If you're in Shenzen you can take a walk and pick up all the components you need for your prototype project in the morning and assemble them in the afternoon.
Here in the US we have to order the components from china and it takes weeks to months.
You only have to live in various cities to see the impact of this. I've lived in cities where you could literally go to a neighbourhood store and have access to a decent supply of components. I have also lived in cities where you would have to go across town to get something as simple as a resistor. I'll let you guess which places had thriving environments for everything from amateur to professional hardware development, and which ones had a bunch of people talking out of their assess about what they wer
here in silicon valley, we have some pretty good used surplus stores that we can run to, grab some old/quality parts and get our projects built. not high qty but for one-off POC's its great.
I've been going to halted (hsc electronics) for over 20 yrs now and I don't know what I'd do if they went out of business. sometimes I just walk the aisles in that store to get ideas. or to find some part that can be used for another project in a creative way.
china may have tons of crap-parts stores; but we have surplus stores from the days when parts lasted decades, not just months. old 'made in USA' transistors and caps and resistors and chips. stuff that you knew was not made 'to a price' but was meant to be reliable. that kind of stuff can be found here and very little of that can be found overseas in asia.
and, of course, mouser and digikey are here in the US and they are 2 of the most respected and trusted parts sources in the world. I can get next-day or 2nd-day shipments from them for reasonable rates. all their parts are real, genuine, trustable. no fake electrolytics here! and so, even though we can't stroll down china's or japan's or korea's electronics-alley areas, what we have in the US (in the bay area, at least) is, in some ways, better. we also have a great used equipment market here and since its not cost efficient to buy $10k agilent scopes and meters, we can find 5 or 10 yr (or hell, even 30 yr) old brand name test and measurement gear and it will often be enough to get the job done, plus it will continue working for many more years. the test gear from china is all throw-away. its unfixable, for the most part, and the company will abandon it in a year or two, tops. there's no staying power with china test gear; even they consider it a throw-away. and I'm sorry, you can't properly do development when your test gear has a lifetime that is in months and not years.
Alternatively, you just acquire yourself a decent collection of parts (from china via ebay) and there's practically no delay when building a proof of concept device. For well under a hundred bucks you can get sets of _every_ standard resistor and capacitor in 04-, 06-, 08- and thru-hole. Basically the components are so cheap you can have at least two* of everything you might reasonably need. Sure, there's often some specific chip or other you need, so digikey works great for that.
* Pro tip - never EVER buy
The greatest productive force is human selfishness.
-- Robert Heinlein
no duh (Score:5, Insightful)
If you're in Shenzen you can take a walk and pick up all the components you need for your prototype project in the morning and assemble them in the afternoon.
Here in the US we have to order the components from china and it takes weeks to months.
Re: (Score:2)
You only have to live in various cities to see the impact of this. I've lived in cities where you could literally go to a neighbourhood store and have access to a decent supply of components. I have also lived in cities where you would have to go across town to get something as simple as a resistor. I'll let you guess which places had thriving environments for everything from amateur to professional hardware development, and which ones had a bunch of people talking out of their assess about what they wer
Re:no duh (Score:2)
here in silicon valley, we have some pretty good used surplus stores that we can run to, grab some old/quality parts and get our projects built. not high qty but for one-off POC's its great.
I've been going to halted (hsc electronics) for over 20 yrs now and I don't know what I'd do if they went out of business. sometimes I just walk the aisles in that store to get ideas. or to find some part that can be used for another project in a creative way.
china may have tons of crap-parts stores; but we have surplus stores from the days when parts lasted decades, not just months. old 'made in USA' transistors and caps and resistors and chips. stuff that you knew was not made 'to a price' but was meant to be reliable. that kind of stuff can be found here and very little of that can be found overseas in asia.
and, of course, mouser and digikey are here in the US and they are 2 of the most respected and trusted parts sources in the world. I can get next-day or 2nd-day shipments from them for reasonable rates. all their parts are real, genuine, trustable. no fake electrolytics here! and so, even though we can't stroll down china's or japan's or korea's electronics-alley areas, what we have in the US (in the bay area, at least) is, in some ways, better. we also have a great used equipment market here and since its not cost efficient to buy $10k agilent scopes and meters, we can find 5 or 10 yr (or hell, even 30 yr) old brand name test and measurement gear and it will often be enough to get the job done, plus it will continue working for many more years. the test gear from china is all throw-away. its unfixable, for the most part, and the company will abandon it in a year or two, tops. there's no staying power with china test gear; even they consider it a throw-away. and I'm sorry, you can't properly do development when your test gear has a lifetime that is in months and not years.
Re: (Score:1)
Alternatively, you just acquire yourself a decent collection of parts (from china via ebay) and there's practically no delay when building a proof of concept device. For well under a hundred bucks you can get sets of _every_ standard resistor and capacitor in 04-, 06-, 08- and thru-hole. Basically the components are so cheap you can have at least two* of everything you might reasonably need. Sure, there's often some specific chip or other you need, so digikey works great for that.
* Pro tip - never EVER buy