The Story Behind the Cover for the Essential Guide to Electronics in Shenzhen

I met Bunnie while living in Shenzhen a few months ago. His knowledge of the electronics supply chain in the city was immense and he gave a lot of useful tips on what to look for and ways that vendors could screw you over. If you are looking into electronics manufacturing, there is no way you don't end up in Shenzhen at some point.

My personal opinion of the city is stay away when you are still in the early prototyping phase and don't have a MVP yet. Ordering from Digikey is way more reliable (though more expensive) then walking for hours searching for the right vendor in the Shenzhen markets. Once you have a functioning prototype, Shenzhen is great for finding similar IC's for much cheaper and streaminglining your supply chain and figuring out your manufacturing.

Given bunnie's knowledge, I had expected the cover to be an usable circuit boards which you just had to solder in through-hole components and you'd have a working book cover - maybe via a very thin PCB on the "back side" of the cover ;)

Seriously, it looks very nice and I hope to get my hands on it soon!

>As an engineer, I disliked how over-simplified the design was. There really should be bypass capacitors around the digital components. And SATA requires series DC blocking caps.

Beautiful.