## The Hardware Hacker ### The Hardware Hacker  #### Metadata * Author: [[Andrew 'bunnie' Huang]] * Full Title: The Hardware Hacker * Category: #books #### Highlights * Of course, my promise to pay for defective product meant there was no incentive for the factory to do a good job. It could have, in theory, just handed me a box of scrap parts and I'd still have had to pay for it. But in reality, nobody had such ill intentions; as long as everyone simply tried their best, they got it right about 80 percent of the time. Since small-volume production costs are dominated by setup and assembly, my bottom line was still better despite throwing away 20 percent of my parts, and I got parts in just a couple of days instead of a couple of weeks. (Location 318) * They're usually held together with screws because it's cheaper to pay someone to screw together a toy over the whole production run than it is to make a steel injection-molding tool with the tolerances necessary for snapping the toys together.* (Location 520) * It's like the old carpenter's saying: measure twice, cut once, and if you have to cut wrong, cut long. (Location 612) * I'm not saying there's no value in domestic vendors: it would be a lot less effort and less risk for me to get stuff made in the United States. In fact, most early prototypes are made there because of the enormous value that the domestic vendors can add. However, the pricing just doesn't work out for a mass-market product. Nobody would buy it, because its price wouldn't justify its feature set. One could even accuse me of being lazy if I were to just stick with a domestic vendor (Location 644) * When I evaluated factories for Chumby, I always visited the quality control (QC) room. I expected to see rows of well-maintained and well-worn binders with design documentation and QC standards, as well as golden samples, which are pre-production samples of a product. I'd demand to see the contents of a random binder and the golden sample associated with it, and verify that the employees knew what was going on in the binder. (Some factories do fill product binders with random data.) (Location 652) # The Hardware Hacker  ## Metadata - Author: [[Andrew 'bunnie' Huang]] - Full Title: The Hardware Hacker - Category: #books ## Highlights - Of course, my promise to pay for defective product meant there was no incentive for the factory to do a good job. It could have, in theory, just handed me a box of scrap parts and I’d still have had to pay for it. But in reality, nobody had such ill intentions; as long as everyone simply tried their best, they got it right about 80 percent of the time. Since small-volume production costs are dominated by setup and assembly, my bottom line was still better despite throwing away 20 percent of my parts, and I got parts in just a couple of days instead of a couple of weeks. (Location 318) - They’re usually held together with screws because it’s cheaper to pay someone to screw together a toy over the whole production run than it is to make a steel injection-molding tool with the tolerances necessary for snapping the toys together.* (Location 520) - It’s like the old carpenter’s saying: measure twice, cut once, and if you have to cut wrong, cut long. (Location 612) - I’m not saying there’s no value in domestic vendors: it would be a lot less effort and less risk for me to get stuff made in the United States. In fact, most early prototypes are made there because of the enormous value that the domestic vendors can add. However, the pricing just doesn’t work out for a mass-market product. Nobody would buy it, because its price wouldn’t justify its feature set. One could even accuse me of being lazy if I were to just stick with a domestic vendor (Location 644) - When I evaluated factories for Chumby, I always visited the quality control (QC) room. I expected to see rows of well-maintained and well-worn binders with design documentation and QC standards, as well as golden samples, which are pre-production samples of a product. I’d demand to see the contents of a random binder and the golden sample associated with it, and verify that the employees knew what was going on in the binder. (Some factories do fill product binders with random data.) (Location 652)