Yaghmour: Ten Days in Shenzhen

On his blog, embedded developer Karim Yaghmour has written about his ten-day trip to Shenzen, China, which is known as the "Silicon Valley of hardware". His lengthy trip report covers much that would be of use to others who are thinking of making the trip, but also serves as an interesting travelogue even for those who are likely to never go. "The map didn't disappoint and I was able to find a large number of kiosks selling some of the items I was interested in. Obviously many kiosks also had items that I had seen on Amazon or elsewhere as well. I was mostly focusing on things I hadn't seen before. After a few hours of walking floors upon floors of shops, I was ready to start focusing on other aspects of my research: hard to source and/or evaluate components, tools and expanding my knowledge of what was available in the hardware space. Hint: TEGES' [The Essential Guide to Electronics in Shenzhen] advice about having comfortable shoes and comfortable clothing is completely warranted.Finding tools was relatively easy. TEGES indicates the building and floor to go to, and you'll find most anything you can think of from rework stations, to pick-and-place machines, and including things like oscilloscopes, stereo microscopes, multimeters, screwdrivers, etc. In the process I saw some tools which I couldn't immediately figure out the purpose for, but later found out their uses on some other visits. Satisfied with a first glance at the tools, I set out to look for one specific component I was having a hard time with. That proved a lot more difficult than anticipated. Actually I should qualify that. It was trivial to find tons of it, just not something that matched exactly what I needed. I used TEGES to identify one part of the market that seemed most likely to have what I was looking for, but again, I could find lots of it, just not what I needed."