Shenzhen is increasingly known within tech circles as the must-go location for anyone working on hardware. The one hour Wired documentary about Shenzhen, entitled “Shenzhen: The Silicon Valley of Hardware”, has been view more than 1.5M times on YouTube at the time of this writing. Countless articles, blog posts, videos, etc. have been dedicated to what takes place there. There's now even at least one book, Bunnie's “The Essential Guide to Electronics in Shenzhen”, whose sole purpose is to help electronics enthusiasts and professionals navigate it effectively; think of it as a tourist guide for geeks in the geekiest city of all.
I can't remember for how long I've known about Shenzhen, but it must be a while. Because when I heard that a couple of other conferences goers at Linaro Connect Hong Kong 2013 were going to do a day-trip there guided by Charbax and a Mandarin-speaking Hong Kong local, I immediately jumped on the opportunity. We were told ahead of time that the only criteria was that we had to have a non-US passport as the 5-day temporary entry visa could not be obtained by US citizens at the border – go figure. We took the train to Luohu, crossed over and then took some cabs to Huaqiangbei, where the electronics markets are found, and spent the day there.
That one-day experience was exhilarating. Whatever they say about kids walking into a candy store applied to myself and the group of people I was with. Everywhere we went and looked there were kiosks upon kiosks of everything we could imagine, from finished products to parts, components, accessories, etc. Kind of like a combination of BestBuy and Fry's spanning several city blocks. Some of us picked up some interesting items along the way. Most of us were amused by how some vendors were creating phones that were either clearly knock-offs or branded with names so close to known western brands as to be confusing. I'll always remember seeing people putting the “known brand” stickers on batteries. By far the find that we found most entertaining was an iPhone lookalike that was built on Android. While I didn't buy one myself, I was more than happy to post a video of it to Google+.
For myself, having already been spending a lot of time on Android since a few years before, my visit to Huaqiangbei brought into focus how unstoppable this OS truly was. The number of inexpensive devices shipping with it was astounding. I was fascinated, for example, to find a $45 Android tablet (back then that was fairly impressive). When I declared to customs upon my return that I had $300 worth of tablets (plural), the agent first said: “each?” I said “No, for all of them.” Fearing she might think I'm playing her for dumb, I proceeded to show her the receipts and explain that the amounts were in Renminbi. To which she replied, “yeah, I know RMBs, I used to work in Hong Kong.” Still, it was clear she was as floored as I was by the price. Something about Shenzhen made it possible to produce advanced electronics at unbeatable prices.
I can't claim that my very short initiation to Shenzhen gave me enough to truly appreciate what was going on there, but it did leave a very strong impression. Something was happening there that I hadn't seen anywhere else in my travels, despite clocking over 100K miles some years. Recently, as I was ramping up work on a hardware side project of mine, it became pretty clear that I would eventually need to start spending time in Shenzhen. I wasn't entirely sure how I'd navigate my way around and find what I'm looking for, especially since I know zero Mandarin, but I was pretty determined to figure it out.
My purpose here, therefore, is to share my experiences in planning and undertaking a first solo trip to Shenzhen and the lessons I've learned along the way. To an extent the purpose is selfish. I've been meaning to take the time to sit down and put my thoughts “on paper”. Still, I think some of the things I've discovered along the way may be useful to others who are thinking of making their first trip or others possibly looking to add some new tricks to their existing Shenzhen travel recipe.
Motivation
While I'm most widely known for my books on embedded Linux and embedded Android, and for some of my open-source contributions such as the Linux Trace Toolkit – i.e. mostly software-related work –, my formative academic years contained a substantial amount of hardware and electronics; roughly more than half the curriculum in my computer engineering program in fact. So while I've spent most of my professional years up to now working on the lower-levels of some of the more prominent open source stacks out there, I've always longed for getting back into hardware in some way shape or form. But doing that had always seemed elusive. Despite a number of tries over the years, it remained a bridge too far.
Doing anything at scale starting individually that involved hardware without being part of a project and/or company already active in that field or without significant financing did not seem feasible. I just unearthed a book I bought in the late '90s, for example, that explained how to do printed circuit boards (PCBs) using press-on tape, rub-on patterns, marker pens and etching acid. That, bread-boards, and wire-wrapping were probably the most-widely used techniques of the day. None of which gave you anything you could scale to provide/share/sell to others. Today, you can just upload a Gerber file to one of the online PCB providers and get yourself a multi-layer board within days, be it in the handful of units or enough for a pilot run. Back 15-20 years ago, evaluation boards and dev boards for even mid-range processors were typically in the low-end thousands of dollars. Today every other silicon vendor is falling over the next to get you sub-$100 dev boards. Back not too long ago the best-looking mechanical housings you could get your hands on for custom designs were prefabbed metal or plastic boxes that you could mill or carve to fit your controls and I/O. Anything custom that looked even remotely like a finished product was inaccessible. Today, you can use a cheap 3D printer or even a desktop CNC to create yourself housings of any shape you want using a variety of materials. That still won't get you to mass-produced injection-molded housings, but the iteration loop has shortened quite a bit.
And that last point regarding iteration loops is likely the biggest difference today from a while back. Advances in technology, such as cheap 3D printers and relatively affordable CNC printers, the advent of online on-demand manufacturing services, such as PCB manufacturing, high-end 3D printing, and even online contract manufacturing (CM), the proliferation of open-source stacks and software, such as free embedded OSes and even some free hardware development tools (nascent as those may be), the advent of cheap development boards, such as the Arduino, RaspberryPi and BeagleBone, the “maker” movement, with a critical mass of self-sustaining hardware-related projects and known-how being shared online, at conferences, in magazines and elsewhere, and crowdfunding sites, such as Kickstarter, Indigogo and CrowdSupply, have all contributed to significantly reducing the barrier to entry for a single individual or a small team to come pretty close at creating a final product using almost software-like rapid iteration loops.
Gradually, it seemed the stage was set to allow me to take some of my wacky ideas and bring them to fruition on my own dime and schedule. Still, there remained quite a gap between on one hand the desire to do my own hardware projects and the knowledge that the means seemed available, and, on the other hand, actually pulling it off. Starting a few years ago, I therefore started devoting an increasing amount of serious time to hardware. One of the first things I did was shop around for a 3D printer. I kept looking at Make: magazine's annual 3D printer shootout, but something always felt amiss. Plastic was just not convincing enough for me and I couldn't get myself to ever buy one of those. I eventually settled on a desktop CNC machine. It was a bit above my pain threshold in terms of pricing, but it did what I want: create mechanical prototypes using a variety of real materials, not just plastic. Granted it's got limitations, as CNC machines can range into the hundreds of thousands of dollars, but it's good enough for creating sufficiently-realistic prototypes.
Another thing I did was read up on a variety of topics, from industrial design, to running hardware startups and including more technical topics like hardware design, and electro-magnetic interference. It rapidly became clear that despite the barrier to entry for prototyping having been reduced, the path to creating market-grade products, not just cute embedded nonsense hacks (btw, Jon's got a point), remains fraught with danger. It's not my goal to elaborate on that here, though I might in a subsequent post, but there is an enormous difference between cooking up a project using a standard dev board like an Arduino and self-printing a case for it, and actually charting a path to creating a finished product that can be mass-produced, marketed and supported. In software terms, the difference between using an Arduino and shipping a real product can probably be compared to creating a custom grep-based script for searching versus building a Google-like search engine. Yes, they both “search” documents, and yet they're vastly different.
Obviously one does not simply get into a new field without a specific project in mind. If nothing else, there's no better way of building organic knowledge on a topic than to have some sort of substrate to deposit the successive strata of learnings into useful experience. Within the same time-frame that I started investing more time into hardware, I had an idea that was increasingly nagging me. So I decided to use that idea as the seed of my hardware endeavor. While I'm not ready to publicly share that work just yet and, ultimately, I look forward to announcing at least prototypes, I have to say that deciding on such a project in guiding my research and learning has been very helpful. It's forced me to explore topics that hadn't originally been on my map and make some unexpected discoveries. It also forced me to continuously ask myself whether whatever detail or feature I was thinking of could be first prototyped, then built into a pilot and ultimately mass-produced. Many things you can build in a lab would simply never survive in a real product.
Unlike software where exploring the realm of possibilities and trying each one out is almost always only a click away, exploring the world of what's possible in hardware can only be done for so long in a seated position. Yes, you can find a lot of blogs with pictures and videos on Youtube on any given hardware topic. You can even take the time to explore the entire online catalogue of shops like Sparkun and Adafruit – which I did btw. But that's not enough. There comes a point where you need to touch and try. In the software world, if I want to try a project, I just grab it from github, build it and go from there. It doesn't work? No issues, go back to github, wash, rinse, repeat. For hardware, you actually have to look for parts in catalogues, order them, wait for them to arrive, try them and then decide whether you need to repeat that loop again because what you got doesn't do what you thought it did. The iteration loop is orders of magnitudes slower and that's especially painful when you're in a learning process because it means you're not learning as quickly. Plus, it's not free. You actually have to buy those parts with real money and possibly pay for shipping because it isn't sold by Amazon or the likes.
That's when you realize that having people around you who already have significant experience in hardware is priceless. Their map of what's possible and what's not and how to implement a specific part of a design in hardware is something no amount of self-exploration can replace. For me, being able to reach out to my friend and hardware mentor David Anders (also known as prplague) has been and continues to be invaluable. Dave was often able to point out pitfalls and steer me in the right direction when I was stuck. He was also helpful in administering the occasional slap in the back of the head when I was biting off more than I could chew.
By September of last year it was evident to me that a stop by Shenzhen was warranted, for a number of reasons:
- Some of the parts I was looking for were proving hard to find or evaluate online
- I felt that I could benefit from expanding my hardware map beyond simply browsing online catalogues and guides.
- I also felt that it was worth seeing what was the “state of the art” in terms or products and gizmos in Huaqiangbei (HQB hereon forward).
- Establishing a network of contacts in Shenzhen and understanding the hardware ecosystem there seemed vital for any hardware project meant to scale.
- Despite having helped thousands of engineers develop and deliver embedded products based on Linux and Android, I hadn't ever visited a factory that makes PCBs or PCB assembly.
In short, learning how to integrate Shenzhen's hardware capabilities into my planning seemed essential.
Preparation
While some might be comfortable just showing up with their backpack and exploring a city, I'm personally a bit more OCD'ed and wanted to make sure I was maximizing what I got out of the trip. So, like learning hardware itself, I spent some time researching various aspects of the trip and reaching out to contacts to help plan things. One of the very first things I did was get my hands on Bunnie Huang's “The Essential Guide to Electronics in Shenzhen” (TEGES from here on forward) off of Adafruit's site. I had already read his “Hardware Hacker” title when it came out and had been obliquely following his work ever since quite some time ago I read his xbox hacking post where he explained spending a Friday night with his then girlfriend decapsulating xbox chips. If an adept of such romantic activities as nocturnal chip decapsulation had advice to share on Shenzhen then it was certainly worth taking the time to read. And I haven't been disappointed. Though I have suggestions to add to it, which I'll mention along the way below, I strongly recommend you get your hands on TEGES if you're planning a visit. As a matter of fact, I saw other foreigners carrying it around in HQB while there myself.
Specifically, there were several aspects that I wanted to nail down:
- Requirements for entering and traveling to China – the last time I was there was on a 5-day, single-entry visa and this time I was planning on staying an initial 10 days with possible returns in the future.
- Advice on best routes and travel means to and around Shenzhen
- Recommended tech gear setup for traveling into China – for the security-minded
- Recommendations for network connectivity, SIM cards, etc.
- Initial planning of day-trips to HQB
One of the first people I reached out to was Charbax, with whom I had done my first visit to Shenzhen a few years back, given his extensive travels there. Charbax very generously answered many of my basic questions and was able to point out a few things I hadn't thought of as well. Another person I reached out to was Benjamin Dolgin-Gardner, CEO of Shenzhen-based Hatch Manufacturing. Charbax had introduced me to Ben a few years earlier given that our day-jobs involve helping companies make custom Android devices, with Ben being more focused on the hardware side while I'm more focused on the software side. Ben helped me on a number of different fronts including making introductions to and arranging meetings with key local vendors and hardware startup incubators such as Shenzhen-based Hax. I also reached out to contacts at Seeed Studios for scheduling a meeting while I was there. Overall, I had a handful of meetings scheduled ahead of time prior to departing.
By following the process published by the Chinese government I was able to secure a multiple-entry business visa at the local consulate. Just look for the visas available and requirements published by the Chinese embassy in your country and go from there. I also booked plane travel and hotel accommodation. There's nothing specific to recommend about travel and lodging other than the usual to do your research. Given that next time I'd probably stay longer than 10 days I'd probably try an AirBnB instead of a hotel. Generally, though, I try to go for the option and location that minimizes all non-productive/non-business-related activities (commuting, eating, etc.) For air travel there are two choices. Either land in Hong Kong and transfer to Shenzhen or land directly in Shenzhen. Most people, including TEGES, recommend the former given the number of airlines traveling to and from Hong Kong and the fact that Shenzhen's airport is a good distance from HQB. Though I can't personally comment on Shenzhen's airport because I've never been there, several people, including some of my contacts in Shenzhen and myself, feel that HKG is one of the better airports around the world. I wasn't unhappy in choosing it as my gateway.
The one thing that absorbed more time than I would've liked preparing for was the tech gear and connectivity. I had been reading and hearing all sorts of stories circulating around tech circles regarding how China has a firewall and the rumors of how it's unsafe to bring electronics into China for fear of them being hacked in some way shape or form. Some of that is also touched upon in TEGES. Personally I take the view that in a multi-polar world, it's only normal that every player is going to defend their home turf in whichever way they deem appropriate, regardless of how other parties, visitors or even some citizens may feel about such activities. We can have political debates about what's “right” and what's “wrong”, and we all benefit from asking questions. Still, at the end of the day, my focus is on respecting the interests of people I work with versus the places I visit. Hence, my concern in approaching this wasn't conspiratorial but rather pragmatic. In other words, starting from the understanding that China has interests which are legitimate with regards to itself and understanding that the base of my work is mostly done in the western hemisphere, what is the proper way for me to work while isolating the latter from the former?
In the end, I elected to take the safest route I could chart. I used a burner laptop, a burner phone and a burner email address while on travel.
With regards to the laptop, I bought an inexpensive Chromebook for the purpose. I had been unconvinced of Chromebooks but my friend John Stultz from Linaro had been sporting one for quite a few years and I kept asking him about how he could live just on that for the type of work he did – kernel and Android development and building. He explained his remote work setup and emphasized how the device used signed images from Google to boot along with Google's constant commitment to security. Another recommendation I had seen that also promoted the security aspect of Chromebooks was a post by the Linux Foundation's Konstantin Ryabitsev in which he answers questions he was receiving from people planning to attend LF's then-upcoming Beijing Open Source Summit. Obviously working on a Chromebook requires a connection to Google, which is a problem because it isn't accessible from within China, at least under normal circumstances. I'll cover that shortly.
The one big caveat that I found with Chromebooks that I hadn't planned for in advance is that it does automagic updates if you're on Wifi and there's no way to currently turn that off. Looking around the net, it appears that I wasn't alone to be bitten by that. The apparent short-sightedness of Google engineers in that regard is baffling. I use a hotspot as my main connectivity means when traveling for all my devices. I make sure to turn off updates on any device connected to that hotspot to preserve bandwidth. It's extremely inconvenient that all of a sudden a couple of hundred megabytes were eaten up by an undesired upgrade. One can apparently turn off such automated upgrades on a Chromebook by “rooting” it, but then you loose all the benefits and “comforts” of running an officially-signed image. It sucks either way. Because of that I wonder if next time I wouldn't just travel with a cheap Ubuntu laptop instead.
As a person that does a lot of work under Android's hood I sometimes get asked how much I trust what happens on my phone. My general response, and one that you should take with a grain of salt, has historically been that I'll use my phone for almost anything except banking. The issue for me isn't Android so much as it is the lack of sustained, daily updates such as the kind I can have on my desktop. All I want is something like a “sudo apt update; sudo apt upgrade” for my Android phone. But I'm the paranoid kind, I used to run a crypto startup for a few years, and I'm the kind of person that will usually go as far as to check the detailed certificate chain of trust of a website before entering any money-related information (credit-cards, bank creds, etc.) Your level of paranoia may be different. So this isn't so much as judgment call on Android's security, which by the way has gotten to be truly awesome and is going to get even better with Project Treble, but rather my own inclination to wear tin-foil hats from time to time.
Still, assuming nation-state-type resources, even the most secure device may not be impenetrable. As TEGES points out: “In an ideal world, you'd have an unlocked phone for use only in China, and a phone you use everywhere else.” Hence my decision to use a burner phone. Unfortunately I had just given my older Nexus 5 to my daughter and was left with only one choice apart from my main Android device – and apart from buying a brand new device just for the trip –, a Blackberry Z30 running BB OS10. I assumed it wouldn't be much of an issue since I'd use it mostly for phone-purposes (calls + text), and its built-in email client is good enough. That turned out to be a bad idea.
I found myself having to shop for a phone in HQB to be able to install apps from the Google Play store which I couldn't get on the Blackberry device. The phone I bought there, a Xiaomi Note 4X, ended up being no end of trouble itself. First, you need to know that phones sold in China for the local market don't have Google Apps. It'd be useless since Google isn't accessible. So the shop where I bought this from offered to reflash it to put the “international” version, several other shops also offered that on certain models. Sounded good to me. That itself worked out fine. I was asked to return in 45 minutes while they reflashed it. So I went to grab a bite and came back, picked it up and was on my way.
Soon after configuring the device with my accounts and everything, however, I noticed it would spontaneously reboot for no reason. Trying to fix that through updates and such only led to burned bandwidth, plain heartburn, and time wasted. I ended up having to endure the device for the rest of the trip with its spontaneous reboots, and concluded after some investigations upon my return that it's a hardware issue. If you're wondering why I didn't return it, first take into account that it had a custom image now and, second, that I had to make a choice between spending time getting emotionally involved in arguing the case for a return with folks whose primary language wasn't English and just living with an annoying device. Given the amount of time I had already wasted with this issue, I decided to cut my losses and keep the broken device.
In short, I would not fly out without a properly-functioning Android device as a burner next time. I have zero time to waste trying to fix devices while on-site in Shenzhen. Note that I continued to rely on the BB Z30 for all “critical” communication while the Note 4x was a wifi-only device.
Another thing I pondered was whether it was safe to travel with my SIM card as-is from my ordinary phone or not. A quick Google seemed to show that there were proof-of-concept hacks of SIM card tampering. So I elected to fly out with my existing SIM card, but I had my phone company transfer my number over to a new SIM card when I returned instead of reusing the old one on my regular Android phone. As I said, you may not share my level of obsession with regards to security. Before leaving, I also took a roaming package with voice/text/data as a “just in case” fallback.
One thing that I found difficult but really didn't see any way around was that I had to leave all means of access to my regular email accounts out of reach. In short, I created a junk gmail address, copied some of my contacts and alerted key people of where I was going and that I'd be running from a non-regular address. I then configured my main email accounts to forward a copy of inbound email to the junk address. That was a tradeoff. I could've risked getting “sensitive” info that I would've preferred not being forwarded during that 10 day period. But it was a risk that was manageable, whereas the alternative (i.e. compromised credentials giving access to my full email history) was not an acceptable risk. I continued CC'ing or BCC'ing my regular accounts on outbound emails from the burner accounts so that I'd have access to the discussions from the latter when I'd return back home. Mostly this bit worked out fine once it was set up. The burner gmail account turned out to be quite useful for keeping in touch over Hangout with people I closely work with and backing up pictures from the garbage phone I got in HQB.
Finally came the question of accessing regular western-hemisphere services such as Google, etc. while in Shenzhen. After some research, it appeared that using a VPN was probably the easiest way through and I made sure to create myself an account before flying out; with a full understanding that, per TEGES, there's a chance the Chinese government may clamp down on VPNs at whim. The VPN is one precaution that turned out to be useless.
When I landed in Hong Kong I stopped by the foreign exchange counter to get some local currency to pay for the cab to the border crossing . The lady at the counter asked if I wanted a data SIM card as well. I said I wasn't staying in Hong Kong but was rather transferring to Shenzhen. She said that that wasn't a problem as the card worked both in Hong Kong and Shenzhen, and that I wouldn't need a VPN. That turned out to be one of the best purchases I made, with one caveat that I'll explain later. For 108HKD (roughly 15 USD) I got 1.5GB of data for a maximum of 10 days. That should've been sufficient had I not had upgrade issues with the Xiaomi Note 4x and the Chromebook. I was able to recharge it through China Mobile's online site during the week though. The only trouble was that the online deal wasn't as good as the initial price of the card. In retrospect, I should've bought two of these.
Initially when I tried using this SIM card in my hotspot in Shenzhen it didn't work as planned. (In case you're wondering, I had actually entertained also using a burner hotspot but I decided against that as my hotspot has no passive data on it and serves as a gateway for SSL traffic anyway.) For some reason, the signal was either very weak or it just outright dropped in some cases. I figured it might have something to do with the bands supported by the device so I went shopping for a local hotspot in HQB. I tried it in a couple of units from different shops but it didn't work. I was beginning to wonder if I hadn't bought a dud. Then one shop-keeper tried it in one of the Huawei hotspots, configured it using the Chinese interface and it worked like a charm. I was relieved but confused. My hotspot is a Huawei as well and I wasn't sure what was different, except maybe bands. After closer inspection, though, it turned out that the difference in configuration was that my seller had turned on roaming. That was the key. In short, China Mobile in Hong Kong, where I bought the card, appeared as the “CMHK” network whereas the local China Mobile in Shenzhen appeared in Chinese in the list of networks. Had I figured that I needed to enable roaming and switch to the proper network, I would've likely avoided the extra hotspot. Sometimes you can't learn without wasting time and money apparently.
Getting there
Landing in Hong Kong, passing passport control, picking up bags and heading for the exit is pretty efficient. Based on TEGES I had decided to cross at the Futian border crossing. I was a bit worried about the schedule as my plane landed at 8PM and TEGES said Futian closed at 10:30PM. That ended up being a non-issue given the efficiency at Hong Kong int'l. As I exited the terminal I followed signs for taxis and was directed to one of the colored taxis – I can't recall the color. The cab ride itself took about 35 minutes and cost 357 HKD (about 45 USD). The time was within what TEGES provides (30-40 min) though the fare was a bit higher than the 310-320 HKD listed, but that's fine. The driver managed in English. We were able to have an ok conversation even though his fluency was limited. Further trips in Hong Kong later in the following week were similar, the drivers could manage English.
When I got to the Futian border crossing, I collected my bags and went up the stairs to take the foot bridge that spans the Sham Chun River into Shenzhen. Per TEGES, this crossing is mostly frequented by locals. So at first I felt a bit uneasy as I wasn't sure I made the right choice to cross where fewer foreigners cross – I was in fact the only foreigner on the premises that I saw during my passage through the crossing. It dawned on me that I might be in a situation where there's a language barrier between me and the customs agent processing my passport. As I got closer to the end of the bridge one of the officers spotted me and immediately waived me to the left. Clearly that was where the foreigner queue was. It ended up in a very short “foreigner” queue. I started waiting but then realized that I forgot to fill out the entry/exit card. So I went to side where they had stand-up tables set up with the forms, filled it up and went back in the queue.
Finally it was my turn to walk up to the passport control booth. I handed my passport and the form to the agent and said hi. She looked at it intently, flipped pages around, and looked some more. She was silent long enough that I started wondering if something was amiss. Then she looked at me and asked in a most impeccable French: “C'est votre premier voyage en Chine?” (It's your first trip to China?) I was like deer in the headlight, completely floored. I live in Québec, Canada and my passport clearly indicates where it was issued. In the realm of expectations, though, it never crossed my mind that a border agent in China at a crossing mainly frequented by locals would speak to me in French. “Non, j'ai déjà traversé de Hong Kong il y a quelques années à Luohu, mais c'était sur un autre passeport” (No, I already crossed over from Hong Kong a few years ago at Luohu, but it was on another passport). I couldn't recall having been this proud of speaking French, essentially my mother tongue, ever before.
After an “au revoir”, I continued onto to baggage screening – my bags didn't seem to interest anyone FWIW. Upon exiting customs, I exchanged some money and proceeded to where the taxis are parked. This was a bit more involved than I expected and required crossing the street with my bags and such. Still, it wasn't that complicated. I had been anticipating based on TEGES that cab drivers wouldn't know much English on the Shenzhen side. And that was true. In contrast to Hong Kong, the vast majority of Shenzhen drivers generally lacked any knowledge of even the most basic English. So to get to my hotel I just pulled up the hotel's address from their site in Chinese and showed it to the driver. That recipe, showing addresses in Chinese to drivers, mostly worked during my trip. In one case I brought a card with a tiny address and the driver had a hard time reading it. I was immediately reminded of the advice in TEGES that many drivers have bad eyesight. I eventually made it to where I needed to go, but there's nothing better to remind you of something important than feeling the sting when you forget it.
First few days
After a good night's sleep, I was ready to explore HQB. I had deliberately chosen a hotel with an easy access to the metro line that wasn't too far from HQB, and this proved quite useful. I had also spent quite some time studying TEGES' content for tricks and directions in and around HQB. The maps section seemed particularly useful and turned out to be quite so. I was also very happy to have the vast collection of point-to-translate pages for all sorts of things. That turned out to be less useful than I expected, at least for what I was trying to accomplish. I'll explain why later. Finally, I was initially worried about the limited number of plastic sample pages with maps wouldn't suffice for my needs. I ended up not using them at all, and found a different way of organizing my samples and marking locations that I found much more useful. In the first few days I carried TEGES everywhere. I felt much safer having it in my backpack when walking around. Later, though, I ended up taking pictures of the maps section pages on my phone and leaving the hardcopy at the hotel. Another map I had spent quite some time studying was Seeed's “Shenzhen Map for Makers”. I actually compared those two maps at length to identify differences and make sure I had maximum coverage.
On the first day I had two goals. One was to beat jetlag and stay awake all day. That turned out to be not too bad. The other goal was to explore the parts of the map that seemed most likely to have end products targeted at the same segment I was aiming for. The idea was to get a first feel of what's trending in Shenzhen and what were the latest designs in that space. The map didn't disappoint and I was able to find a large number of kiosks selling some of the items I was interested in. Obviously many kiosks also had items that I had seen on Amazon or elsewhere as well. I was mostly focusing on things I hadn't seen before. After a few hours of walking floors upon floors of shops, I was ready to start focusing on other aspects of my research: hard to source and/or evaluate components, tools and expanding my knowledge of what was available in the hardware space. Hint: TEGES' advice about having comfortable shoes and comfortable clothing is completely warranted.
Finding tools was relatively easy. TEGES indicates the building and floor to go to, and you'll find most anything you can think of from rework stations, to pick-and-place machines, and including things like oscilloscopes, stereo microscopes, multimeters, screwdrivers, etc. In the process I saw some tools which I couldn't immediately figure out the purpose for, but later found out their uses on some other visits. Satisfied with a first glance at the tools, I set out to look for one specific component I was having a hard time with. That proved a lot more difficult than anticipated. Actually I should qualify that. It was trivial to find tons of it, just not something that matched exactly what I needed. I used TEGES to identify one part of the market that seemed most likely to have what I was looking for, but again, I could find lots of it, just not what I needed.
A local lady seeing me walking through a floor seemingly lost asked me in English if she could help. I was only too happy to oblige. She said that I'd be far likelier to find what I was looking for in another part of HQB. She proceeded on to pull out a map application on her phone and show me where I should head. She also asked if I had WeChat so that she could continue helping me after I left in case I couldn't find my way. That was one of the first encounters that made me regret not having a properly-working Android phone. I had to admit shamefully that my phone setup wasn't optimal. She told me that I shouldn't hesitate to ask any of the shopkeepers for assistance, they'd be happy to direct me if they knew where I could find what was looking for. That was rather comforting and turned out to be relatively true. I've found that most people are happy to help once you break the ice and they realize that you're genuinely seeking a purchase or aren't afraid to deal with the language barrier.
In the first few days, however, I must admit that I was a bit wary of approaching some of the kiosks and make enquiries regarding the merchandise. The language barrier was certainly a big part of that. Another concern was my lack of understanding as to the nature of the businesses they run. Some clearly had more things on display than they could possibly stock in those tiny two-person kiosks. Yet another thing is that you walk around and there are tons of kiosks with all sort of components, some which I'm more familiar than others. Those that were most unfamiliar were sometimes the most intriguing. And yet, I just didn't see myself walking up to some of those shopkeepers and “wasting their time” with newbie questions in a foreign language. I couldn't see how TEGES would be helping me in that regard at all, and I don't think that that was ever its purpose. I eventually figured out a way to solve this, but at first I found myself just walking around kiosks not fully able to get myself to get anything done. Plus, initially, until I solved my hotspot problem, my connectivity was very bad, so I was having a hard time looking up more information. In short, the first few days were a bit frustrating.
One of the reps at one of the stores where I stopped couldn't explain something using her basic English so she just pulled out a translation app and spoke into her phone in Mandarin and had it repeat the content in English. I found myself a bit ridiculous not having thought of using something like that. Eventually, once I got a network connection, I started resorting to using Google Translate. I would type what I wanted in English, get it translated and show the translation to the person I was interacting with. This was ok for basic interactions, but it had its limitations. Still, I was able to make good progress with that. It felt far more intuitive than having to search through TEGES while the person waited on me. Again, they're running a business and I didn't want to feel like the annoying tourist. For the technical translation, it was often just easier to point at items or parts of items than trying to find the proper language in TEGES then use Translate or something else to bridge the gap. I got even better later as I'll explain.
On the 2nd day I met up with Ben and we went to Maker Faire Shenzhen, which happened to be running while I was there. We toured a bit and saw the usual maker stuff. It was interesting to see that the maker ecosystem there was similar to maker ecosystems elsewhere. It did however feel smaller than the NYC one I attended in 2015. After lunch with Ben, I returned for more HQB exploration. I spent more time looking around for my elusive component, with little success I must add. When I returned to my hotel room at the end of the 2nd day I felt a bit underwhelmed. I had come halfway around the world with as one of my main purposes finding samples for a specific part and I couldn't find a single match for what I was looking for.
Booking meetings
By the beginning of the 3rd day I decided to switch tactics. Over lunch the previous day when I had asked Ben how he'd shop around for what I was looking for he said that he'd go on Alibaba, find some manufacturers that produced the items I was looking for and book meetings with them. That is one piece of advice I would absolutely apply in preparation for a next trip, and one that I can't recall having seen in TEGES. Outside of HQB, Shenzhen is a town where you can find manufacturers for most any electronic component you can think of, and many not only maintain an independent online site and/or pages on Alibaba, but they'll often have a booth in HQB showing off samples. That is something I wish I would've understood beforehand because it would've made the trip even more productive. It somewhat felt like a long shot to start spending time in my hotel room finding potential manufacturers, initiating contact, and book meetings with only a few business days left in my trip.
I did however have one ace up my sleeve. This wasn't the first time I had shopped around for some of the things I had in mind. I regularly present at Embedded World in Nuremberg every year and it happens to be one of biggest (if not the biggest) embedded shows on the planet. Several months before my trip to Shenzhen, I had already harvested several business cards from reps from potential vendors that happened to be based in Shenzhen. So on Sunday morning, I sent a message to my wife and asked her to find my stash of Embedded World 2017 business cards and send me some pictures. I then emailed a couple of contacts hoping they'd respond quickly enough to be able to schedule some meetings. This turned out to be quite effective. I had a couple of meetings scheduled with some manufacturers within the remaining week. They sent a car to pick me up at the hotel, I spent an hour or so at each site, and they drove me back to the hotel. And I got the information I was looking for and prices for exactly what I'm looking for. In each case they had very competent, English-speaking staff at hand and they knew exactly what I was talking about. I'd do a lot more of this on a future trip instead of just walking around HQB.
If you're thinking of going to Shenzhen to shop for a project and you have specific components (or process/service for that matter) which are more critical than others, I strongly suggest you spend some time finding relevant companies several weeks ahead of time and arrange meetings while you're on site. It'll be far more effective that just walking around HQB in the hopes that you'll find what you're looking for. It's not entirely a replacement for going around HQB, but I wouldn't do without it in the future.
One meeting that was planned ahead of time through Ben that almost fell through because I couldn't find how to get to the location was a visit to Hax's offices in HQB, despite all my Googling. I tried asking one of the guards in a building near where the navigation app took me but despite calling a colleague on his radio he couldn't help me find it. By that time I had been walking around HQB for long enough, this was 7th or 8th day, to know the most important landmarks. Nothing seemed right about the addresses I was finding. I ended up having to wait for Ben, who happens to be one of the mentors listed on their site, to walk me up to their offices. In short, if you ever have to go to Hax's offices, don't assume the online information will be sufficient. Ask for guidance ahead of time. Despite this little delay, the visit was great. The place reminded me of Google's ATAP offices which I visited on a few occasions as part of my involvement in Project Ara with all sorts of cool and creative things happening all around.
The visit to Seeed Studio's factory towards the end of my trip was very interesting as well. They showed me the line they use for PCB assembly, from the solder paste machine to the test jigs along with the infrastructure they have in place for real-time tracking of orders. Great setup and definitely a place I'd be comfortable doing business with. Plus, my contact at Seeed was very helpful in answering several questions I had about Shenzhen and HBQ in the lead up to our meeting. Not only do they have a great setup, but they're great to work with.
Navigating Huaqianbei
By the 3rd day I felt more comfortable approaching some types of kiosks and trying to buy some of the things I needed or wanted samples of. I stopped by one kiosk selling standoffs and screws and initially just wanted to buy some dozens. But the shopkeeper was selling them by the hundreds and was wondering why I just wasn't buying them by the 2,000-bag full. That would've been a bit much. But I did end up getting about 3,000 M3 standoffs and screws for an unbeatable price in comparison to what I could find online. The only trouble with that purchase was the weight. It was so heavy that I ended up going back to the hotel to drop the package off. Still, once the shopkeeper realized that I wasn't just casually asking for information or wasting her time, she insisted I take her chair to sit down as I selected what I needed and started making jokes which her assistant who knew some English tried to translate.
It might seem from my explanations above that I was being shy or too cautious in my interactions. But I spent part of my life living across cultural boundaries, and continue to do so in some circumstances, and I therefore tend to be very sensitive to cultural deltas. I could see that there were a lot of locals stopping by and being very efficient in getting things done at some of those kiosks. From the outside looking in it may seem like this place is a maker's paradise with every ware you can think of available for you to purchase, but those shops weren't built with makers or foreign hardware officiandos in mind nor as their main business. Otherwise they would've all spoken English. The place is a real hustle and bustle. As we were walking around HBQ at some point, Ben quoted a friend of his, Sky Gidge, as saying that if HQB had a soundtrack, it would be the sound of tape wrapping boxes. The volume of sales going through the place is fairly important. So I felt it incumbent upon me to be as effective as I could in my interactions out of respect for the people who work there.
On some occasions, the shopkeepers seemed more open than others to my asking exploratory questions. One shop I stopped by on the same floor where TEGES mentions that there are electronics tools was selling all manors of tape. Some of these tapes I had seen in some blogs and/or in some of the various devices I had to service or disassemble but for which I didn't know the purpose. Here they were all stacked up for me to buy in all sorts of widths and sizes. I was able to ask about all the tapes I saw. The guy at the counter would happily use his app to translate the name/purpose of the tape I was pointing at and show it to me. I essentially got a free class and the opportunity to buy myself a lifetime supply of several tape types such as kapton, copper and conductive fabric tape.
Much like other shopkeepers, the guy at the tape counter asked if I had WeChat. At the time when I first passed by his counter I still didn't have a functional device. By the 4th day, though, I had fixed this problem and I went back to several shops to connect with them via WeChat. TEGES mentions that WeChat is “handy”. From my point of view, that doesn't sufficiently highlight how crucial WeChat is. For there is one functionality not mentioned in TEGES that makes it a killer app for shopping in HQB: it's got live translation between Chinese and English. Now, I didn't figure this one on my own. At one counter where I stopped I started by asking if they had WeChat. The guy at the counter popped his phone and showed me the QR code for me to scan and connect with him, which I did. Then, as I had been doing before, I went to Google Translate to write my question and show him. Seeing what I was doing he said: “no, no, no, WeChat, WeChat”. I didn't get what he was saying at first. But he quickly showed me that he could type in Chinese on his phone, I would get the text in Chinese, long-press on it and get a menu that allowed me to translate it in English. And when I sent a message in English, he'd be able to translate it to Chinese. That was a revelation. From that point onward I was able to have very effective conversations with most shopkeepers when the discussion warranted going further than a couple of simple questions using Google Translate.
Thereafter WeChat became central to most everything I did in Shenzhen, including keeping in touch with the companies I met. I returned to a shop where I had bought a few neodymium magnets a few days before for example. The first time around the guy at the counter didn't know any English. When I showed up and tried to talk to him he called what seemed to be his wife on his phone over a video call and just let me speak to her. She then explained to him what I was asking for. When I returned there, she was there in person. I asked if she had WeChat and we were able to have a constructive conversation from there on. When I asked if I could order from them for delivery back home, she asked me how do you ship magnets. That clued me in to something I hadn't realized before: powerful magnets can't just be shipped like other components. I knew lipo batteries required special packaging and carrier notification to transit properly, but I hadn't realized magnets were an issue as well. After some investigation I found that the marginal quantities I bought were a non-issue for my specific trip, which was my primary concern. That, though, didn't solve my problem if I wanted to use that shop and contact for ordering larger quantities later. I told her that I needed to investigate that upon my return and I'd let her known.
One thing I found problematic with WeChat is that unlike Hangout, for example, it doesn't store any of the conversations on the backend. There's apparently a “we're not spying on you” angle to this with regards to Tencent providing this service to users. That also means that conversations that you've had on one device will be unavailable on a new device unless you explicitly copy them from one device to the next. I find that to be somewhat annoying. Also, files shared in the past don't necessarily remain available, so make sure you download local copies if something is shared with you through WeChat. WeChat can also be used for payment. I had looked at that and AliPay before leaving but it seemed to require a Chinese bank account issued from a China-based branch. From what I was reading on the net, it's not too hard to set that up for just depositing locally and then using for WeChat/AliPay, but I didn't bother doing that this time around. Maybe if I was staying longer next time I would.
Generally I've found prices to be a good discount off of even the prices of Chinese sellers that sell through eBay. In fact, I bought some items just out of curiosity without any immediate use for them just because I was able to get them right there and then at a fire-and-forget price.
Keeping Track
As I kept buying stuff, there was the question of how do I organize it all in a way that allowed me to figure out which invoice was for what, where I bought it from, how to return there and how to contact the seller for more later on. This is the part where I thought the plastic sleeves and maps in TEGES would come in handy. But at least for me, that didn't work out at all. What I had been doing was taking the business cards from the kiosks, whether I bought something or not, and I'd find a spot on them where I'd write 2 things: the kiosks' number within the building (they all have one) and the number and letter corresponding to where I got this from based on the maps in TEGES. Sometimes the kiosk number was already there, but I'd write it down anyway by hand so that it was more obvious to me. If I had bought things there, I'd keep the card in the same bag with the things I bought there along with the receipt. When I eventually got WeChat working, I added another item of information on those cards: the seller's WeChat ID – which you can retrieve in the app once you're connected.
Taking samples from the bags and putting them in the plastic sleeves along with the cards didn't seem right, because I'd then loose track of the match between the stash I had and the book itself. To avoid all this confusion of where I got it from versus what it was versus what it looked like when I bought it, I decided to just line everything up on my desk in the hotel room and take pictures. For each purchase, I'd lay out on the desk the merchandise, the invoice, the business card and whatever info I hadn't put elsewhere. Here's an example for some tiny motors I found:
At the end of the trip I had a Google album with the picture of every purchase I made that allows me to find again the sellers that I had found before. I find this to be more useful as I can access it from anywhere and I don't have to have my physical TEGES copy around to find it again. Nor do I need to worry about the number of sleeves left that I can use. I'd also write an English description behind every invoice of what this covered so that I could do the reverse lookup if I had an invoice in hand later and was wondering that this was, since most of the descriptions on those invoices are mostly written in Chinese.
Bringing “stuff” back
As I mentioned earlier regarding the neodymium magnets, not all things travel as easily. One thing I had to constantly kept track of in my head is the amount of luggage space and allowance left for me to buy more stuff. I initially thought that I'd just ship some of the things back to myself. I went to explore the location identified as “shipping alley” in TEGES but it seemed I would've needed to invest some time just figuring out this aspect of HQB whereas I eventually told myself I still had enough space in my bags.
One of the things I thought about shipping out regardless instead of travelling with them was lipo batteries. But when I enquired about rates at the DHL counter I was flabbergasted. It turns out that it's extremely expensive to ship those, which I vaguely then recalled having read something about in Bunnie's “Hardware Hacker” book. After much research on the net regarding rules and regulations, it turned out the sample quantity I had bought until then, especially since they were tiny, were a non-issue so long as they were in the cabin with me – they couldn't be checked in. That though put a stop to further lipo battery shopping. Still, this is one thing I don't know how to solve for now if I wanted to order large quantities from the vendors I identified in HQB.
I was also in the market for larger items such as a stereoscopic microscope. That sort of item just wouldn't have fit in my existing bags. I could've always purchased another bag or bought a box to stuff things and count it as another bag, but I didn't see how I'd manage that on the transfer back to Hong Kong airport. I could routinely see people walking around with bags around HQB, some of which I presumed would've just been merchandise meant to travel. Staircases around HQB often include ramps for what could be bags or wheeled trolleys.
Shipping things back is certainly something one thing I wish I could prepare more fully for the next time around, especially if I planned bringing back large quantities of any specific item. Ideally, I'd use some form of cheap delayed-delivery method. This is one thing TBD.
In addition to taking pictures of my purchases as I mentioned earlier, I also put all the invoices in a nice spreadsheet for customs purposes as I had to declare everything as commercial merchandise upon returning to Canada. That's one thing you probably also want to keep in mind. If you bring in any substantial number of parts of anything and/or if they look like things a company could use, it's entirely possible that the customs officer inspecting your bags on return might consider this “commercial merchandise”. Depending on the country you're returning to or even transiting through, such as the US in my case for that trip, they may have some different requirements and varying penalties for not declaring what they may deem as commercial merchandise. Personally I prefer playing it safe and declare anything that could potentially be seen as commercial merchandise as actually being commercial merchandise. If the amounts involved aren't big, they usually don't care. But at least they can't come back saying I didn't declare it.
Closing thoughts
Somewhere around the end of the 3rd day I was roaming around the SEG building and turning around a corner I thought I'd seen someone that looked like Bunnie. As I got closer I realized that it was indeed him. He happened to be there with Gavin Zhao, to whom TEGES is dedicated to, at a kiosk selling copies of his book. I introduced myself and mentioned that I had been using TEGES for finding my way around HQB. We had never met before but he was as friendly as in some of the videos of him that are around – some people can be different on and off camera. I asked about some recommendations regarding some of the things I was struggling with and he generously made a few suggestions. Obviously I did the total fanboy routine and asked for an autograph. I can now claim that I've got the “run into Bunnie at the SEG building in HQB and get him to sign your copy of his book” achievement unlocked ;)
I hadn't thought of it at the time when I saw Bunnie, but having worked with TEGES throughout those ten days I've come to the conclusion that that book would make a fantastic app backed by a corresponding website. There's no reason the map section of this book couldn't be provided in an interactive format with the ability to add user-generated content. This would open the door for having the app also double as an online community of non-Mandarin speakers roaming around HQB and Shenzhen in general. Anyone looking for the tiny motors I found, for instance, could just search for tiny motors and be shown a number of locations on the map where they were spotted along possibly with user pictures and information about the actual use of those parts and contact info about the seller, etc. The same goes for the point-to-translate sections of the book. As an app, in fact, this would probably be even more effective than having to sort through several pages of a section to find the one relevant to one part of the conversation. I'd think that the content of TEGES, especially since it's CC-BY-NC-SA, would make a fantastic starting point for such an app/website.
Despite the several issues I ran into, including the tech issues I encountered because of my pig-headed insistence on preserving a high level of security and some poor choices I made, I consider my ten day stay in Shenzhen a resounding success. I feel much more confident moving my project along and more solid in my understanding of hardware after the experience. It highlighted several issues and opened the door to several new possibilities. I don't know of any other place in the world that I've traveled to that could offer this much for a hardware project. There are certainly much wider ramifications to such a realization than my personal interests and the hardware segment of the tech world, but that's a separate topic.
Much of the preparation I did before the trip paid off. Though, as I mentioned earlier, I would also do a few things differently:
- Research vendors working in my areas of interest on Alibaba and the net ahead of the trip and book meetings in advance.
- Hit the ground in HQB with a fully-functional Android device running WeChat.
- Stay for at least 2 to 3 weeks.
The first time I was in Shenzhen the group I was with was accompanied by someone who spoke Mandarin. While there this November I did see a handful of foreigners walking with what seemed to either be translators or local contacts. Before this trip, I wasn't sure whether I'd be able to make it solo to do something as specific as discussing and shopping for electronics without knowing the local language. With the proper preparation and tools, that turned out not to be a show-stopper. I wouldn't hesitate doing it again in fact.
Some things I still haven't figured out:
- Coming up with a shipping strategy for getting things from Shenzhen to back home.
- Managing the lack of scalability of not having access to my usual laptop and email setup while in Shenzhen. I mean, it's one thing not having my usual work setup for 10 days, it's an entirely different one not having access to it for weeks on end.
I'd like to close by thanking everyone that has helped me both before and in preparation or during this trip, including my friends David Anders, Charbax and Benjamin Dolgin-Gardner. A big thanks to Bunnie for taking the time to write down two books that I've found to be tremendously useful and insightful. This trip was of course but one step in a much greater adventure and I've been very fortunate the find the right people and resources to help me along the way. Stay tuned for more from where this came from.