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from the Which-way-to-Millinocket?-(p6V2Ew1M0sE) dept.
Famed hardware hacker Bunnie Huang has published an electronic edition of his Essential Guide to Shenzhen. The PDF version is now available for download free of charge, available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. His book is intended to help non-Mandarin speakers navigate the sprawling electronics markets, Hua Qiang Bei, in Shenzen. It specializes in finding components, setting quantities and packaging, agreeing on payments and deliveries, and remembering the vendor's location within the dense mazes.
It’s taken me a long time to get around to doing this, but here’s a link for a free-to-download copy of “The Essential Guide to Shenzhen”. The catalyst that prompted me to finally get around to this is the fact that Crowd Supply is now sold out (I think Adafruit is also sold out, too). Since the maps in the guide are now quite out of date, I figure it’s not worth re-printing the guide. Instead, it may be more useful to publish a link, so that others can swap out the map pages with something more up-to-date and have a swing at making their own derivative works.
(Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Tuesday December 17 2019, @08:04PM (1 child)
If you have a Fry's there's some hope there, although some shelves in the electronics hobbyist section are bare with neglect. You can get cables, crimp stuff, solder stuff, they have a lot of discrete components and switches, Arduino shields and Raspberry Pi stuff, wire spools, etc. You're gonna pay a markup, sometimes a really obscene markup, for the convenience (I recall a harness used to install a 2.5" drive into a tower PC being 40 bucks! Of course I didn't fucking buy it).
If you're not in California it's gonna be a bitch to find one, though, but I think in this case ordering from Fry's is a more appropriate situation than Mouser or Digikey. Mouser and Digikey are more suited to bulk items and industrial accounts and the shit you buy from those may be higher quality but you're gonna pay the same, if not more than, buying from Fry's with the markup. And then when your expensive DC brushless fan arrives and you discover at the last minute that the PWM you're using for it can't even get it moving past starting torque, you will have to return it with all the hassle and wait that entails. There is nothing fucking worse than being a tinkering hobbyist and having to wait to get even basic-bitch parts, especially if you're using a trial-and-error process.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday December 18 2019, @11:04PM