Hackers Beware: Shenzhen Is Closing

March 14, 2022 by Arya Voronova 43 Comments

If you’re among those of us with immediate plans for a PCB or parts order from China, watch out – Shenzhen just recently got put on a week-long lockdown. Factories, non-essential stores and public places are closed, and people are required to spend time at home – for a city that makes hardware thrive, this sounds like a harsh restriction. Work moves to remote where possible, but some PCB fabs and component warehouses might not be at our service for at least a week.

It might be puzzling to hear that the amount of cases resulting in closures is as low as 121, for a city of 12.6 million people. The zero-tolerance policy towards COVID has been highly effective for the city, with regular testing, adhered-to masking requirements and vaccinations – which is how we’ve been free to order any kinds of boards and components we needed throughout the past two years. In fact, 121 cases in one day is an unprecedented number for Shenzhen, and given their track record and swift reaction, it is reasonable to expect the case count dropping back to the regular (under 10 cases per day) levels soon.

Not all manufacturing facilities are located in Shenzhen, either. Despite what certain headlines might have you believe, supply chain shortages aren’t a certainty from here. A lot of the usual suspects like PCBWay and JLCPCB are merely reporting increased lead times as they reallocate resources, and while some projects are delayed for now, a lot of fabs you’d use continue operating with minor delays at most. SeeedStudio has its operations impacted more severely, and your Aliexpress orders might get shipped a bit later than usual – but don’t go around calling this a Chinese New Year v2 just yet. For those who want to keep a closer eye on the situation and numbers, the [Shenzhen Pages] Twitter account provides from-the-ground updates on the situation.

Wondering how your supply chain might be affected? We’ve talked about this way back in February 2020, addressing then-warranted worries that Chinese New Year would grow into a longer disruption than planned due to COVID becoming into a factor to manage. If you’re yet to discover the significance of Shenzhen, books have been written on this marvellous city, where you can build a successful hardware company in a week’s time. We’ve even had a meetup there once!

Header image: Charlie fong, CC BY-SA 4.0.

China Loves Battery Swapping EVs, But Will They Ever Make It Here?

February 9, 2022 by Zoe Skyforest 122 Comments

Electric vehicles promise efficiency gains over their gas-fuelled predecessors, but the issue of recharging remains a hurdle for many eager to jump on board with the technology. The problem is only magnified for those that regularly street park their vehicles or live in apartments, without provision to charge a vehicle overnight at home.

Battery swapping promises to solve that issue, letting drivers of EVs change out their empty battery for a freshly charged one in a matter of minutes. The technology has been widely panned and failed to gain traction in the US.

However, as it turns out, battery swapping for EVs is actually thing in China, and it’s catching on at a rapid rate.

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Toilet Paper Warmer Is A Unique Chinese Luxury

January 14, 2022 by Zoe Skyforest 32 Comments

[Handy Geng] lives in Baoding, China, where average winter temperatures can get as low as −7.7 °C (18.1 °F). Rather than simply freezing in the cold when using the bathroom, he decided he could do better. Thus came about his rather unique toilet paper heating system.

The build uses a gas burner heating up a wok. Toilet paper is fed into the wok body via motorized rollers salvaged from what appears to be an old counterfeit money detector. The wok is then shaken by a second motor in order to more evenly heat the toilet paper within. The burner can then be turned off, and the lid of the wok opened in order to gain access to the toasty toilet paper.

The system heats the toilet paper to a scorching 75 °C (167 °F); a little too warm to comfortably touch, but thankfully toilet paper doesn’t have a lot of thermal mass so cools off relatively quickly. It’s also thankfully well below the auto-ignition temperature of paper of 451 °F.

It’s a noisy, clanging machine that nonetheless provides the same warmth and comfort that you’re probably more familiar with from the office photocopier. It’s not [Handy Geng]’s first bathroom hack, either. Video after the break.

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Is Cloud Seeding Good, Bad, Or Ugly?

December 20, 2021 by Zoe Skyforest 34 Comments

The Chinese Communist Party celebrated its centenary on the 1st of July, 2021. For such a celebration, clear skies and clean air would be ideal. For the capable nation-state, however, one needn’t hope against the whims of the weather. One can simply control it instead!

A recent paper released by Tsinghua University indicated that China had used cloud seeding in order to help create nicer conditions for its 100-year celebration. Weather modification techniques have been the source of some controversy, so let’s explore how they work and precisely what it was that China pulled off.

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ARM’s Chinese Venture Goes Sour

September 1, 2021 by Jenny List 69 Comments

We’re used by now to many of the more capable microcontrollers and systems-on-chip that we use having an ARM core at their heart. From its relatively humble beginings in a 1980s British home computer, the RISC processor architecture from Cambridge has transformed itself into the go-to power-sipping yet powerful core for manufacturers far and wide. This has been the result of astute business decisions over decades, with ARM’s transformation into a fabless vendor of cores as IP at its heart. Recent news suggests that perhaps the astuteness has been in short supply of late though, as it’s reported that ARM’s Chinese subsidiary has gone rogue and detatched from the mothership taking the IP with it.

It seems that the CEO of the Chinese company managed to retain legal power when sacked by the parent company over questionable ties with another of his ventures, and has thus been able to declare it independent of its now-former parent. It still has the ARM IP up to the moment of detatchment and claims to be developing its own new products, but it seems likely that it won’t receive any new ARM IP.

What will be the effect of this at our level? Perhaps we have already seen it, as more Chinese chips such as the cheaper STM32 clones are likely to get low-end ARM cores as a result. It seems likely that newer ARM IP will remain for now in more expensive non-Chinese chip families, but in the middle of a semiconductor shortage it’s likely that we wouldn’t notice anyway. Where it will have a lasting effect is in future Chinese joint ventures by non-Chinese chip companies. Seeing ARM’s then-owner Softbank getting their fingers burned in such a way is likely to provide a disincentive to other companies considering a similar course. Whether ARM will manage to resolve the impasse remains to be seen, but it can hardly be a help to the rocky progress of their Nvidia merger.

Bitcoin In For Bumpy Ride As China Crackdown Shakes Things Up

August 20, 2021 by Zoe Skyforest 105 Comments

Bitcoin. The magical internet money is often derided as “worthless” and “made up” by those who forget that all currencies only have value because we believe in them. Perhaps the world’s strongest currency not backed up by guns and ammo, Bitcoin nonetheless remains a controversial invention, as do the many cryptocurrencies that followed in its wake.

Recently, the Chinese government has cracked down on operations within the country. With China hosting the world’s largest fraction of Bitcoin mining capability, it’s sent shockwaves through the network and had a huge effect in a multitude of ways. Here’s what’s going down.

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As Chinese Wheels Touch Martian Soil And Indian Astronauts Walk Towards The Launch Pad, Can We Hope For Another Space Race?

July 12, 2021 by Jenny List 34 Comments

If you were born in the 1960s or early 1970s, the chances are that somewhere in your childhood ambitions lay a desire to be an astronaut or cosmonaut. Once Yuri Gagarin had circled the Earth and Neil Armstrong had walked upon the Moon, millions of kids imagined that they too would one day climb into a space capsule and join that elite band of intrepid explorers. Anything seems possible when you are a five-year-old, but of course the reality remains that only the very fewest of us ever made it to space.

Did You Once Dream Of The Stars?

The Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin in Finland in 1961. Arto Jousi, Public domain.

The picture may be a little different for the youth of a few decades later though, did kids in the ’90s dream of the stars? Probably not. So what changed as Shuttle and Mir crews were passing overhead?

The answer is that the Space Race between the USA and Soviet Union which had dominated extra-terrestrial exploration from the 1950s to the ’70s had by then cooled down, and impressive though the building of the International Space Station was, it lacked the ability to electrify the public in the way that Sputnik, Vostok, or Apollo had. It was immensely cool to people like us, but the general public were distracted by other things and their political leaders were no longer ready to approve money-no-object budgets. We’d done space, and aside from the occasional bright spot in the form of space telescopes or rovers trundling across Mars, that was it. The hit TV comedy series The Big Bang Theory even had a storyline that found comedy in one of its characters serving on a mission to the ISS and being completely ignored on his return.

A few years ago a Chinese friend at my then-hackerspace was genuinely surprised that I knew the name of Yang Liwei, the Shenzhou 5 astronaut and the first person launched by his country into space. He’s a national hero in China but not so much on the rainy edge of Europe, where the Chinese space programme for all its progress at the time about a decade after Yang’s mission had yet to make a splash beyond a few space watchers and enthusiasts in hackerspaces. But this might be beginning to change.

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