Dirty Cables is a drag and drop cable builder that gives you access to cheap custom cable services from China. Build a custom cable, get an instant quote, and checkout. Your custom cables should ship in 3 to 7 work days. Huaqiangbei is full of cheap custom cable vendors with a big pile of samples […]
Author Archives: Ian
How Scotty made his own iPhone in China
Over the past two months we’ve been super excited to follow Scotty’s adventure recycling/refurbishing an iPhone 6S in the used cell phone market just south of Huaqiangbei, Shenzhen, China. Scotty finds all the bits and pieces from various sellers and then follows the iFixit instructions, backwards, to build his own recycled franken-phone. Despite living in […]
CHINA STUFF: Email that works…
Working from China is a constant reminder that the location of internet services is super important. North America and Europe are just a few internet hops from our servers in Hetzner’s carbon neutral, green energy data center in Germany. From China, however, we’re often routed out through Beijing to San Jose, then to New York, […]
How to measure laser cut length or time?
To price laser cutting online we need to extract two pieces of info from uploaded design files. The area of a box surrounding the design, called the bounding box, is the amount of material needed. The length of all the cuts in the design can be used as a rough estimate of the cutting time […]
Amazon Web Service Beijing woefully inadequate for international use
Amazon Web Service (AWS) is a bunch of server, storage, and other internet resources. AWS datacenters are located around the world so companies can locate websites close to their customers and speed up page load times. A couple years ago AWS started testing a center in Beijing, China. There’s all sorts of benchmarks on speed […]
HOW-TO: Shipping stuff from China cheap?
Tyler writes: What method do you use to ship from China? I am trying to ship 8kg of PLA from a manufacturer in China. I want to figure out how much sea shipping (the cheapest method) would be, but no one is really able to give me a legit answer besides someone like UPS (Yeah […]
Site reorganization complete
Sorry for the occasional outages over the past week. Most were during Chinese work hours, so hopefully not really noticed if you’re in the US or EU. The whole site has been moved into GIT repositories and redeployed as virtual directories as outlined on the blog last week. It is much cleaner, better organized, and […]
Phishing attempt in the forum and how to clean it up
The forum, which runs on the popular phpBB3 software, was hit by a phishing attempt in the last few hours. Around 2000 private messages were sent by hundreds of newly registered users. It’s not clear how this automated attack got past our own spam hammer protection that bars new users from sending private messages. Apologies […]
HOW-TO: Add live websites to GIT without interruptions or security risks
Over at the DEV site we’ve been using GIT repositories hosted at BitBucket.org to push (deploy) changes to the live server instantly. It’s way slicker than uploading changed files by FTP, which has no roll back if something goes wrong. It also solves one of our China internet problems: routing to Bitbucket is much more […]
Trolling venture capital and the death of Hacker Camp Shenzhen
The sixth and final Hacker Camp Shenzhen begins in a few days. We’ll do the typical tours, market shopping, factory visits, and lots of eating and drinking. There are around 30 purchased tickets, and another dozen repeat campers and locals coming along to help. Hacker Camp has been amazing because of the totally cool people […]
HOW TO: Chinese Driver’s License
China has huge factories, but there are also thousands of tiny factories hidden away on back streets and in garages. During the production of *The Expressway,* we had a lot of downtime waiting for molds to heat, so we explored the neighborhood. On one tiny road, there was a compression molding factory, several gauze factories, […]
Harmony t-shirt #1: Make a packing tape handle
In Chinese markets it’s super common to carry boxes with an improvised packing tape handle. It’s a simple idea: make four or five tape loops over the top of the box and then crush them together into a handle. Bunnie’s new Huaqiangbei adventure kit even includes ‘please make a tape handle’ in the useful phrases […]
Owning DirtyPCBs: an opportunity lost
With the Chinese company out of the way, I’ve had some time to work on projects and plan what to do next. One thing I have to do is own DirtyPCBs, I’ve failed at some basic stuff. DirtyPCBs.com was a joke. It started as a quick script so our team and a few Shenzhen locals […]
HOW TO: Chinese work permit and residency visa
First we started a Chinese company, then we got a bank account and import export permit. The last major thing is a work permit and residency visa. Americans, Canadians, and soon Australians, all get an automatic 10 year multiple entry visas for China. It’s quite common for foreigners to post up in China for years […]
HOW TO: Shenzhen Spring Festival/Chinese New Year
By 2016 most hackers have some idea that China shuts down for a month every year. If not, learn it: from some time in January to some time in February the world’s largest country and manufacturing capital, one of the biggest economies, closes shop. Nothing is made or shipped. While the whole country celebrates, Shenzhen […]
HOW TO: China import/export permit and company bank
Last week we described the painful process of opening a Chinese company. That was actually the fast and easy part. There’s still a pile of paperwork and months of waiting ahead. This week we look at the proper, and improper, ways to export from China. A Chinese import export permit is permission to exchange foreign […]
HOW TO: Start a Chinese Company
While Shenzhen is becoming “Hollywood for Makers”, and not always in a good way, there don’t seem to be a lot of foreign open hardware/maker/start-up/accelerated/innovated/incubated people starting Chinese companies. As far as we know, we are the first foreign owned open hardware centric Chinese company in Shenzhen. With everything going on here, we definitely wont […]
Hacker Camp Shenzhen 2016 March 24-26
Hacker Camp Shenzhen 2016 is on! Join us from Thursday March 24 to Saturday March 26 for fun, food and 3 solid days of electronics tours in Shenzhen China and beyond. Come to the world’s electronics capital and experience Shenzhen like a local hacker. Tour the famous Huaqiangbei electronics markets with people who live in […]
Dirt Cheap Dirty Reels: cheap component reels from China
Component reels shouldn’t be overpriced or difficult to come by. Dirty Reels connects you to cheap Chinese component suppliers in the Huaqiangbei electronics market. Add a reel of resistors to your next DEV shop order for under $4! A dirty reel of 5000 100ohm 5% 0603 resistors from a major Chinese manufacturer like Super Ohm is only $3.97. […]
DP 2016: Live from China!
Today Dangerous Prototypes is a legal Chinese company! 100% legit with import/export license, work permits, visas, and an office in Huaqiangbei (the world’s largest electronics market). It is likely the only Open Hardware centric WFOE (Wholly Foreign Owned Enterprise) in Shenzhen, and perhaps China. It took over a year to complete the process, and we […]