It was a decision made just five days before it happened, but it led to so much fun and very engaging learning experience, with such a great people (and cheap food)!
I have also taken the infamous How to Make Almost Anything at MIT, but it was more than a year ago, and coming from more software background, it was a very nervous and intimidating decision to make. Arriving at China, forgetting about the VPN, and definitely not familiar with the entire WeChat and Allipay ecosystem, and arriving a day late due to my other commitments, it was definitely not a easy start. But soon, seeing so many very nice people at the Scalable HCI and few friends I knew from MIT, things started to get easier.
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I would say beyond the ScalableHCI, the most eye-opening experience was the HQB. I have never seen such a Disney place of Hardware, with every components you could have imagined!!!! Few of us also went to a place with a lot of motors as well.
During the first week of factory visits, and getting adjusted to Shenzhen, I met my amazing collaborator Yuxiang after giving a talk about rings (and frequently encountering from our apartment), and very supportive Seeed family including Ellie and Violet. We were able to start from sourcing components, testing, designing PCBs, and getting an FPC prototype !
Testing worked, so I was also able to start with some Firmware stuff.
https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/d33b0c7d-00b2-47d6-bbd1-fecc08d38d24
We just shipped components to factories for FPCBA, all thanks to Seeed.
Ending with infinite fruits from Spa Decompression, I’m still dreaming of.
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