Lu Ban's axe and working with your Chinese suppliers
hackaday.com
hackaday.com
I have to respectfully disagree with the author on the esteem of engineers in China versus the West. I am not Chinese, nor an expert on their culture, but I do live in the West so I understand half of the equation.
Current President of China, Xi Jinping was educated as a chemical engineer[1]. His predecessor Hu Jintao was a hydroelectric engineer[2]. His predecessor Jiang Zemin was an electrical engineer[3].
Compare that with recent American presidents like Obama (JD), Bush(MBA), Clinton(JD), Bush Sr(BA in Econ), Reagan (BA in Econ). These are only a few points, but seems to me it is in China where engineers rise to the highest echelons of power. We have lawyers.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xi_Jinping#Early_life_and_educ...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hu_Jintao#Early_life
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jiang_Zemin#Background_and_asc...
She has way more attention to minute policy detail than anyone who has been elected president in the past few decades. And the knowledge of detail is a double edged sword, because it's hard to sell what you know to be an oversimplification (which almost everyone here can relate to).
To end up as president, you have to go through many promotions in the government bureaucracy. Probably stop actually doing engineering work (or whatever) pretty early on. Similar to rising through management ranks in a company.
So the author's point could still stand in the context she present it in: where you are not the boss.
Actually everyone got to vote for people's representatives. Of cuz, no one cars that much, like many people were not bother to vote, so DNC thought their presidency is already in bag, then many decided to actually vote.
So in a democracy, there's all that behind the scenes tussel, but there's also an important aspect of public advocacy and decision testing. None of that in China; the politburo says what it's going to say, and then does what it's going to do.
Thats not what happened in China. In China government invest heavily in propaganda and mind manipulation, they do not automatically push anything and everyone just follow blindly.
> You know how overseas Chinese students in America all copy each others work to get answers? This workflow scale. How we work when older too. So if I have a question I open up QQ and have a few hundred friends. We all help each other with whatever. Many are engineers or work in factories here in Shenzhen. Most of the electronics in the world are made here and a lot of them designed and engineered here also. So easy to get very very professional help. This network has been called gongkai. Also why so many hardware startup here.
Found from the author's comment history on reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/DIY/comments/3c9l2m/my_diy_underlit....
She seems to have a lot of (culturally) interesting opinions in general: https://www.reddit.com/user/SexyCyborg/comments/?sort=top
> how overseas Chinese students in America all copy each others work to get answers?
Student colluding is any special? I was college ta before, I do not think there is ever a class students do not copy each other.
But is there anything special?
Gaming the system is the human nature.
Turns out some of them were seniors who had brought their homework from previous years. It wasn't like everyone just copied the work either, there was plenty of discussion about the points they had trouble understanding. (But my Chinese wasn't quite good enough to pick up on most of it.)
So if I may generalize from my anecdote, I'd say that Chinese students colluding is special in that they form a tightly knit community abroad, helping each other out.
They definitely hung out with each other more often, but they didn't seem to actually study much together. I had a few email me with questions on the same exercise, so at least those three hadn't exchanged notes.
Of course there might have been some Pakistani-only homework sessions I was simply never invited to, but I don't think that was the case.
If he had spent more time teaching instead of coming up with insanely hard test questions we wouldn't have had that huge of a back file on him.
We used them for study sessions.
I can only imagine they are all online now.
Are American companies that different? The few places I've worked software engineers didn't get bonuses, only the people in sales did. Software engineers are seen as a resource.
My starting pay was more than double that of someone of similar talent to myself who ended up at a different company.
My lowest offer coming out of college was a $30k 1 year contract in 2005. Needless to say I didn't accept that one.
This article makes it sound like China in fundamentally different in that respect.
People in sales don't get a bonus because they're not viewed as a resource, they get a bonus because they hit a sales target for eg the year and their pay is often determined in part through sales goals. All employees are generally viewed as a resource by management.
It's not uncommon for software engineers to get an annual bonus, that's particularly true if things are going well and it's also commonly true for any higher value employees (software engineers commonly earn 2x to 4x the median income in the US).
There's a little more creative thinking in American companies, but people are still people. Which means you need to tread very carefully or you will quickly acquire an almost invariably fatal reputation as "not a team player".
For everyone arguing about whether this is true of all Chinese culture, of course there is innovative thinking in China, Wu is simply pointing out that in places where people aren't getting paid to innovate but rather are there to do a 9-5 job, there is little (and, in many cases, negative) incentive culturally to think outside the box and push the envelope. Don't expect that your contractor is going to go the extra mile for you. Getting specifications right and driving the production process are on you.
That's pretty much every country, including the US. Even many Silicon Valley companies are this way.
This culture isn't bad and works reasonably well in a lot of places.
(not my thing though)
LOL... best part of the article. Good writing in general.
This hasn't been my experience. I manufacture small metal objects in China, that are not very complex (no electronics, etc.) but I get good inputs from manufacturers. For the packaging for example, we designed cases and envelopes with a manufacturer, and they came up with several ideas that we tested on prototypes -- some good, some bad, but the point is, they did have ideas and they did offer them for consideration.
More importantly, it differs from manufacturer to manufacturer. Some factories will produce garbage and then try to explain to you that there is no other way (after the fact); other factories correct mistakes before they even show you the result, because they understand what you want and they iterate autonomously, in order to get there.
What is true is that manufacturing is sloooow. The total duration quoted at the beginning of a project should be at least doubled. But this is probably not Chinese-specific.
EDIT: not sure where the downvote came from, you can read about it from her own pastebin
You're probably getting downvoted for that premise. It's blatantly obvious she's using it to drive views on YouTube (and there's absolutely nothing wrong with that). Even her name is intentionally pointed toward that: SexyCyborg; she's telling you right there what she's doing. It would be just as obvious if it were some hot guy that did every video of his with his shirt off. It's no different from Howard Stern shock-jocking for listeners, or the thousand times Jenna Marbles leveraged her looks to push views, or Matthew McConaughey taking his shirt off on camera. It's always obvious what they're doing and why.
https://twitter.com/RealSexyCyborg/status/903441607709540352
Maybe a bit slanderous and biased, but certainly some interesting evidence to ponder...
That doesn't change the fact that the media is still NSFW in the U.S.
At the same time, there are innovations out of China (that surpass anything which may have inspired it, or which they could have started out copying). So judging by their output, whatever cultural issues surrounded:
>For Chinese, this means you think you know better than a professional, than experts. It’s the act of seeing something and saying “why don’t they do this instead?”. Traditionally, this is viewed as extremely arrogant and certainly not something to be encouraged in children or anyone else.
does not seem to extend to the whole of their ecosystem. I realize the author calls the above a "traditional" perspective.
Could anyone here who is current with current developments of Chinese IP and innovation comment on the validity of this general characterization?
The author in the entirety of the article certainly paints the Chinese culture with a very broad brush. But as would concern readers here on HN, the only thing that matters is what engineers who might work with them think.
What do people here think of the perspective in the article? For Chinese readers, do you agree with it?
Especially in the PRC, you're in general incentivized to be an "excellent cog in the machine", and they teach this value to you in schools. "Being unique" in your first 18 years of life is considered a bad thing, and respect for hierarchy is enforced every day.
I wouldn't write everyone in China off to the type presented in the article -- most people in China know that this is not an efficient way of approaching things. However, their hands are tied in a society that enforces hierarchy in every possible way.
>engineers that you know to be otherwise reasonably competent simply choosing not to bring up glaring and obvious problems.
What does it refer to? How would/should someone guard against it? Normally we are usually used to being able to receive a bit of push-back (maybe polite) if we propose something with a glaring and obvious problem. Does this mean engineers would build something that doesn't work at all? (For some reason that's completely obvious to them.) In point of fact, I'm not sure what the article refers to, as it doesn't give an example. Could you give an example of what you think they mean, and how someone might protect against this effect? Thanks.
An example would be: I know this different schedule can probably save the company $xxx money, but since it's my boss who proposed it I'll just let it pass.
It really takes a village. The culture of standing up against higer-ups is sometimes way out of the league for a single person to achieve.
For instance, to continue with your example, suppose the boss certainly would like to save $xxx with a different schedule they hadn't considered, but isn't even aware that the engineer is competent enough to propose it and knows how to do so: so in this case what could the boss have said or done differently that would have caused the engineer to propose it?
I assume ending each meeting with "We must now talk about anything that would improve the proposal just made; even if it makes me look like an idiot. Zhang Wei, do you know of any improvements?" and then going around pointing to each person and making them tell you whether they do, does not sound like it would "work". In this case Zhang Wei would say "no", as would the rest of the engineers... so how can the manager learn that an alternative schedule which Zhang Wei can propose could save them $xxx? (And maybe even complete production sooner, etc.) Any concrete suggestions here?
It just has to be ingrained in the company culture I guess. You'd really need to emphasize, whenever possible, that improvements and suggestions and corrections are welcome. You're fighting against upbringing.
I must be living in a China of a parallel universe.
But one thing I agree, do do appear use statement without backup, that certainly one common traits of Chinese education: teach facts not reasoning...
Almost any books in China described the country as founded by overthrowing the rich and powerful oppressed the people.
Certainly the government is the rich and powerful and is no longer what it should be as described in the text book.
But is it appropriate to fabricate statements to patron the western stereotype?!
Do you know what Deliang Hou's line: isn't the truth already powerful, why use lies to support our causes?!
> Sure, but you learn that in a country you described as teaching to respect hierarchy, did you not find the contradictory?
I'm not sure where the contradictory is, because I certainly don't feel that overthrowing your superiors is an acceptable thing during my education, and this discussion is getting more political than I'm comfortable with on HN.
It doesn't take too much effort to acknowledge that China, or more so the entire eastern Asia's culture, favors respecting hierarchy, and I'm not sure why we're even debating this. I'm also not sure what about my statement is fabricated. You literally cannot fabricate an opinion.
I'll say this though: things are moving in the right direction, and I'm seeing the culture moving away from respecting hierarchy in all conditions. But you really can't fix the problem without acknowledging it.
2. Chinese are not particularly taught to respect hierarchy or particularly really respect hierarchy. Most nations respect their own hierarchy. There is no special in China, and there is no special in Chinese education.
3. I am not debating if China respecting hierarchy, I am pointing out that your baseless claim of China being educating or particularly educating her citizens to respect hierarchy, that's not true and I showed the fact.
4. Respecting hierarchy is not a problem itself. Organized system, be it human or machine, needs hierarchy to function. Your premise of moving away from hierarchy is GOOD, itself is another unbased claim, AGAIN.
But there's definitely change going on in China. Juxtapose all of that with increased Western exposure, and increased sense of Chinese pride. More individualism. More "We're Chinese, we can do better!" attitudes.
In many ways China has been playing catch-up and still is - it's only been in a position to innovate and lead in very recent times. I mention this as a rebuttal to accusations of China being uninventive.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15153379
(sibling comment to this comment.)
Of course this is more for fixed price for fixed work contracting. Contracts with more variable pricing my be better. Maybe other contacting setups can alleviate this issue, but I haven't seen many that could work and that clients are willing to sign.
what a joke. Three Chinese Presidents in a row all had engineering background, yet this is still not enough?
President Jiang Zemin was an engineer for decades.
President Hu Jintao was an engineer for almost a decade.
President Xi Jinping majored in chemical engineering from Tsinghua.
Then you look at property prices in Shanghai, Beijing and Shenzhen, it almost got a point that you can't afford to buy a home unless you work for some Internet companies or some banks. That is still not enough? How about the fact that most Software engineers got paid far more than lawyers and doctors/dentists?
> Simply put, in a strictly hierarchical society, proposing a solution missed by your superiors is at the very least perceived as arrogant. You’re just as likely to be penalized in some way for making whoever is responsible for the current solution lose face as you are to benefit in any way from proposing a better way.
Is this generally true in other industries as well? How do Chinese companies try to be innovative, if people are discouraged from suggesting ideas?
But in the broad sense you mean: yeah, kinda. Chinese companies (in the PRC in particular of course, but also outfits the stem from Hong Kong and Taiwan) tend not to be particularly innovative. It's a lagging market, filled with well-implemented but fundamentally cloned products first pioneered elsewhere. China has products that can compete well against, say, Google and Samsung's offerings, but there are no chinese Googles or Samsungs.
There is no american or european WeChat.
The GFW has severely crippled the web, coupled with the lack of card usage, created a situation that made wechat work for mainland china and can't really be replicated anywhere else.
Until it can. This happens in tech regularly.
So... sure. In some sense that makes it an exception that proves the rule. If China can be successful with WeChat where is its Tesla or Pfizer or Intel or Fujitsu or...
I mean, there are times where a single counterexample can disprove a point. I don't know that this is one of them.
So which system did they clone to become like this? Because if they are the first, I guess it is a lot of innovation.
This is the same argument people made about Japanese companies 40 years ago and then Korean companies 20 years ago.
For the record:
http://www.indexmundi.com/facts/indicators/IP.PAT.RESD/compa...
(Actually, I'm not that surprised, they're probably too big to fail and Apple really wants to sell iOS devices in China)
In Seattle, a similar phrase I've heard is "I've invested quite a bit of ego in X" when one challenges assumptions about X.
All IMO of course...
Too much forced analogy. This one is just plain out of context. Even people dont want to be educated in public, that does not translate who do the job doesn't get paid.
Software engineering are already the best paid job category[1], outpacing finance, for Chinese university graduates, as the best profession to go to. I would say that is not the case here in US, where engineers are well paid, but the still far from the envy of everyone, which would be lawyers and doctors.
1. http://www.chinanews.com/sh/2016/05-16/7871331.shtml (in Chinese though)
Side notes: It is pretty interesting to read those articles try to analyze Chinese or East Asian people in general as they are machines from the same factory tagged with serial number. I cannot see how that could give you really insightful conclusions that generalize to 1.4 Billion people.
the "community" on hacker news has said limor (ladyada) fried is not a "real engineer" or she has help and doesn't really do engineering, or she is not a real person, or she is just a marketer, or it's not really her code, amongst other attacks anytime her work appears here on hacker news.
the same attacks on hacker news on naomi wu have been said to other women who make things, share their projects, and are online, including limor, on hacker news.
before you hit "add comment" - what is the goal here hacker news community?
The last time I made the front page under my real name,[0] I got a very encouraging comment about how it was nice that I had just started programming and was already thinking of hard problems.
Thankfully, it's simple enough to add an nginx rule to bounce anyone from news.ycombinator.com right back to where they came from.
--
[0] For some reason HN comments are much more respectful when I use a pseudonym. I must have a silly name or something. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
hacker news community, what is your goal here?
How does one relate to and incentivize the Chinese people, then? Where are good places to start learning more?
Context/example:
I'm tentatively interested in approaching China from a "hobbyist with a tiny bit of money" standpoint. I want to do limited runs (3 to 4 zeros, or if circumstances allow, less!) of small handheld electronic devices - PCB, thin removable enclosure, possibly some buttons/keys on the front.
Plastic caps directly over tactile buttons is cheap and compact, but rubber-dome systems seem to have a higher-quality finish. The challenge here is that rubber-dome "mats" are likely expensive to tool for, while sticking the dome under a plastic cap means extra thickness. I'd need to find out what my options are here (if I could achieve making a small keyboard, with full key-click - like the Psion Series 5 or HP palmtops - that would be amazing).
As a separate thing, I'm also really fascinated by the chip-on-board techniques used to manufacture credit-card-thin solar calculators. It would be amazingly fun to be able to play with those manufacturing techniques, but going on the cheapness and sheer numbers of devices like this out in the wild (and the fact that I'm seeing the same designs on eBay as I saw in electronics catalogues from 1999!), it seems reasonable to think that the tooling to make these is probably eye-watering, sadly. But I don't know.
I'm not asking for solutions or answers to these problems/questions here (although if anyone wants to comment...); they're just for context. My point is that I have no idea how or where to start in terms of contacting people and going through all the machinery; I know the volume I can promise is effectively nil, and I read this article from the standpoint of knowing I have an extra job of convincing to do because of that.
I also recently read https://lwn.net/Articles/504865/ (found in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15138028; replies say the main focus of the (2012) article is outdated; I'm curious if the bits I'm quoting are relevant). It's a transcript of a talk about some teething problems with trying to do runs of hardware to run KDE on. It reads
> ... the manufacturers are "all about volume" ...
and
> Because the volume of devices that [Make Play Live] could promise to sell was fairly low, the manufacturer had little interest in consulting or even notifying the company about the changes.
and
> In the Q&A session, Seigo further explained some of the problems that MPL had run into. Unless it can promise a quarter of a million (or some other six-digit number) of units, MPL won't be able to get any input into the process.
This info will likely be old hat to some. But I begin to wonder that whoever agrees to do small production runs will just be amusedly humoring me - because if the speaker of the transcripted talk linked above said '"Our order is a rounding error"'... what does that make my run? (Would it even need a receipt? :P)
So I'm interested to understand Chinese culture more - particularly with manufacturing, and in terms of learning more about the tech scene - so I know how and where and the best place(s) to jump in.
I read https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15138739 a couple of days ago; to quote:
> ... [T]he most impressive I've seen were some calculators I saw in Shenzhen a few years ago which looked like simple solar-powered 4-function ones, but were actually programmable and had several tens of KB of memory. Trying to use that functionality with a 8-digit 7-segment display, however, was quite challenging.
That's awesome. That's the sort of thing I mean by "scene" and what I want to learn tons more about.
Guanxi, guanxi, guanxi.
Convincing of what - people to work for effectively nothing? Because according to your logic, that is what you are trying to accomplish. Convincing people to work for nothing. But it's not just you, it is the majority, dare I say nearly everyone, that comes to China. Nearly everyone is trying to get something for nothing. People just seem to lose their ability to comprehend that people in China have the same constraints on time, and particularly the value time, as everyone else outside of China.
I own a factory in China and I see this all too often. For example, people come to us with complicated electromechanical projects with half-baked designs. Designs that would require at least 3 additional months of prototyping before we'd even be ready for tooling. That means we are very likely going to spend 6-12 months working on your project. Too often, they don't have a dedicated engineering staff so there are a lot of gaps we must cover. Verification and validation of designs. Resultant CAD changes. Circuit design changes. Prototyping. Strategic sourcing. Lifecycle testing. Safety and agency. Packaging, packout and shipping. More, much more. It can easily consume 1000+ man-hours even 2000+ man-hours from a team of 8-10 professionals working on it. And then, lets say I quote $35,000 USD nonrefundable engineering fees or labor and overheads for 1000+ manhours. That's about the cost of a secretary with an associates degree from my home state in WV. What do I usually hear? Crickets. I hear nothing back because people are too busy expecting that they are going to work with a factory here in China and get something for nothing.
And in the end, they are all wondering "why didn't I get what I tried to buy from China?"
> Convincing of what - people to work for effectively nothing?
Not quite. Things cost money; trying to get something for less than it honestly costs is delusional, disrespectful, wastes everyone's time, etc. I don't want to do that. (I'll admit I didn't convey the sentiment I was getting at in my last message particularly well.)
Rather, it seems that there are few options if want to make something that isn't going to be superscalar in terms of volume demand. Instead of "we need ten production samples of this design to judge tolerance, and then our plans are to do a volume order of xxx,xxx items"; I want to do the minimum order possible (for reasonable and non-irritating (!) values of "minimum").
Essentially I'm in the same part of the spectrum typically catered to by hobbyist 3D printing, but I'm trying to do things that are tricky to manage with just a 3D printer. I mentioned keyboards before as an example; I've wondered about how much it would cost to tool for custom keyboards for a while.
> People just seem to lose their ability to comprehend that people in China have the same constraints on time, and particularly the value time, as everyone else outside of China.
FWIW, I think this is because China is viewed as a kind of magical place that makes so much of everything with such amazing prices that there must be some superhuman magic in there somewhere. :P So all reason and logic kind of goes out the window. Somehow stuff is being made for impossibly cheap, so surely that must mean that the actual manufacturing cost is cheap too, right? (It would seem that these people don't comprehend economies of scale. I get the impression that the reason that (for example) a given cheap toy is only ~a dollar is because some super-wholesaler did an order for ~a million and paid ~$8xx,xxx (?), and then forwarded their costs on to a bunch of toy stores.)
> I own a factory in China and I see this all too often. For example, people come to us with complicated electromechanical projects with half-baked designs. Designs that would require at least 3 additional months of prototyping before we'd even be ready for tooling. That means we are very likely going to spend 6-12 months working on your project. Too often, they don't have a dedicated engineering staff so there are a lot of gaps we must cover. Verification and validation of designs. Resultant CAD changes. Circuit design changes. Prototyping. Strategic sourcing. Lifecycle testing. Safety and agency. Packaging, packout and shipping. More, much more. It can easily consume 1000+ man-hours even 2000+ man-hours from a team of 8-10 professionals working on it. And then, lets say I quote $35,000 USD nonrefundable engineering fees or labor and overheads for 1000+ manhours. That's about the cost of a secretary with an associates degree from my home state in WV. What do I usually hear? Crickets. I hear nothing back because people are too busy expecting that they are going to work with a factory here in China and get something for nothing.
I see I have a lot to learn about. (I'm very curious where I should start. On the one hand I'm yet another confused tangle of dime-a-dozen ideas, but on the other hand I do think I have the patience and determination to manage a couple of them down the track a bit.)
Reading this makes me think of the line "Reproduced by (...) from camera-ready copy supplied by the authors." at the front of one of the textbooks I have upstairs. It sounds like I could eliminate significant cost by applying similar diligence and aiming to deliver complete specifications that are immediately usable. I presume it's possible to request that mistakes be pointed out so I can do the work to correct them on my end. That said, I say this 100% naively; I wouldn't be surprised if this is actually infeasible :)
> And in the end, they are all wondering "why didn't I get what I tried to buy from China?"
I remember having a brief conversation with someone selling kitchen supplies at a kiosk in a local mall (IIRC) many years ago about manufacturing arbitrary things in China versus elsewhere. That's when I learned that the main reason "Made in China" has such a bad reputation is because it's the customers on the non-China end that are always trying to "optimize" their costs - and that end quality was judged acceptable by sampling at the receiving end, not the source.
That's kinda saddening, but it seems that the prices people expect to pay for different things have been pretty much been locked-in since the manufacturing boom of the ~60s-80s, so anybody who wants to pay the factories a tiny bit more for better output quality is going to have a very hard time competing.
The angle I've been coming from here is biased a bit towards manufacturing in general - I've mentioned toys, everyday objects, etc, as I have little awareness of the technical/industrial side of manufacturing at this point.
I've also done some prototyping in Shenzhen. CNC and 3D printed parts are cheap. If you've modeled it, everything apart from the membrane itself should be straightforward (and cheap in small quantities, <100USD). DirtySLA and itead provided cheap SLA printing options.
The membrane itself is likely more problematic. But you can make FPCBs, flexible circuit boards. In small quantities and at relatively low cost. Because the membrane is quite large I'd guess maybe 500USD? Getting domes in it probably is harder. I wonder if you can deform Polymide in some kind of jig. Alternatively could add a thin, 3d printed spacer perhaps?
If you really wanted to do it properly, I don't think that would be massively expensive either. Having a prototype might help. There are a bunch of companies that /do/ agree to do small runs. And I know many people how have done this. Often you end up having to visit the factory a bunch to push them to do what you want, and have occasional failures. But it's often still far easier than it might be elsewhere.
Wow, you figured the LCD out. I'm very curious how the LCD actually works - how is it updated? Through some kind of serial protocol? I get the impression it's pretty fast - I made a program in OPL a while ago that created a borderless window a metric stupid number of pixels high and EPOC was able to scroll it up the screen remarkably quickly (I was trying to see whether it could do haptic scrolling, it definitely could). It also seemed that I could drag windows around the screen faster than the liquid crystals could keep up - there was no choppiness here, it was rather an organic problem, so the LCD controller bandwidth/implementation seemed really good.
Flexible circuit boards are such a cool technology. To clarify, though, you're saying the Psion's keyboard is large? I presume the $500 is for initial tooling and that individual membranes will be a couple of dollars to run.
Another keyboard approach I think is really cool is that found in the original BlackBerry 850/950. I've admittedly only seen pictures of these but it looks quite usable.
> If you really wanted to do it properly, I don't think that would be massively expensive either.
That's incredibly encouraging, thanks.
> Having a prototype might help. There are a bunch of companies that /do/ agree to do small runs.
Oh okay, cool to know.
> And I know many people how have done this.
:D
> Often you end up having to visit the factory a bunch to push them to do what you want, and have occasional failures.
Hmm, plane tickets...
> But it's often still far easier than it might be elsewhere.
Duly noted. Thanks.
The interface is pretty standard, so the gumstix (TI OMAP3something) can also drive it.
The keyboard is pretty big for a FPCB. I'm just guess 500USD, for maybe 10 pieces. Because that's the prototype level pricing I've seen before (check itead.cc or Seeed, they both do FPCB now I believe).
The process they actual use in membrane keyboards is different, I don't know what that process is called.
While highly nonstandard, but I want to see how feasible it is to truly drive an LCD directly. To me that sounds like a) huge pin count, b) "fun" prototyping costs, and c) difficult conversations with manufacturers who don't want to explain how their controllers work (and I guess d) a lot of work on my end to support all the different LCDs I'll use). My motivation is to see whether it's possible to control an LCD and touch panel or keyboard from a single chip.
> The interface is pretty standard, so the gumstix (TI OMAP3something) can also drive it.
Good to know.
> The keyboard is pretty big for a FPCB. I'm just guess 500USD, for maybe 10 pieces. Because that's the prototype level pricing I've seen before (check itead.cc or Seeed, they both do FPCB now I believe).
Oh okay, so $50ea for prototyping. Cool.
> The process they actual use in membrane keyboards is different, I don't know what that process is called.
Okay then.
There's a chip on the FPCB bonded to the LCD matrix.
> While highly nonstandard, but I want to see how feasible it is to truly drive an LCD directly.
I guess you'd probably need to use an FPGA to do that. I can't see an advantage to doing this (there might be one, but I can't see it).
I was curious about integrating LCD control into a single processor because the security implications are really interesting. Just an idea at this point though.
I remember looking inside cheap electronic organizers and seeing a lone blob on the PCB. So I know managing simple LCDs is doable.