but it's not like, you know, my crowning achievement in my life. It's more like a mark of shame i could have done something else like all my friends wouldn't start like dot-com companies and like you know started actually doing things for people i sat inside of like an office and hid from the world you know reading about computers i was at a couple of dot-coms it didn't really help many people.

The output of my 10 years was a book that no one ever read. Literally, it's like this bound volume that sits in the MIT library and no one really cares about it. It's pretty pointless. It's pretty sad, actually. Alrighty, then. I have a whole bunch more questions on this

but i think we should go to lightning round and and get through a few things before i come back to sure sure yes go ahead all right you're ready ready for this yeah yeah i'm i'm ready for this i actually read the lightning round questions ahead of time well i'm inserting some different ones so okay all right let. Let's mix it up. Let's do it. Little or Big Endian? Little or Big Endian? Ooh.

Ah. Man, you know, I like being able to read the bytes without swapping them in my head when I look in a hex editor. But everything, I've gotten so used to Little Endian, I have to say Little Endian now. All right. Favorite programming language? Does solder count as a programming language or not?

We'll accept it. It's not. Okay, good. So now I had another answer. Okay, you go with solder. Favorite processor, living or dead? Favorite processor, you mean like a CPU type? Yeah.

Living or dead huh yeah i i always said that like uh if i had a male child i would name him alpha cray because it combines like two of my favorite you know processors so it's somewhere between the two you know the alpha cpu or the you know the cray architecture you know the original one the cray the one that you could sit on making or hacking i think they're like kind of two sides of the same coin um you know good hackers make their own tools and good makers know how to hack things up so uh i think it's like you know do you like heads or tails like i don't know i like coins who do you find inspiring there's a list here but i'll just

leave it open-ended who do i find inspiring man there's a huge list of people out there um that do really great things that i that i, have always admired for a lot of different reasons. I mean, I, I, I guess an easy one is like, you know, Steve Wozniak designed the Apple two and, and he put the schematics out there, uh, so that I could learn from them. I don't know if that's his intention, but that's why I did. I never asked him if that's why he did it, but, but, you know, he, he bundled the schematics in the book with the source code,

and that was a gift to me, and that changed my life. And so I constantly go back to that as sort of a raison d'etre for doing the open hardware and sharing my work with people because I feel like there's a multiplicative force when you open source your stuff and you share it with other people. Speaking of the force, have you seen the new Star Wars movie? I have. It's great. Christopher totally rolled his eyes at my speaking of the force.

He's like, that's terrible. I love the Apple II stuff. I remember all those books and there were even third-party books that went deeper into just the entire architecture and now that's like that's impossible for most for most products but yeah that's the way i'm actually i'm actually like staring literally at the main board logic schematic of the apple 2 it's hanging on my wall next to my monitors and like i keep it there to remind myself that like computers are normal and and the power the empowerment that comes when people believe that technology is

something they can know and not something that is a black box that they can't control are you a morning person or a night person? I'm most definitely a night person. So 2 a.m. is night, not morning, right? 2 a.m. is kind of, I don't know. It's like, I'm probably going to go about around 5 o'clock tonight. So we're going to finish up and I've got to finish doing some changes to the circuit board. And then I've got to finish a blog post and then I'll probably start retiring around then. I should note that we are recording at 2 a.m. Bunny's time, but not 2 a.m. our time. Because that is not... They have a 2 in the a.m. too?

Exactly. All right, one more from me. Is a mobile phone an embedded system? Yeah, totally. It's several embedded systems. The only person that agrees with me. I mean, it's a subclass

of an embedded system. It's like a thing as a mobile phone and a computer, yes. It's a mobile phone a communications device, yes. It's a Venn diagram. You're allowed to have overlaps. Alright, alright. I always say it depends on who you're allowed to have overlaps all right all right i i always say it depends on who you're talking to if it's not an embedded system then what is it it's a computer i mean it's your your apple 2 is a computer your phone has way more processing and flexibility than the Apple II. I feel like an embedded system is when the presence of the CPU is hidden a bit from the user.

So an Apple II features a 6502, or your PC and your desk has an Intel processor that's a Core i7. That's like a feature, right? A lot of mobile phones, you don that, a lot of mobile phones, like you don't even know what CPU is inside. It could be some Exynos or it could be, I mean, Apple, of course, advertises its core,

its A7 is whatever it is, but it's not. But that's meaningless to most people. Meaningless to most people and not really a marketing feature at the end of the day. And so,

my distinction embedded system is like they're the processors that you don't know about and so when i say like a phone is several embedded systems not only is there like whatever they talk about but there's like the half dozen other arm cores inside that manage the wi-fi and the and the baseband stack and you know handle power management and security and all these other things so there's like dozens of embedded systems inside your phone, in addition to the fact that the phone itself is, you know, from a user's perspective, it's like a beautiful piece of glass that shows magical images that respond to touch, right?

And it talks to space. That's always my favorite part. It talks to space, yeah. I mean, it's like we got that one aspect of Star Trek today, thanks to Moore's Law, but nothing else ever came out of all the sci-fi from the 60s and 70s yet yet nothing came out yet we have hoverboards i've seen them i've seen them advertised yep okay all right now it's trolling me uh you have a new book on crowd supply. Tell me about it, please. Yeah, it's called The Essential Guide to Electronics in Shenzhen.

And, you know, it's the book that I wish I had when I first went there like 10 years ago. And I saw all this electronics and this huge market and all this potential. And you could just feel the energy swirling around you, but you couldn't catch anything, right? It was just like you're just grasping at the air and snowflakes were falling off your hand and you're just frustrated, right? And a lot of it was because the language barrier and the impenetrability of the chaos of the market.

And after being there for quite some time, you start to see some semblance of order, some general rules that things tend to follow. And so I kind of did my best to distill it into a couple of guidelines. I hate to call them maps, but guidelines of areas you might want to go to try and then reduce your search space from you know you know np to like linear time or something like that right um and then um also like a set of pages which have technical terms uh that have both the chinese and the english words in them because the thing, it's not just a one-way thing.

You don't want to just talk to the vendors and say, hey, I want to resist. The vendor wants to come back and say, what tolerance do you want to that? And it's really hard, actually, to do these with any translation app. The technical terms are very subtle. Like, for example,

I was trying to translate the word for materials as in like, you know, steel or tungsten, aluminum, you know, what's the general term for that category? If you plug that into Google Translate or any other translate apps, it comes with something that in Chinese means the distinction between the spiritual world and the physical world, right? And so you use the word that comes out of it, it like you're talking about like like um you know things that have form as opposed to things that are spiritual right would be the word that comes out of google translate but the chinese people would get that you're not talking about spiritual things right it's it's weird right and so and so i actually had to go back

and forth i had a couple of editors who are you know native chinese speakers and also technically fluent go through and we had several terms that were really subtle and very difficult to translate. I'm still not 100% sure if we got them right, but we'll see what happens when we get in the field. And so this is a book I could take to Shenzhen, the market, if I was going for the first time, or maybe the sixth or even the 10th, I bet. And if I wanted to go ahead and buy a strip of those NeoPixels so that I could test them out and maybe get a whole bunch later, not the NeoPixels, the 28, whatever they're called. Yeah, WS2812Bs.

Yeah. And I mean, I know that they're a lot cheaper there and that they come in big rolls. So I could use this to say, could you mark on the map where you are and give me a business card and tell me what the pricing would be for some things? Yeah. Yep. That's exactly the idea behind it. You could walk into, the guy would give you a general idea where the LED market is. Until it's the fifth and sixth floor of this building, you'd go up there. You'd wander around and find some guy who has wares of what you're looking for.

And I actually have the word. I would like LED tape, or I would like it in tape and reel, or the packaging type you're looking for. And then you can say, no, actually, I want a bag or a box. If the guy needs to get it it you can ask how long it's going to take you know it's going to be 15 minutes a day or whatever it is and then and then then there's a set of maps where you can ask the guy say you just got lost totally lost in the market which happens to me all the time you just stumble across the vendor you're inside this building of you know just Byzantine passages right and you're like I'm never going to find this place

he hands you his business card. It's in Chinese with like one stall letter with stall number and alphanumeric characters. And I'm just like, can you at least just tell me what building we're in and mark it on this map so I can even begin to find this again? Because there's like a dozen buildings at least in like one district

and they all look the same. This doesn't sound like procuring parts. This sounds like playing an RPG. It kind of is, actually. And that's kind of the fun part. It's kind of a shopping jungle, right? You know, it's not, you know, once part of the excitement is actually finding it

and bagging it, and it's just such a fractal nature to the marketing, just explore any corner and go deeper and deeper and deeper and find new interesting things. Or you can just stand back and just walk around the district at a high level and also take in a lot of interesting stuff. And that's, I think that's really exciting, an exciting part about it. And hopefully this guide will help people, at least save them a

lot of aggravation, trying to figure out which way is up. Your results will vary depending upon your ability to patiently communicate. I know that there's a skill, actually, and someone actually had to point this out to me at one point in time. I didn't realize even this was a life skill. The ability to explain things to people in simpler terms than the complex technical ones, right? So you may know all the knowledge about some subject, but if you can't break it down into the simplest words possible and say it very slowly to someone who's a non-native speaker, all that knowledge you have is almost worthless, right? And what tends to happen when people are talking to people in another language is that the more they go, what? The more they go, huh, can you say it again? They actually start using bigger words. They start speaking faster

and louder and they get, you know, because that's what you would do if it was another native English speaker who is a, you know, a peer in engineering, you would get more specific and more precise and start using, you know, larger words, you know, pulling from a big vocabulary. In fact, what you have to do is resist that urge and just break it down to the very simplest thing. No, I want the red one. You know, like I, I wanted, you know, no, the capacitor with the dielectric of this particular thing. And that's like, no, there's a bunch of blue ones.

The red one actually is the one that I want. And actually that's good enough. Right. I got the point across and, and everyone's happy at the end of the day. And that's actually something that if you've only spoken one language your entire life and you're particularly fluent in it, you miss the difficulty of being able to communicate with people. And so the translation guide will help you a little bit but I wouldn't say you should expect to be like fluid you're still going to have to like you know really use it correctly as a tool and yet it's a tool I've never seen the like of interesting I'm glad you say that

because you know when I struggle with the idea of doing this in the first place at all. I hate building stuff that has no value. And so I want actually to make the book have value for the fact that it's printed. I want to use the medium to turn it into a tool. So I put tabs on it and i have

like business card holders built into it it's designed to be marked up and the actual physical form opens flat you can hold it to a particular page and and two people can point it at the same time without like having the screen slide and move around like you know on an app these sorts of things right and so and so i was trying trying to actually turn it not into a read-only thing which you just distribute pdfs if you just read only right but this is a read write evolving tool you know it's like the last chapter of the book you write yourself it's a bunch of maps they're empty with business card holders i write the first three pages of the map section that gives you an idea of where to go you fill in the last 10 pages with like your adventure

and and your findings and and it becomes your book your your tool your personal copy that no one else has that has your ending to it and i think that's like you know if if lots of people do that and they all write their own versions of book i think that'd be phenomenal well then i had a EE friend who, when I pointed him to it, he bought two, and I asked why. And then I realized I didn't really need to ask. One was probably for work, and one was probably for his own personal projects. And he needed two maps, one to leave with work when he left, and one to play with when he continued on his own. Yeah, that's the idea. The book is actually meant to be a consumable at the end of the day. Pages to be torn out, given to vendors, things to be marked in it, extended, changed. And so a lot of people ask me, why do you even bother doing a crowdfunding campaign? Why don't you just make a PDF and just give it to people and whatever?

I have smartphones. I don't know. I don't feel like it first doesn't have the immediacy that you need in the market. The moment you start pulling your phone and start typing at it, that's like a social signal that you've lost interest in the transaction. And the person you're talking to, when you pull your phone and start browsing for stuff, they're going to talk to someone else. You've lost the element of human immediacy. Whereas if you're coming with a book and you're flipping through and

the other person can see it they can stop the page and they're like no no no go back back that's the that's the term i actually want right it's it's in and the the bandwidth through flipping through pages is way faster you can get through a screen i think right and um and also just like this read write nature to it just that it's meant to be marked up and have things put into it and samples added and things you can't do with a read-only media. It's like those klutz guides. Do you remember those? It's like the Hitchhiker's Guide to Shenzhen.

Maybe you need to reprint it with that title. That's pretty cool. Yeah, I don't know. One thing I really want to make sure that doesn't happen, doesn't get oversold as like an ultimate tour guide or something. I was very careful to stay away from like where to eat and where to stay and, you know, sites to see. Well, that's all very fluid too, yeah.

And there's also just a lot of guides, frankly, and people with large paid staff to figure that out in Shenzhen. I mean, Fromers and Lonely Planet, those guys, I'm not here to compete with them on that front. But they're never going to tell you what a resistor is in a Fromers guide. That's just not material to most people in their market, right? So I wanted to stay hyper-focused on geeks who need that little extra oomph. And then they should keep a copy of the FromWare's Guide in their hotel room when they get done and they want to get a beer. They can get 10 places to go.

I'm fascinated by this idea that this bizarre-style marketplace still exists in 2016, when everything seems to be going to just-in-time delivery and overnight delivery and everything's online and drones are going to be dropping your parts on your front door. Why do you think it persists the way it does and what makes it interesting that it does, I guess? I mean, we can start by reversing from the statement, you know, drones are going to drop stuff on your front door.

I feel like that reality is actually a really, really long way off. It's interesting. It's compelling. The story is, is, has a lot of good ideas to it, but I mean, this, it's way beyond the context of this call. Why I think it's socially and also like, you know, by the laws of physics, not practical. Yeah. you know by the laws of physics not practical yeah um but uh you know the the things move online that are information-based uh and purely information-based the the thing that's

different is that hardware ultimately requires the atoms to be there atoms actually you know despite you know us having us having trillions of resistors on this Earth probably, the Earth is really big. If we just decide to distribute the world's collection of resistors equally across the Earth in a Cartesian grid or something like that, you're still not achieving a very

great density of parts. If you want to have all the variety of parts... Yeah, most of it. Even if you just counted the landmass, most of it would be in deserts and mountains and whatever you know yeah there's i think i think anyways so so the the point i'm trying to make is that um physical goods uh still get a uh an advantage an economy of scale of aggregating in a particular area right because uh once you've got the idea down you want to make 10 000 of them or even 100 or 10 but you need that exact one part

out of a register of 10 000 parts right um there there are things like fedex that can get you stuff overnight from like digikey and that sort of stuff that works great in the United States. But part of the problem of like kind of flipping through DigiKey is like, I can only find things I know to look for in DigiKey, right? So if I'm looking for a particular resistor or a particular type, sure, I can do the query and reduce it down to the part that I want to order. And then voila, like, you know, 12 hours later, it's in my front door for a mere $30 in shipping or whatever it is, right? But, you know, there's something about viewing the entire inventory of what's out there that everyone's making right now. And you're like, oh my God, I didn't know they made resistors like that. Or I didn't know they had motors like that or that that's how they do it that's crazy right you know and that element of discovery and serendipity and that element of immediacy and

being able to just be like that's cool you know i want a bunch of those what what's the price oh it's like 60 bucks for 10 000 sold i'm going to bring this home everyone's going to love it right um that there's something about that that really has a value that i think that brings about these sold. I'm going to bring this home and everyone's going to love it, right? There's something about that that really has a value that I think brings about these bizarre type markets. That makes a lot of sense. But now actually the DigiKey is sort of like a dictionary. It's like when teachers said you have to look it up in the dictionary to figure out how to spell it. And my response was always, if I to look it up in the dictionary to figure out how to spell it and my response was always if i could look it up i would know how to spell it

and so you have to go and see it in order to know it even exists or maybe maybe the other the other you know the flip side is you can ask like why do we even have grocery stores anymore when everything's online right you know and why do we have fishermen's markets? And why does the catch of the week matter? Because fish, if you want wild ones, they have to be caught by fishermen. And if you want the fresh fish that was caught that day, it really varies depending on the time. And so, yeah, you could maybe create an online marketplace that lets you know what's coming down the dock. And maybe you can throw in some ice and FedEx it to people.

But there's just something about if you want really fresh, good food, being close to that market just reduces the cost of acquiring it greatly. And in the hardware world where your margins aren't 200% like in the software world or something like this, right? You have to live on 30 to 40% margins or something. If you're saving that $30 on the FedEx box or the discovery cost or whatever it is, that's all money in your pocket, right? And that matters too. And so is this book designed more for professional engineers or is it more for makers who get the opportunity to go to the Shenzhen market? I think both. I mean, I definitely hope that professional engineers could find some value. I mean, presumably professional engineers have translators and experience and cadres of people to help them with this stuff.

But there's still times when you're on the factory floor and you need to ask for an oscilloscope and you just can't remember the word. You want to point at it. And that's where it can help, right? But definitely, I think, you know, the idea behind the book was, you know, when I first went there,

I wouldn't call myself a professional. I was definitely, I had no clue what I was doing. I was paid to be there. So by some extent, I'd be a professional, but I had no clue. Right. So, um, so for someone who is just curious and wants to learn and, you know, and, and, but doesn't want to waste four years learning the market before they can get something out of it. I think it's a, you know, hopefully it's a good deal for them. Why didn't you go with a traditional publisher you went with a crowdsourcing method yeah and then and again this went back to

me thinking about what the nature of the book is um uh i want to do weird stuff with the book like uh the tabs and the card holders and and and i know publishers are very cost sensitive um and they already have their printers lined up and all these sorts of things and um i i actually needed to sort of get in with the printer himself and see what was possible we had to go through a few iterations on the physical design of the book before we could settle on something that was manufacturable at a reasonable price and that layer layer of putting, you know, a publisher between me and the printer and the pricing of the book and that

sort of thing, I think would have, would have limited my creative ability to create the thing I really wanted. And so in essence, I couldn't have had a publisher if I wanted to do something so weird, right. And kind of break the mold there, which then meant I had to go to crowdfunding to get the minimum order together to make sure I could pay for this weird thing I wanted to build.

When you posted about it in your blog, you seemed uncertain that you would get funding. Yeah. I estimated that I would be lucky if I got 300 orders, 300 people by the time the campaign was over, which had got me just to like the end. And I had like this backup plan, what would happen if that didn't happen? And, you know, I would like figure out how not to totally lose a ton of money on this. I was really, I was shocked that like, there was even a response like this.

You'd funded in less than 24 hours and now exceeds the goal by at least 3x. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because when I did my models, I was like, the only people who are going to need this are people who have A, tickets to Shenzhen and B, going in the next couple months. Because if you're not sure you're going to go, you can always buy it later, I suppose.

You'd be like, why buy it now? Cost of capital, blah, blah, blah. I'll buy it after it's funded, nine months from now when I actually have tickets to Shenzhen. So if you look at the number of people who would be going there, who would need the tool and doing its sort of thing, it's pretty small. But then I guess if that were the case, no one would own a circular saw because circular saws are like saws for professional carpenters. Or a pickup truck.

All these kinds of things. There's a lot of stuff out there that are owned by people who are designed for professional use, but people like to have them because they're actually really good for doing what they do. Well, yes, you could cut a 2x4 with a hand saw. It's a heck of a lot easier with a cirque saw saw is like you know 100 bucks or something like that and you spend an afternoon cutting two by fours with a with a wood with a hand saw you're like yes even though i only use that circular saw once every couple of years it's totally worth it exactly i mean it's exactly the same point you were making with markets having something on hand is different than having it in theory yeah but you know i i just couldn't had no basis to assess how many people would actually want something so specific i mean it's

chinese to english translations and maps of the market. Like, if you live in, you know, Boston, and you have no intention to ever go to China, when would you ever need to open this thing up and actually use it? Actually, I got one, although I've never been to Shenzhen and may not go, I don't know. But I got one because occasionally I can convince friends who are going to bring me things and if i can start getting an idea of where things are in the market and point to this or that and send them with my book with my help and my instructions and you know if they're willing to play the RPG for me, then this helps. This helps me even though I'm not there.

I never considered that possibility. My huge fear right now is that there's a thousand people out there getting a book that's not what they think it is. Somehow it's like this do-all-end-all sourcing guide for how to find factories and negotiate and it's translation guide man and a map it'll help in a map it'll get you on the market it'll get you into china and back out of china and tell you like what the fastest way to do all these sorts of things is but you know it's kind of it's a circular saw right it's not it's not a 3d printer

or something like that right um but you also traded some on your reputation i mean you have a reputation for making really cool things so if if somebody else had made this i might not have jumped right on but i i was like okay he makes cool stuff it's not very expensive it was what 30 bucks yeah yeah and i'm willing to check it out yeah that that's below my okay the business is paying for it might as well buy it threshold i'm i'm i'm flattered and extremely happy to hear that that that happened but i you know i oh man like i think i think this is actually one of the nice things of of working in the relative isolation of sing by myself is like I don't interact with a lot of people very often out here and it keeps me grounded you know I just keep focused on building things and doing stuff and not so much about doing talks or advising

you know committees and raising money or whatever these sorts of things people do in the United States, I guess. And so it's very hard for me to take stock of how many people would just get it because of reputation. It blows me away that that would even be a thing. You've worked hard. It's okay to trade on it a little bit. As long as you continue to do good stuff. Funding ends

March 17th and then it goes up to $35? Yeah, that's right. What made a difference for its 24-hour success? Was there a viral step or a retweet that mattered? Or was it just all these little things?

I don't know. I mean, in the first 24 hours, I put a tweet out there and a blog post and um actually so it's funny it's funny my um my girlfriend she does bioinformatics for a living and so she loves analyzing all kinds of data and patterns and stuff like that so she went through and helped me construct the tweet and said like look if you send it this particular time and you ask people to retweet it and you put these things inside of it and pictures and all this stuff you'll probably get the best traction right so she actually helped me craft 140 characters she could make a living at that to to get the maximum impact right because she did all this analysis she just like pulled like a whole bunch of twitter feeds and like you know looked at the

most retweeted ones and gave me like some advice as to what what the right thing to do was so so so it was a it was a you know it was a crafted message um that did really well and uh about like a day later uh just completely surprising um edward snowden tweeted about the book and and then that just drew the analytics to the roof it was really funny because i was i was actually talking to the crowd supply guys like oh cool like we got the funding and you know can we can i get like some google analytics or something so i can like kind of keep an eye on stuff and like i mean you have this line moving across and all you know there's like you know how like the graphs can auto adjust in terms of size right and so when when a big event comes along like i was looking at this

texture of the data and all of a sudden everything flattens out and there's like this huge spike that goes up i'm like something wrong what's going on and like 20 minutes later i'm like trying to i'm looking through the internet trying to figure out and then like you know edward stone had had tweeted about this and like like just the analytics were through the roof at that point in time i think that just you know that took it to the next level. So it was pretty unexpected and really, really crazy. Do you speak Mandarin? I have had to teach myself.

So I hesitate to say that I'm conversational about it. Put me in a factory and I can get my way around. Put me next to a girl and ask me to get her on a date. No, no way I can do that. How is building things like manufacturing different in China as opposed to manufacturing in the US? I want to switch topics a little bit and go into for people who have never built consumer products or who have never done manufacturing in China, what do they need to know? I think, you know, well the good news is that physics is the same everywhere and so the fundamental

challenges are identical whether you're in China or the United States and as long't you have a strong grasp of the fundamentals and you can you can see through the bullshit on either side then then you're not going to get lost but of course the culture and the politics are very different on both sides um and and you know actually in china it's funny like whether you're in a factory that's run by say uh someone who's from hong Kong or who's local Chinese or Taiwanese has a huge difference in terms of the outcome and the culture and the interaction. One of the first things I like to know when I visit a factory to work with is, what's the nationality of the ownership? I guess it's a little racist for me to make these stereotypes. But the Chinese factories kind of run like big extended families.

It's just kind of the way the culture works there. And so the culture of the boss tends to percolate its way all the way down to the floor and the style and the management and stuff. And being able to read that nuance and understanding what no means and yes means. No doesn't always mean no. No doesn't always mean no, yes doesn't always mean yes. Sometimes it's yes, but it's complicated, or no, but there's other ways to do it, right? And you have to sort of be able to work with the engineers, ask the leading questions you need to ask to get the results you need to get, right? And that's actually the most difficult part, and that's why a lot of people end up getting frustrated because they assume the culture is exactly identical between the united states and china that's like you couldn't be any more

wrong about that right and um and so i mean if i were to try to sum it up at the end of the day um in america the primary thing that you worry about a lot is the upfront cost. So it's going to cost you $1,000 or $2,000 to set up a production run of circuit boards at a factory. And you expect that 95% of them are going to come out good or more, ideally, right? From that run, because you're paying a lot of money for it. In China, you can get your run started for as little as $100, right? Very little. Sounds like a bargain. But you should expect that maybe out of 10 boards, only 6 will work, right? But what you do to compensate for that is you order

16 because you know that six are going to be bad, right? But at the end of the day, when you do the math, even though it costs like 100 bucks to get started, maybe the cost of the board is 10 bucks a piece. So you're going to throw away six boards at 60 bucks. You're still better than a thousand bucks for setting up the run, right? But getting people's head around the idea that you're paying for defective material is really hard sometimes. I'm having a hard time with it. Well, I mean, even my little environmentalist in my head is going, well, but you're throwing away, you know, raw materials. The tester part in my head is going, but how will you detect the defective boards? Well, that's an extra cost.

Because that's going to take all the time and the cost. And so it's not just $60. Yeah. Okay. Well, but this is in particular when we're talking about like really early stage runs where they're, you know, you're already in engineering land and small runs. When you get to greater scale, the economics shift a lot. You're not, there are other things that come into play. I'm just giving an example of one of the cultural differences.

To frame this specifically, we're talking about prototyping. Prototyping runs in the United States are really expensive. You have to pay documentation fees and operator fees to program the SMT and line fees. They do all this upfront work to get the thing absolutely right. It costs

a couple thousand bucks to do the legwork to make sure every part is on exactly the right spot and you have no problems. In China, the reason why it's so cheap is like that's why it's $100 dock fee is they just take a Gerber fuzz, they print it out, and they put it in front of a girl. And she looks at it, and they give her a kit of parts, and she starts sticking them down with her hand. She just guesses where it should go on the board. She's paid local minimum wage or whatever it is. She's really good at it, actually. She can put BGAs down by hand. She doesn't need a microscope to do it. She's just dropping them down

just like nothing. It's funny. I was at one of these facilities a couple months ago. I was talking to a friend and how amazing it was that she can put the board together. We talked for five minutes. She finished the whole board. We had a conversation. We didn't even get a chance to really watch her because she was that quick at doing it,

and the board worked. But because it's a human putting those things down, not a machine, you get a higher error rate. So sometimes the components go off or whatever it is. But when you know it's a human that's doing it, you know what to look for. You look for components that are a little off or whatever it is. And so, but you get to look, but when you know it's a human that's doing it, you know what to look for. You look for components that are a little skewed.

You look for, you know, some swaps of parts. You look for... Backwards diodes. A couple of like, yeah, yeah, backwards. Well, they're pretty good. All right.

They're surprisingly good about, so they have a methodology. It's not as crazy as it sounds. Like they actually like tranche the parts out in an order, and they only give the operator exactly as many parts there are on the bill of materials. So if they end up with one extra or a short one, they knew they put one down in the wrong spot,

and they go back and they inspect and find the wrong one. So it's not totally like the Wild West crazy. They have no process control. But there are things that happen. And if you know it's a human versus a machine doing it, you look for different kinds of problems. It's easier to debug but you know at the end of the day if you send you know say a hundred dollar setup fee and 50 of your boards go to work right um i think

western engineers would like flip right they're like that's that's unacceptable like that's not possible but you know i'm a practical guy you know my boards only cost 10 20 each right in terms of parts or whatever it is you know for a typical run or something and then circuit boards themselves are almost free because because fr4 is really cheap so you just order twice as many as you need you build them up if a lot of them work hooray like you have extra ones for marketing use if some of them don't work you have to spend a lot of time reworking them and you have a you have a test from the from day one to try and figure out what's going wrong and that's actually

good to have because when you go to full production you need that test anyways right that test is i mean i i said i cringed a little bit about the testing aspect but really that's you should be doing that from the very beginning because it makes everything easier later. Right. But things work so well all the time with American prototype lines. You can get away without testing for a long time. Until you can't, and then you really regret it. Yeah, yeah, right.

Okay, so the culture, the human aspect, what else would be different that we'd need to think about? I mean, there's the usual stuff like, you know, just getting the materials in and out of the country can be hard. You know, there's duties and taxes and customs and paperwork you have to fill. You know, the whole game of telephone and time change and all the things you have to deal with i guess you know people have come to express people tend to forget about duties and customs and shipping delays but they can be real headache and that can be an aggravation um i mean i think aside from that like that, the other thing to just keep in mind is that China's not Walmart. I mean, they make a lot of stuff that goes to Walmart, but they're not Walmart, right? And so you don't walk in with the attitude that I'm going to buy something.

If I don't like it, I get a return and get my money back, right? That's such an American attitude towards everything, right? That I can just buy stuff, and if it doesn't work, I can get a warranty return on it. And that's great that the U.S. has these protections. But China is very much more like a buyer beware kind of situation. Things are really cheap. And the funny thing is, one thing that was really eye-opening is that people are like,

oh my God, things are really cheap in China. It's actually things are really expensive in the United States because the cost of giving you that guarantee of return is like 2x on the product cost. There's a reason why retailers charge 50% more more a markup on

other goods right you know the thing that they bought for five dollars they sell it to you for 10 because i have to deal with those guys coming back being like yeah you know these headphones i didn't like them i took them out i put them in my ear you know they're covered with earwax but you gotta take them back right and then the guy goes like okay i can't sell these i'm throwing them away guess who's paying for everybody right we, right? We all pay for that convenience. Yeah, it's like return insurance. Yeah, kind of, right? But Americans value that guarantee, that promise a lot.

And so a retailer that can guarantee a result is something Americans will pay for. And in China, they're fine. They're like, just give me the whole lot. I'll figure out the ones that are good and they're bad, as long as it's cheap. Because there's money to be made here. I don't care if I have to buy two of them. If I get twice or half the price and 20% of the time, they're they're good actually I'm getting 20% more material than I paid for it otherwise right that's their mindset right and so there's this you know this ends up being a little different

because like the Americans like man the Chinese quality is so bad and then the Chinese like man the Americans are so unreasonable they expect everything to work and giving them everything right I mean we're not you know they work. I'm giving them everything, right? I mean, we're not, you know, they should be happy that I'm giving them everything because they get a chance to, like, get an upside if things went well, right? But instead, like, they just want the only ones that are good, right? It's just like this sort of mindset change, right? It's cultural difference, right? Yeah, earlier I was going to uh why you thought such a marketplace

didn't exist in the united states because it seems like something that could work barring the fact that most of the components aren't manufactured here but and it sounds like this is one big reason is the entire cultural aspect is completely different and it wouldn't work the same extremely different yeah i mean it's like like one thing you'll see in the markets in china is you'll see uh literally like huge you know ziploc type bags packed with like cell phone cameras they're not in anti-stack controlled you know foil pack things like they should be the lenses are probably being scratched and whatever like all these horrible things are happening right but they sell them by the kilogram right and and they're dirt cheap and they're actually recycled right but um but the thing is is the chinese people are like

that's fine i'll i'll build a tester for the cameras and just screen out the ones that are good these are so cheap it's totally worth it to get you know and and why can they build that tester it's not like they have an engineer and staff to do it they like look up where the main the camera is made and they call the factory that made the original camera the first place say hey i hear you make these cameras i would like to buy one of your testers and how much does it cost they're like oh a couple hundred bucks they're like oh okay i'll wear you a couple hundred bucks can you have it here in like a week like sure no problem you get the test of the same freaking tester that they used to make the original cameras to re-qualify the refurbished ones.

How bad can that be, right? But where do I buy the tester for the tester? Tester for the, well, I mean, you're trusting the, you know, at the end of the day. It's not quite that simple. Like I've actually tried to pull this trick a couple of times and sometimes they're cagey about giving the tester and so and so you can come to their factory and see how they test it or you they'll loan you the tester for two days and you

reverse engineer and copy it or whatever it is right but you know the idea is the the key point is that the ecosystem there is so dense that you can do that. Whereas in the United States, if you've got a bag full of cameras, you can't even find the guy who made it. You're just on your own. And so to some extent, in a huge country, which had a huge frontier at the end of the day, and you're on a wagon trail going out to California, being able to know you can buy good grain and good materials

from a quality place actually really matters because you just can't go back to the source and get it. trail going out to California, being able to know you can buy good grain and good materials from a quality place actually really matters because you just can't go back to the source and get it refurbished. You're on the frontier type of thing. Whereas in China, there's just this embarrassing wealth of factories there. You can just go to the source and actually do real recycling. Is engineering prized more highly in China? That's interesting. That's a tricky question

because Americans don't view some activities as engineering that chinese view as engineering and vice versa like guys who set up factory lines are they process engineers are they line managers right and you know in china they view it as is kind of an you know an engineering exercise to optimize and and innovate the process of manufacture in america it's seen as something that you have to manage and it's an inconvenience that should go away and just always work right and so you know america has a very top-down culture around ip they tend to value patents and copyrights and like the original thought the person who first thought of the you

know jotted down in the back of a napkin and got a number assigned to it should be assigned all the royalties and china is a bit more of like feeling that the people who sit there every day and build these products and actually make it 10 times cheaper than the other guy originally envisioned with his idea but you know sure it's an adaptation of an idea but he missed a couple things that were really important that can make it cheaper there's a value in that and and and and they they prize that kind of ability there. And out here, that's kind of seen as needless optimization and boring, not sexy work. Tony Stark is not sitting there trying to cost optimize the cost of an Iron Man suit, right? He's always building new shit, right?

Oh, yeah. The number of people I know who companies when when the first design is done and they're going to go into a cost reduction cycle they're just like oh i'm out of here that's so boring yeah yeah and it's like there's huge value well i mean by definition there's huge reducing cost but it's boring it's a hard work right and it's not it's not like you know and you know this is this is the problem you know you can speak good or ill um about you know different innovation models you need both at the end of the day but to some extent like you know patents these days is almost like you just throw anything at the wall and see what sticks if you don't know if it's worth patenting

or not if you're a big company you just patent it anyways right because you, right? Because you just want to have it in your war chest. It could be a terrible idea. You patent it. And a broken clock's right twice a day, right? Well, and those patents may not get built. They may just be traded for other useless patents. Yeah. Yeah. There's the whole troll ecosystem too that comes don't don't even get me started on that um but but yeah you know we we tend to celebrate like the you know the one percent is a survivor bias right like oh you should do a startup like you know people get rich doing startups look at like you know like zuckerberg and like you know page and and brin and all this you know bill gates all these guys right and you're just like the the number of people you can't even begin to name,

the faceless masses of bones these guys stand on to get to the point where they're at, right? It's like, it's staggering, right? And there's this kind of notion that we just kind of want to keep running for this thing. And it's funny, right? There's some people who really value the money and the fame and the fortune. There's some people who just really take pleasure in a good day's work and a happy family that's well fed and um for whatever reason like i would say actually more the chinese care about you know the more humble lifestyle there there's definitely the flamboyant rich you know guys you see out there right that that make headlines and stuff

but you know they can't fill factories with millions of people building stuff, doing jobs that are difficult and stuff if that wasn't a pervasive cultural ethic out there, for better or for worse. I've heard that labor prices in China are increasing. Yeah, drastically. China are increasing. Drastically. And do you think that means that there will be more U.S. manufacturing or do you think it's just resettling? Hard to say. I mean, already a lot of the low-cost jobs have already left China actually a while ago. So textiles are all in other areas and low value toys are have all moved away um and um you definitely see a more clever redistribution of of effort um you know like

it's interesting like i think manufacturers are very pragmatic about it right to say to say a trend goes one way or the other because of labor costs, you really have to boil it down to, like, what percentage of your bill of materials is labor cost? If labor cost is 1% of your bill of materials and it goes to 2%, you're not going to move, right? And that's kind of the case in electronics, right? Like, the value of the goods is so high that an increase in labor costs,

doubling labor costs, isn't worth the effort of moving out. But for textiles, it's almost all labor, right? And so those guys like dumped China in a heartbeat once the labor started going up. You know, for example, like on the Novena project, I did a hybrid supply chain between China and the United States, right? Half the stuff was built in the United States, half the stuff built in China, and it was all simply based upon what was better for the bottom line at the end of the day.

It wasn't like a nationalist bring manufacturing back to California thing or whatever it was. There's an inherent value of doing stuff in one region or the other, and I just picked the one that was best, given all the costs involved. Okay, I realize that we're approaching to running out of time, and I've got this whole long list of other things I want to talk about. So I should ask you what you want to talk about. The Novena is really cool.

The IP and copyright and the fact that you're hacking the Xbox book is free. That would be neat to talk about. Continuing Chinese economics and business practices. I still think that's really cool. Which direction should we go given our reasonably limited time? Jeez, I don't know. They all sound good. I mean, I guess I feel like the Novena story has been played out a lot.

So I don't think we need to do another segment on Novena. I've said almost everything you'd say about it 10 times over again. People love to hear the story, I guess. The only thing I would ask you about it is if you think about it any differently given the FBI, Apple security things and kind of how having an open thing can protect us a little bit. I definitely, you know, I don't want to sell the false sense of security that openness is the panacea

to protecting people but full disclosure of information and the ability to trade it freely I think is a foundation of you know, sort of a free society and and people be able to make their own decisions and also you know strong crypto which doesn't have back

doors or you haven't created tools to try and like you know circumvent it right is also extremely important for society. And so to the extent at which I feel like Novena empowers people to understand the issues at hand and allows them to understand the technology better, I think it's important. But it's a really difficult problem we have in front of us. The conflict between the government saying, we need to have back doors and we need to keep things secret and people shouldn't know about these things. We had to put back doors and stuff. Cause like you have terrorists, right? I mean, like it's just this whole, you know, we live in this world of fear and they're just using it to

like, you know, rob us of civil liberties. And that's really sad. And people are kind of more or less rolling over and taking it. And, you know, I would like to do something to, you know, make sure that, you know, a generation from now, we still have the freedoms we have today. Cool.

Well, that sounds like a lead-in to IP and copyright, so let's go that direction. Sure. You're hacking the Xbox book, which is, I suppose, about hacking the Xbox. It's free and online by the publisher, which was NoStarch. Yeah, that's right. How do you make money off of that?

Well, so I guess that's an interesting question. This goes way, way, way back. And also, first of all, it was NoStarch's decision to put it online. I wasn't going to undercut them by putting something. Technically, I have somewhat owner the cost of printing books. I'm a pragmatic guy. But if you go back to the origin of it, I wrote the book, and again, it's one of those weird things where I wrote about the Xbox. It's really about reverse engineering. It's like learning reverse engineering with Xbox

as a backdrop for it. So it's an educational book. That's how I like to frame it in my mind. And my original publisher, who commissioned the work, is j wiley dropped me because they were getting sued but because i met all my milestones deadlines they were obligated to pay me my my advance right which they they did and let me keep it and so i took the advance and just printed books saying you know screw that i'll print it you know i'll sell it myself this is before crowdfunding and anything like that existed so i had to like literally like running proscripts with csv files

to print like postage myself in my in my garage right it was like really it's actually a bit of a harrowing experience packing in like 2 000 copies of of a book and and that's part of the reason why like by the way i use crowd supply now for all my stuff is I'm like, Oh my God, these guys will pack books for me. Thank God. Right. I don't have to pack books after this crowd campaign is done. Right. So, um, so I, you know, I, I appreciate, you know, what they do from sweat of the brow. Um, and, uh, and so to some extent, like, you know, the book already got monetized.

I feel like all the money ever was going to make has already been made off that book. And then, and then, and then no starch and Bill Pollack is like, he runs no starch. He is like an amazing guy. He's like, and he's really, I really loved, loved his attitude towards this. He's like, yeah, you know, I, I run no starch. I'm the final say I have no problem with this i'm gonna do it i have to ask you lawyers i don't care right i'm just good i think this book is important when you get out there let's do it i was like wow like this guy has this guy is like this guy's freedom of the press right i mean he's got he's got balls right so so um i was very happy to work with him to bring more copies of the book out there and get me out of the hell of packing and picking books.

Um, and, uh, you know, and, you know, the book's been out there for like 10 years now, so it's not really selling that well. So we're just like, we should just put it out there, let people have it. Right. Information, you know, we, we, you know, there's no you know there's no more there's no more marginal value in selling books and so even though he had you know actually quite a few copies that were still unsold um you know he he decided it had more value being free than being closed and so he made that decision and i think that was great when my o'reilly contract it says uh that at some point they will open source it and I could opt out of that.

And I said, no, no, open source it as soon as people stop buying it and I want it free. And of course, online, it's already free. Not that I really like that, but with NoStarch, and I'm working with them and Bill right now, so I totally get what you're saying and agree. He's been great. Uh, it's, it is a way even online to advertise the paper or copy of the book and to advertise for people who, okay, I read it online. I liked it. These people deserve a little bit of reward here. I'll actually buy that.

And that happens. Yeah. No, I do think there probably is a bit of brand building and just karma points that he's getting by doing that. But generally, I think Bill really does care about he walks the walk around openness and freedom and that sort of thing. That's part of the reason he put it out there when he did, I think.

I am actually working on another book with him, by the way. I don't know how much he wants me to talk about it yet, but he's finally managed to convince me to write a book about sort of actually more of like a compilation of the writings I've done in the past that would get sort of like all the things I've done in the past around hardware and reverse engineering and hacking, that sort of stuff. And that'll come out eventually. Aren't you a little young for a memoir? It's not a memoir.

I don't think it's a memoir. I think it's more of like, you know, It's the first greatest hits record. It's the observation that, like, i've actually written a lot of blog posts in the past that that that are you know you know they stand well alone right and i was like ah you know i don't know whatever and then like they actually like um kind of put together in into like just to see how many pages it'd be it's like hundreds of pages of stuff i had no idea i'd written this much right i was like huh i even

forgot i wrote that oh that that could you could string that together into something that's like coherent and and maybe interesting and so and so you know i decided to work with them on the project. Yeah. It's been fun working with them. And my book is taking apart toys, where it's sort of similar in spirit to hacking the Xbox, where it's reverse engineering and using that to teach engineering concepts.

Hmm. Great. And they've been okay with me putting the book on the blog, even as I write it. They're okay. Oh, that's awesome. So that's been really exciting. Yeah, that's cool.

Yeah, he's super flexible. I mean, he was sort of like, the thought that got through my mind to ask him if he wanted to try to do this crazy translation guide with me, but I just didn't want to like, you know, it would, it would have been, I would have been in his hair so much about like stupid details about like getting business card holders and, and the, you know,

card stock thickness and all this different things that, that I think he just didn't need. And notebook rings. I mean, the, the printers he works with print traditional things, not rings. That's actually very different. book it it's um you know i have this i have this sort of philosophy that you you should go to the factory first before you really decide upon the final form of something and see what the factory can do and so a lot of the features of the book came from touring the factory and seeing what

processes they had they had ring binding they had gilding they had uh you know people doing die cutting and stamping so they could do the tabs and all these sorts of stuff. I knew, you know, I had like this palette of processes I could paint with. And, um, and from there I tried to construct the best possible experience using the in-house capabilities of this printer, um, and create a, a, you know, a book at the end of the day that I could, you know, sell at a reasonable, you know, somewhat reasonable price given the expensive features I put in there. Printers are like, you want to put a four-color spread in the middle of the book? Oh, my God, it's going to drive things through the roof.

Or we want hardcover. Oh, my God, it's going to drive. These little things are already big deals to them. So putting in the business card holders are actually a manual process. Before they do the binding, they have to go one at a time in to leave the maps and the cards.

And then the card holders themselves have to all get heat staked and stamped and all this sort of stuff. It's actually really expensive to do that. It's half the cost of the book. And I think it was just driven a traditional publisher nuts for me to make those requests but because you are your publisher and you're working with the printer you can make those demands yeah then that that goes back to

the question of why did i decide to go the crowd supply route it's like i just you know i guess you could say i'm a control freak i I just wanted to be exactly what I wanted to be at the end of the day. And I could do that if I self-publish. So what did you want to be when you grew up, when you were a kid? That really didn't have the right verb structure, but I hope you understood. Yeah. Well, you know, it's funny. When I was really young, I wanted to drive trains.

I love trains. But when I got a little bit older, the question of what I want to be when I grew up was, it was difficult. Actually, there was a time when I was like, I think it was my freshman year in college, where I had to make the choice of what my major was going to be. And I essentially flipped a coin if it was going to be biology or electronics. I loved both and I excelled at both. And I went for the electronics path. and um you know i guess you know i i had this sense that that one of the greatest tragedies my observations you know about the world is that so many so much conflict happens as a result of people being unable to communicate with each other their true meanings and feelings

on the inside um and i thought technology could help solve that like you know visualization and telecommunication all sorts of stuff so i really you know in my early days i had a strong emphasis on things like computer graphics and and and communication theory and stuff like that thinking that we could build products to help connect people better um which is great top-down thinking but just like i had no clue what i was doing i was gonna like actually build a product that had any impact coming from that angle i mean it turns out that people you know what they want to do they want to take selfies and post them on the internet that's a good form of communication right there

i mean i'm not knocking it people do it all the time and i think people feel more connected as a result of it. I would never have come up with the idea in a million years as a killer app for phones or something like that. All you can do is make technology and hope people find good uses for it. Okay, so now you just had a birthday, which for me is always a little bit of introspection. I hope it was happy. Now what do you want to be when you grow up? I recently ran the numbers because I actually have to buy health insurance for a small group of people. And you get these chart tables that tell you what it's going to cost. And I've been paying for a few years. And I've seen that it's been going up like 10% a year.

And so I just put it in an Excel spreadsheet, like what it's going to cost me to afford health insurance by the time I'm like, I don't know, 70 or 80. And it was like $100,000 a year is what I needed. Like, I can't afford to get old, apparently. Like, I need to die by the age of 70 or else I'm going to be miserable, apparently. So with that looming ahead of me, yeah, I would like to have health insurance. Aside from that, I think it's, I have to say, like, I'm extremely happy with my life. I leave, you know, I have a gilded existence. I get to wake up late. I get to build interesting things that matter to me. I get to deal with, like, good people on a daily basis who are kind to me,

and I can be kind to them. The factors I work with in China feel like extended family to me quite often. So there's a lot of camaraderie there. I think the question now I have is, what can I do to sort of improve society and help things as much as possible right um because i you know i don't i don't have any children i don't plan on having any kids uh so you know i don't i don't really need to leave any legacy for them uh so i might as well just go ahead and, you know, whatever, YOLO,

figure something out and make it happen. So that's something I struggle with constantly is like, what is the thing I should be doing? What is the right thing to do next that will help the most people and not unintentionally hurt people, you know, because I didn't see the unforeseen consequences of it. That's a tough battle with yourself to try to figure that out and to try to find a path. It is. The best thing I can do is iterate. Yeah. And the problem is, like, you know, I just turned 41, and I'm just like, ah.

I look back, and if I look kind of back at the trends, it takes me about four to five years to do a major project from start to finish. And I figure by the age of 50, you know, I'm not going to have the health that I have now. So I maybe have two more chances to do something really big. And so it's really starting to get to the point where I should really stop just farting around and building laptops because I think it'd be fun. Maybe actually doing something that helps people. I don't know. I haven't figured what it is, but I'm working on it. Well, I think you're being too hard on yourself, but I want to look forward to what you're doing. So get to it. And this actually seems like a pretty good place to stop or to restart and to just ask you a whole bunch more questions. But I think we're out of time. Sure.

Do you have any last thoughts you'd like to leave us with oh man i think i put all my last thoughts into your questions um that's yeah i mean that yeah that sorry go ahead that's totally fine this isn't a required question okay yeah yeah the the default platitude i was going to throw was about the cultural differences between working in u.sS. and China, but you guys already covered that. And then you kind of ended on this question of what I want to do when I grow up. Like, I don't know, I want to help people somehow in a way that's meaningful and useful, doesn't accidentally hurt people. That's, I don't know, I don't have anything else. My resume actually has an objective,

which is one of those things that people say you shouldn't put on your resume anymore. It's out of fad or whatever. Oh, really? Oh, Jesus. To make interesting gizmos that make the world a better place. And if I send my resume to places, which I don't do all that often anymore, but when I did, you know, 70% of them would be like, you shouldn't put an objective in why that. And the other 30% would be, yeah, okay, come work here. Because there are people who get it and who understand that making the world a better place is a very reasonable objective for an engineer.

But yet, we have so much power to build this stuff. It's just amazing and awesome. I'm happy to hear it from you because I think you can do some pretty cool stuff. Good. Well, I hope I don't let you down. You should also have some fun, too, because that's where the good stuff actually happens. I have plenty of fun i have you know i it you know i i'm uh like i said i can't complain

on my lifestyle um i i i picked um short-term small happinesses over the long-term bet like i'm not doing the big companies and the long slog and no gold in handcuffs or stock options to earn off or whatever it is. It's very day by day for me. And so you just sort of, you know, when an opportunity comes along and there's like some guy with free beer, you hang out with them and you drink all night and you have a good time. And then next morning you work off the hangover and get back to work. It's great. Can't ask for anything more. My guest has been Andrew Bunny Wong.

His business cards say Ronin, which seems appropriate. His new book is The Essential Guide to Electronics in Shenzhen. You can pre-order at CrowdSupply. There'll be a link in the show notes, of course, and I did buy mine. Thank you, Bunny, for being here. Thank you. Thanks for having me. Thank you also Bunny, for being here. Thank you. Thanks for having me. Thank you also to Christopher for producing and co-hosting.

And of course, thank you for listening. Hit the contact link on Embedded FM if you'd like to say hello. Check out embedded.fm slash blog if you want to know more about some topics. I don't know what they'll be this week, but you can know more about some topics. Or you can email us show at embedded.fm. We'll be here next week. In the meantime, a final thought to leave you with. This one's from Shel Silverstein.

Listen to the mustn'ts, child. Listen to the don'ts. Listen to the shouldn'ts. The impossibles, the won'ts. Listen to the never haves, then listen close to me. Anything can happen, child. Anything can be. Embedded FM is an independently produced radio show that focuses on the many aspects of engineering. It is a production of Logical Elegance, an embedded software consulting company in California. If there are advertisements in the show, we did not put them

there and do not receive any revenue from them. At this time, our sole sponsor remains Logical Elegance.