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Book authored by Andrew Huang
Reviewed by Ralph Grabowski
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When a Kickstarter project fails, often it is because promoters aren't able to get the hardware built in China. (The other reason is that promoters become greedy, and then run off with the funds.) Hugging the east coast of the Middle Kingdom is a vast network of suppliers and manufacturers. Suppliers who manufacture parts used by manufacturers who finish products. The cost of parts is low (and sometimes suspect), but the cost of Henry Ford-style labor is lower. My newest smartphone (UMI Super), for example, is designed and made in China with high-end specs, and costs $200.
Getting your Kickstarter-funded project made in China is not easy, not if you want it made well. You need to pay for an airplane ticket and nights in a hotel to tour factories to see for yourself the production process. Plant managers are apparently eager to do so.
And you need to write excruciatingly clear instructions on how the device is to be built, deliver schematics (there goes your trade secrets), and provide an overly-detailed parts list -- down to the part number and manufacturer of each part -- right down to the box in which the finished product is delivered to the customer. Otherwise parts may be substituted as the factory looks to increase its profit.
To pay only for working devices costs more per device; to save money on the production run, you can gamble with paying for everything, working or not. Then you need to figure out how to ship the boxes overseas. By container on cargo ship pays only if you can fill the container; otherwise, air cargo might be cheaper. Then you need to figure out how to deal with returns of no-longer-working items from dissatisfied customers. The flaw might be one that shows up only under certain operating conditions, yet affects the entire production run.
Andrew Huang was raised by Chinese parents to speak accent-free American, and returns to a country strange to him. He's hunting components and a manufacturer for the Chumby, an at-home information device that subsequently failed in the market. (See figure 1.) His experience (and his checklists) in part 1 of The Hardware Hacker makes for great reading by hackers and wannabe-hackers -- as well as those hoping to build the Next Great Device.
FIGURE 1The original design of the Chumby information device (image source Chumby)
Fun fact: Foxcon, which makes cell phones for Apple, trucks in 3,000 pigs a day to feed its workers.
Think Different
More fascinating to me is the difference in how Chinese think about intellectual property. We in the CAD world saw this difference in the law suit Autodesk brought against ZwSoft of China. In the end, ZwSoft acknowledged that one of their programmers borrowed code used by AutoCAD. (Autodesk discovered the copying when an obscure bug in the Hatch command had the exact same effect in ZwCAD.)
The Western world see IP through eyes trained by the centuries-long influence of the enlightenment. It is the individual who reigns supreme, and what is mine is mine. In China, however, there is thinking described as "gongkai." You make available your works to others. Then someone else takes it and makes it better -- or at least different. And so you get cell phones that look like Marlboro cigarette cartons or dinosaur heads or $200 ones with top-notch specs. After all, all smartphone designs are the same inside: it's just a question of which components you use and how you design the case.
Now, there is the blatant rip-off, the so-called "Third Shift," where a factory produces more running shoes than Nike paid for, and sells the extra ones in the markets. That's different and not to be tolerated. Not to quote Steve Jobs, but he did say, "All great artists steal."
Huang's American-Chinese background describes both approaches to IP in part 2; being a hacker, he gravitates towards gongkai.
Fun fact: Kingston does not make its own SD card innards, but buys what it can from Samsung or SanDisk.
Open Hardware
We are used to open software specs. But consider what happens when we combine manufacturing prowess with gongkai-style intellectual sharing: we might end up with open hardware specs. Huang is convinced of this, having been an open hardware kind of guy all along.
Me, not so much. The curious bit in part 3 is how he is convinced of open hardware becoming the new standard, especially now, because the capabilities of computers, tablets, and smartphones have plateaued. He may be too young to remember when we really did have an open standard; it was called the IBM PC.
With no more easy money through upgrades, hardware and software will become more closed, not more open. Vendors will instead make their profits from services. Cf. the horror farmers experience today from closed-off John Deere tractors. The fault in the Deere tactic is that they have insufficient authorized repairmen during peak tractor failure season, harvest time.
To prove his thesis, Huang designed (with help from others) and built Novena, an open laptop that featured lots of ways to extend and hack it. It sold poorly. (See figure 2.)
FIGURE 2Andrew Huang with his Novena open source laptop (image source VentureBeat)Body Hacking
Healthcare is a mess, even in a seemingly-socialist utopia like Canada, which since the mid-1960s has had (mostly) free medical coverage for all its citizens. There are ways to hack the mess, but bureaucracy loves its comfort and see no need to change, except perhaps the wording in its advertisements.
Huang in part 4 thinks he has a way to solve the root of the problem: reduce and eliminate disease at the source. He describes ways in which virii, super bugs, and genomes could be hacked to eliminate them, or at least increase the body's resistance to them.
But in the end, you realize this is a biography of a man who had interesting new ideas, who followed them to completion, and then failed every single time.
The Hardware Hacker: Adventures in Making and Breaking Hardware
by Andrew Huang
No Starch Press
Hardcover; xviii+398 pages
ISBN 978-1-59327-758-1
$29.95
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And Now the Rest of the News...
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New on our WorldCAD Access blog:
IronCAD Design Collaboration Suite 2017 Product Update 1 decreases save times by 25% and speeds up graphical interactions by 45%. IronCAD now determines length of flat stock needed for length of bend, offers quick select dimensioning, hole naming, and more. Get the update from http://www.ironcad.com/product-updates/
"I think we just won the Crypto War. A very important part of the US government is prioritizing security over surveillance." Bruce Schneier is referring to the US Senate and its staff now using Signal, a secure messaging app for Android and iOS with no backdoor and no corporate owner the FBI could pressure. https://whispersystems.org/ (I use it, too.)
Stratasys reports mixed results for Q1: $163.2 million in revenue but a net loss of $13.9 million. For fiscal year 2017, Stratasys projects $645 to $680 million revenues and continuing losses of $53 to $39 million. http://www.stratasys.com
Auotdesk Q1 revenues fell 5% from a year ago, down to $486 million, a result the company calls "strong." (I wouldn't.) Also of note, this quarter Autodesk celebrates eight consecutive quarters (two years) of making a loss. If their revenue projection for the full fiscal year is even slightly off, Autodesk will fall out of the $2-billion club, leaving only Dassault and Siemens. Nevertheless, speculators are cheering, forcing up the ADSK share price to all-time high. Ex-ceo Carl Bass oft stated he was emulating Adobe. (But Adobe makes profit; I think Autodesk is emulating HTC, actually.)
"Twitter lets you see which advertisers are targeting you." Ads? On Twitter? Must be that ad blocker I run that keeps me in ignorance.
Hexagon acquires VIRES for its software that develops, tests, and validates autonomous driving technology. http://hexagon.com/news/press-releases?page=/en/hexagon-accelerates-its-simulation-portfolio-and-autonomous-x-strategy-acquisition-vires
Google boasted at its I/O conference that Android now has over two billion active users. In unrelated news, applications running on iPhones were found to crash almost 3x more often than apps on Android phones:
- 28% crashes on iOS
- 10% on Android
http://bgr.com/2016/11/17/iphone-vs-android-reliability-crashing-apps/
Gene Roe of @lidarnews reported on a new OpenLSEF standard for describing features in 3D point clouds. "Features" in OpenLSEF are physical edges, like the flow line or back-of-curb being the defining feature of curbs. https://beta.openlsef.org/
Vention.io is moving from closed beta to open beta in June of their Web-based 3D Machine Builder software.
OPTIS unveils HIM 2017 (human ergonomic evaluation) system for 3D virtual prototyping, which is powered by NVIDIA GPUs and VRWorks. http://www.optis-world.com
EOS updates its EOSPRINT 2.0 additive manufacturing software, now with easier part optimization for metal systems. A future update will add support for all current EOS metal systems and future polymer systems. https://www.eos.info/systems_solutions/software/eosprint
MEPcontent.eu updates its symbol browser add-on for Revit 2018 and AutoCAD 2018. Also new: directly select and insert family types into projects. https://www.mepcontent.eu/news/detail/3608/mepcontent+browser+ready+for+revit+and+autocad+2018
Going for Inventor's throat. Solidworks dealer GoEngineer offering Solidworks Premium version at half-off, plus 60% off Simulation. 'Til end of June.
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Follow upFront.eZine on Twitter for late breaking CAD news: https://twitter.com/upFronteZine
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Re: Missing AutoCAD Developers
Platform split must account for a lot of ‘lost’ developers. Since 1995 a lot of AutoCAD work has moved to Inventor, Revit etc. I know of several AutoCAD developers who are still Autodesk developers creating Inventor/Revit content and add-ins etc.
-Robin Capper , Store design technical manager
The Warehouse Limited, New Zealand
Jim Quanci of Autodesk responds: In 2016, we had 4,255 third-party developers. Just over half these folks are ISVs [independent software vendors], 15% or so system Integrators, another 15% or so customers, 5% or so authors/publishers - and the last 15% a mix of university researchers, government, and even a few retired developers that like to keep their fingers in the game (even a few octogenarians).
Re: Autodesk Subscriptions
I agree it is a rip off. I have the AutoCAD LT 2015, which I purchased the perpetual version. I want to upgrade to the 3D version [of their software], which I now can't buy as a perpetual version. I have it on two computers, so that means I have to pay $2,352 every year.
What is this country coming to, and when will it stop? Its like the car taxes in Connecticut, which we pay every year even after we pay when we buy a car. It is like the Mafia. Pay, pay, pay.
- Dan T. (via WorldCAD Access)
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- Solid Modeling Solutions (small company donation)
- Roger Roberts of Mid-West CAD (small company donation)
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"The trend is ominous for Big Internet; 40 per cent of Americans use mobile for data at home, and ubiquitous 5G threatens to make the cables underground as relevant as a Georgian canal after the Victorians built the train network."
- Andrew Orlowski, "There be dragons?," The Register
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/05/08/net_neutrality_groups_fear_of_politics_risks_total_telco_annihilation/ |
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