bunnie Huang

Not until software lottery tickets quit returning 10x+.

Who, in their right mind, would invest in hardware? NRE kills--especially in mechanical engineering which actually seems to be regressing. Machining companies now charge a fortune for things which my grandfather used to do by hand in his garage in about an hour. Not to mention how long it takes to get an injection mold (14 weeks is not uncommon).

For the price of a couple injection molds, I can flog a gaggle of stupid 20-somethings living in squalor for about a year. No contest as to which has a better probability of cashing out.

In addition, who is going to buy out a hardware startup? Hardware really doesn't fit the Yahooglezoft strategy, so now your exits are very limited. Even worse, hardware acquirers tend to be rational about things like costs and profit.

Finally, everybody who does hardware tries to create the cloud back end and then get anybody else to do the hardware while they extract the rent.

So, longer timelines to cash out with higher risk. Yeah, don't think so.

Now, the upside is that if you do manage to get a product out, you have an actual barrier to entry. 2 guys and a dog in the Ukraine can't just clone you.

While I love the manufacturing incubators, they don't solve the fundamental problem of not knowing how to run machines. The existence of a CNC machine or a TIG welder doesn't magically make you a machinist or a welder. Being able to run a CNC machine doesn't mean you know how to…

Bunnie Huang (of MIT fame, original cracker of Xbox, proponent of open hardware [see: Chumby, Novena, etc]) has a really interesting talk given at the Media Labs in '15 at his alma mater[1]. It's about 1:15 but fully worth the watch including the QA, if you have any interest in 'open hardware'. That Rockchip run's on a fairly complicated 4core ARM. So which while the instruction set may be open, so is Intels. They'll happily ship to you their 3 volume multi-thousand page ISA. (Open is when you get to see any of final Altium/Cadence files that were used for the tape-out to make production wafers). At best you might get a few block diagrams. Good luck getting anything more than that. The closest you'll get to something open might be collaborative open standards a la the OpenPOWER (still, not that open) or RISC-V (which is probably still fab'ing at what, 65nm? 45?)

Anyways, that Rockchip is far from open. watch the talk to see his rationale behind choosing Freescale as his microprocessor of choice. He remarks on how $2.25 SoC picked up on the streets of Shenzhen have the full capabilities to run on GSM, which is really pretty remarkable. Obviously they're stealing IP and probably using grey-market tech/seconds that failed QA, but when he talks about the innovation _within_ that grey-market its fascinating. Even with his PhD in EE from MIT, experience in taking consumer products to market multiple times, fluency in Mandarin to aide in his ability to navigate the markets of…

There are a bunch of interesting accounts which basically boil down to the following: you can do in Shenzhen in a few days that which would take weeks to months in the US or EU (well, most of western civilization). Take "Ten Days in Shenzhen" at https://www.karimyaghmour.com/blog/2018/01/ten-days-in-shenzhen.html or Bunnie Huang's blog at https://www.bunniestudios.com/ . It stems from the fact that everything is local. You don't have to wait for product to get shipped across the country for each individual step in manufacturing when you can just walk / taxi / bus it between the manufacturers in a day or two. Iterating is fast.

TSMC has a similar work ethic. They have process engineers running experiments 24/7 that each build on the results of the previous shift. When's the last time Intel could hire folks with that kind of dedication in Oregon?

Netflix has a documentary called The Factory which touches on the kind of cultural differences between workers in the US vs China that is rather enlightening.

A thoughtful tour of a Lego minifig as sliced by a CT scanner. This is kind of the reverse of 3D printing - rather than build something layer by layer, the assembly is scanned and visualized in slices, allowing a peek into the way parts mate. Differences in density can be automatically color coded - in this case the dye of the figurine provides a convenient separation between differently-colored parts.

I never knew that the hands of minifigs were ribbed to create a rotating press fit!

This reminds me of the fun I have reading [name that ware](https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?cat=54) by Bunny Huang. There's a sense of discovery and delight in analyzing the choices made by designers of physical things.

Does anyone know the site library used to pull off this scroll-animation? It works excellently on mobile and I recall it being used heavily on Apple.com to showcase product cut-aways.

As someone who attended a private engineering school in Boston (although not MIT) I see a move from scheme to python as regressive in almost every way.

Scheme levels the playing field among incoming students, both those who've barely programmed and who've been programming since they were 14. It also provides a special kind of mind bender that challenged me in ways I still use today. Granted I work at a company that employs multiple functional programming languages.

Good engineers in time don't use python because they realize it attracts tech debt and cruft. I love python, and still use it for quick hacks and machine learning things. However, I'll defer to the one and only Bunnie Huang regarding python v other languages [0]"fwiw, Python is a great glue, but a terrible structural material. Do not build skyscrapers out of Python"

[0] https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=5863

I'm a big fan of Adafruit, which is a great place to buy electronic components that all have projects, tutorials, active forums, etc.

Here's the "learn" page on the Adafruit web site: https://learn.adafruit.com/

And the Adafruit Youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/adafruit

And it's definitely worth just dipping in and out of -- and eventually reading all the way through -- "The Art of Electronics." It's a terrific book, and manages to be both readable and super in-depth about every topic you could possibly want to know about when you're trying to figure out what's what.

There are also a number of inspiring blogs by electrical engineers who are also great writers. Which ones to follow sort of depend on what specialties you are most interested in, but Bunnie Huang's is a great one to start with: https://www.bunniestudios.com/