One aspect of Shenzhen’s lubricant effect on creative hardware design is the ready availability of building blocks for any hardware engineering project. Our office is located at Huaqiangbei, right in the middle of all the huge electronics markets. We are always sharing the elevator with large carts full of capacitors. And we are steps away from millions of LEDs, passive components, integrated circuits, shanzhai mobile phones, PCB manufacturers, and tons of useful tools.

It’s not quite to the point where plutonium is available at every corner drugstore, but we can probably get all the parts we need to build a flux capacitor within a three-block radius. Check it out!

Some survival phrases for the electronics markets. No accents, alas. The very last one seems crucial.

The LED market sign we passed every day during the first week, walking from hotel to office.

There are lots of markets, SEG being probably the best known, but Duhui is our go-to general electronics market since it’s right across the street. Ready to go inside…?

Inside are rows upon rows of tiny stalls. Bottom floors are very basic components: resistors, capacitors, leds. As you ascend, you’ll encounter integrated circuits, arduinos, cable assemblies and other more complex stuff.

A lot of people working at these markets have their young children with them. They’re sliding down one of the ramps that are meant for carts. (Note: these ramps are EVERYWHERE in downtown Shenzhen. Every set of stairs, it seems, has a ramp built in that’s far too steep for a wheelchair, but fine for a human-steered cart, or for walking a bike.)

The variety of specific subtypes of electronic things is staggering, and the displays kind of remind me of a candy store. Lots of obscure batteries here, I think, and maybe some very large capacitors.

Huge variety of USB connectors, and some power jacks.

Have some ultrabright LEDs!

More connectors, this time the Molex type (I know that’s the brand, but it’s like kleenex to me), JST connectors, assorted switches and buttons.

LED displays like this are sitting on nearly every vendor table inside Duhui Electronics. It looks really festive.

Every one of these is handmade, likely by the sellers themselves, so there’s a wide variety. Here you can see that these are just hand-soldered in parallel into a perf board, with a few really high-wattage current-limiting 220ohm resistors.

We ended up buying from this person because she had a clean display that had a lot  of specs (relative to the others) written down for each LED. Presumably, if we spoke Chinese, we could ask and the vendors would know all this stuff, but our communication is not great. I wonder if this particular vendor does especially good business with foreigners.

To get around our inability to communicate, we shop with datasheets. Part numbers are a universal language. Rigid, reliable categorization here supports our creative improvisations.

Another approach is to go find this lady, Madame Cai. She speaks pretty good English, at least in this specific domain, and will get on the phone and source all of your parts in about 20 minutes, then have them delivered to you later that afternoon. Or the next day if Chinese New Year is just winding down. She charges a bit more, but can save a shopper several hours of search time. For a more in-depth article about Madame Cai, with other wonderful observations about electronics shopping in Shenzhen, you should check out Silvia’s post on transfabric.

Outside (I guess these are the back doors, but they’re just as accessible as the front) there are always carts waiting, being loaded, leaving, coming back. A lot of them head up the elevators of our office building. This part of Shenzhen is full of carts, always moving, transporting electronic components and assemblages.

Some of the factories we’ve visited (more on that in the near future) have seemed very Big and Corporate — exactly what you’d expect when you think about globalization and business. But a lot of exchange, the distribution and selling of component parts, happens at markets like this, that have a vital, organic, “mom and pop” feel to them. But the smallness of the shops doesn’t mean they’re dealing in small orders — not at all. 100,000 surface mount capacitors are easy enough to transport on a bike, and these people are mostly working with large-volume orders. It’s pretty anticlimactic when we come in and ask for 10, or even 100 of something.

If you own a mobile phone, a computer, any number of consumer electronic devices and accessories, you almost certainly own some parts that have been traded through this market, or one of the similar ones right next door.

And if you can’t get it at this market, you can find it on taobao. As far as I know, there’s nothing you can’t find on taobao, up and an including a fake boyfriend.

If you want to know more about what we’re doing here in Shenzhen, take moment to visit fabule.com and sign up for our mailing list. We don’t spam or share your info, we’ll just occasionally let you know when we make something really cool.

We came to Shenzhen to participate in a startup accelerator for entrepreneurs dealing with hardware. These sorts of businesses have particular joys, needs, and pitfalls, and with material sourcing and production so central to our practice, location really really matters. So when we got accepted to HAXLR8R and were presented with this opportunity, of course, we jumped on it without hesitation, and worked our tails off until Jan 20, when we left Montréal for Shenzhen (via Hong Kong, just across the border).

With very little free time to research things before we left, we arrived in Shenzhen with no idea what to expect. Everything we’d been exposed to in media and rumour led us to believe that we’d be entering the dark underbelly of piracy, a manufacturing-heavy trademark-deficient safety-tenth hazy dystopia. I mean, hey, we came, so clearly we were taking it all with a grain of salt, but we’re coming here to work and find our fortune rather than to find a pleasant place to live.

And yeah, the air here is not great. Above is the clinic I had to go to for a small pharmacy’s worth of asthma meds. (I photographed the Chinese address so we could direct a taxi there.) The air here is decidedly worse than in Bangkok or LA. But it is pretty much the same as Hong Kong, and much better than either Shanghai or Beijing, which has been in the news for record levels of deadly air pollution. All the foreigners here have an app or widget on their phone that measures air quality in near real time. LA’s is usually around 25-50. Shenzhen anywhere from 80-180 (but mostly in the low to mid 100′s), which is considered unhealthy in the US. Shanghai has been above 200 quite a lot lately. Beijing has recently exceeded 500 several times. That’s right around where AQI stops being very useful because it’s just not scaled for pollution levels that high.

I got some inhalers. I got some face masks. No one else I know is significantly bothered by the air quality here, but I am a delicate flower.

We stayed at a business hotel for the first week, where I learned that the kind of men who do business in Shenzhen might sometimes be a little sketchy. The manicure kit seems somehow guilty by association, so I avoided cutting my nails. There was a massage / sauna place in the hotel, right next to the restaurant. They even give you a coupon for it! Don’t ask how I know this, but I am pretty sure that it’s a legit massage place before 7pm, and something entirely dodgier after. In other arenas of sketch, we were located right next to THE big shanzhai cell phone market, where I hear you can find a phone that looks AND WORKS exactly like an apple magic mouse. It’s a phone. And it’s a mouse. Cuz why carry both? Our friend Silvia saw a bunch of people in a room packing up tons of phones in boxes, but moved on quickly when a big scary (apparently) Eastern European guy gave her the stink-eye. I bet her we’d see him at the sauna later that night.

So there is a bit of that “dark underbelly” element, with a significant dash of (largely delightful) weirdness.

Weird hotel adventures aside, Shenzhen is a really liveable city. There’s a big middle class here. Leopard print is in. It’s pretty clean, but not so creepily clean as Tokyo. The subway goes lots of places and runs smoothly and frequently. People are pretty nice — much nicer than in Beijing*, both in our experience and according to everything others have told us. It’s a young city. Someone cited the totally unconfirmed (but rather plausible) statistic that the average age here is 27. Babies, children, and pregnant women everywhere, which is probably partly due to the average age here, and partly due to our proximity to Hong Kong. (I believe that under some circumstances, if you give birth outside of China, and Hong Kong counts in this case, you get an extra kid under the current One Child Policy.)

* I’m starting a rumour that Beijing cab drivers are the product of a failed eugenics program that bred people for maximum nastiness in an attempt to create super-soldiers for the People’s Liberation Army. Pass it on.

The first week we were here, lots of companies were having their end-of-year parties at various big restaurants around town, complete with music, stage performances, and numerous speeches, toasts, and dinner courses.

During Chinese New Year, Shenzhen looks like San Francisco during Burning Man but with more bottled water left on the shelves — everyone goes back to their home town. Like ourselves, hardly anyone who lives here is actually from here. Those who stayed set off fireworks on the first night of the new year, which seemed to come from every alley and rooftop around our building. The next few days each have their own meanings and traditions. Day five is dedicated to the god of money, and on that night, we heard almost as many firecrackers as we did on New Year’s Eve itself.

Wyld Collective is in Shenzhen!

We’ve been rather quiet in our preparations for our four-month-long move to Shenzhen, just telling clients, family, and a few friends. But now we can announce that we’re here, and why we’ve come.

There have been a few posts on the Wyld blog about these cute little lamps, maybe some moustache-shaped hangers, a picture or two from Maker Faire. Well, these are all part of a greater plan to develop a line of hackable housewares. We’re spinning this project off into a startup called Fabule. There’s even a little website up.

Fabule from Wyld Collective on Vimeo.

At Fabule, we’re anticipating the growth of mixed manufacturing. On the one hand, mass-manufacture of electronics has become increasingly accessible, which has facilitated a growing market for DIY electronic kits. More and more people are creatively engaging with hardware, which is absolutely awesome. On the other hand, 3D printing, lasercutting, and small-batch CNC manufacturing have also become increasingly available, both as services, and as machines affordable enough for individuals and small businesses to consider owning. What’s missing, so far, are design methods (and designed products) that use this manufacturing ecosystem to create objects of great beauty and practicality as well as uniqueness. This is where we’re taking Fabule.

So first things first: we’re going to make some lamps. Some really cool lamps. Lamps that you can hack and repair and customize. Lamps are the simplest thing. We’re going to perfect those before we move on to clocks and toys and ambient displays and internets of things and lowering the barriers for product designers to make cool objects and taking over the world and stuff.

We’re being helped along in this quest by HAXLR8R, a hardware-focused startup accelerator based here in Shenzhen. For the next 111 days we’ll be rapidly iterating through electronic and material prototypes in the world’s hot-bed of manufacturing, facilitated by Seeed Studio and some other mentors. Look for us in the San Francisco Bay Area on May 17, our demo day, and probably at Maker Faire directly after.

And keep reading right here to learn about our Shenzhen adventures as they happen.

It’s hangin’ pretty well here at Wyld Collective Headquarters.

We’re trying out a fun new mini-project: Moustache Clothes Hangers! We’re getting some prototypes of it ready to show at the Montreal Mini Maker Faire, and anticipating that we should be able to sell some small batches this fall. These cardboard prototypes are hot off the laser cutter (seriously, they still smell like campfire), but we’re already picking out some nice wood for the final product.

And it’s not just for sleeveless thingies either: there are many different types of moustaches, on which you can hang many different types of clothes. A Tom Selleck or a Freddy Mercury might be better suited for, well… suits.

During April, we did a bunch of work on this project, designing and redesigning the circuit boards for reliability and reconfigurability. What we’ve ended up with is pretty compact: a board for power regulation that is smaller than the battery case (this version runs on 3AAAs) and an attachable/detachable board for the LEDs, about the size of a quarter.

Here’s a few fun features!

• You can place the button wherever you want when you assemble the kit.
• Great power management: plugging the light into AC vs. running it off of batteries will switch the resistance of the circuit so that the LEDs always received the optimal amount of current. This means that they glow brightly on batteries, but stay within spec when plugged in. Running too much current through LEDs shortens their life, so controlling the current in this way means that the LEDs will last a really long time.
• Use rechargeable or disposable batteries — a small jumper on the board lets you optimize for either.
• The LED board can plug straight into the power board if you want them all in one place, or you can separate them… it depends entirely on what you want your light to look like.

We also made two different enclosures to demonstrate a couple of the different forms the finished light can take. This summer, we’re working on even more!

We showed this project at China’s first Maker Carnival in Beijing at the end of April, and then at the Bay Area Maker Faire in late May. We received tons of great feedback and advice from people at these events, and we’re busy improving Luciole to be cheaper and easier to assemble.

We’re currently working on setting up an online store, as well. If you’re interested in buying a kit or learning more, email us at info [at] wyldco.com

This post does NOT cover the use of the Twilio library, because we simply haven’t had the need for it for this project. The next steps explain how to receive, and reply to SMS messages that are sent to a Twilio number, with Twilio set to make requests to a CakePHP app.

This example is intended for CakePHP 2.1, because it makes this process so easy, but a few tweaks will make it work with earlier versions.

1. Setup a Twilio number, and a TwiML application.
If you got to this point in the post, your should know what Twilio is. You can use the number that comes with the trial version, but we decided to purchase a number that we’ll keep around to test this project, and future ones.

After you purchase the number, you’ll be taken to a page where you can enter the Request URLs that Twilio will call when it receives Voice call and SMS messages. You could enter Request URLs directly here, but don’t worry about those for now, we will create a TwiML application instead. One reason why we prefer using a TwiML application is because it makes it easier to switch quickly between development urls and production urls.

While in your account, open the ‘Apps’ tab, and create a new TwiML app. You should see a field for the name, and sections for the Voice, and below, the SMS parameters. Name the app something funky, and in the SMS section, look for the field where you can enter the Request URL that Twilio will call. Our Request URL looks something like this: http://fancydomain.com/twilio/installations/receive_sms.xml

Here are the different parts, and how they relate to our CakePHP project:

• fancydomain.com – just the domain, nothing special here.
• twilio – this is optional, but we use the twilio prefix to make our code more readable.
• installations – this is our controller, yours will probably be different.
• receive_sms – this is our action that receives an SMS message, and sends a response.
• xml – last but not least, the file extension that controls the view to output the xml response.

The next few steps will cover the changes (or additions) you need to make to your CakePHP app so that each parts of the Request URL is treated correctly.

2. Setting up the Twilio prefix
This part is optional. If you remove ‘/twilio’ from the URL, you can skip this step. If you decide to not use this, just remember not to include the ‘twilio_’ prefix in your action name when you get to step 4.

All that is required is one line in your ‘app/Config/core.php’ file. Find the line that configures ‘Routing.prefixes’, and change it to the following to setup the ‘twilio’ prefix. We already had the ‘admin’ prefix so ours looks like this:

Configure::write('Routing.prefixes', array('admin', 'twilio'));

3. Parsing the file extension in the router
Another easy step, we need a single line in ‘app/Config/routes.php’ to handle the ‘.xml’ extension of our Request URL. Adding the following line — we added it at the beginning — will tell CakePHP to switch to the XmlView to render the response as XML.

Router::parseExtensions('xml');

4. Add the action
In our Request URL we specified, first, the ‘twilio’ prefix, then the ‘installations’ controller, and finally the ‘receive_sms’ action, so we need to create the following function in ‘app/Controller/InstallationsController.php’:

public function twilio_receive_sms() {
  //make sure we have a post request
  if (!$this->request->is('post')) {
    throw new MethodNotAllowedException();
  }

  //find the correct installation using the twilio phone number
  $installation = $this->Installation->findByPhone($this->request->data['To']);
  if ($installation == null) {
    return;
  }

  $message = array(
    'installation_id' => $installation['Installation']['id'],
    'source' => $this->request->data['From'],
    'message'=> $this->request->data['Body'],
  );

  $this->Installation->Message->create();
  if (!$this->Installation->Message->save($message)) {
    return;
  }

  //send response
  $this->set('response', array(
    'Response' => array(
      'Sms' => 'Thank you!',
    )
  ));
  $this->set('_serialize', 'response');
}

A few notes about this code before we move on. At the top, we check to make sure the action is called from a POST request. If you specified GET instead of POST in your TwiML application, then you should check for the same method your assigned to your Request URL. Then, for our project, each installation object is matched with a Twilio number, so we find the installation with the ‘findByPhone’ method, passing it the ‘To’ field that Twilio passed to the Request URL. We then create a message array, but in this case, we only need the ‘From’ and ‘Body’ fields. If you want to know what data Twilio passes, you should read the Twilio SMS Request page in their documentation. After that, we create and save a message object linked to the correct installation. Finally we create an array for the response object, and make sure we set the ‘_serialize’ variable so that the XmlView will know to output the content of the ‘response’ variable as XML, following the instructions for the JSON and XML views of CakePHP.

5. Try it!
Give it a go. Send a text message to your Twilio number, and if you set up everything correctly, you should receive an SMS reply that says ‘Thank you!’.

We’re kicking this series off with something very inexpensive. The item I’m writing about today is post-it glue, available from Staples for $2.04. I mean, obviously post-its are useful, everyone knows that. But not many people know that you can actually buy glue sticks that will let you turn anything into a post-it. Seriously, try it. It’s a little bit scary how satisfying it is to postitify all the arbitrary pieces of paper in your life. We found this stuff a little over a year ago, and have been using it since. Whenever we do any paper prototyping, it goes into heavy rotation.

The fun and challenge of sketching and prototyping is to craft something that’s at the proper resolution to teach you something. A prototype that looks too polished is liable to intimidate the person you’re asking to critique it; it looks too close to done, and suggestions for major changes would feel out of line. Anyway, too much detail too early is a waste of time, since you’re going to revise everything as you go. And yet, at least parts of your prototype need to be detailed enough to discern opportunities and problems, to imagine what it would be like in use. How much detail to include, and where to put it, depends a lot on what you’re trying to learn from the prototype. In my experience, you may need to include a convincing-looking animation in a prototype, even when everything else can look sketchy and wireframey, if (for example) you’re trying to figure out how a certain component can grab the user’s attention.

So the great thing about post-it glue is that it gives you unlimited ability to create removable and replaceable parts for your paper prototype while retaining just the look and feel you want. This helped us stretch the principles of paper prototyping to apply not just to conventional screen interfaces (though we do those, too), but to prototyping spatial and tangible interactions. If you’re testing, say, the playability of a scavenger-hunt type game, you can’t just sketch components onto a post-it and expect them to be legible from across the room… you want to print out something clear, clean and iconic and turn it into a post-it.

In the gallery below, you can see how we used post-it glue to fake a sequence of system actions and reactions scattered among many screens all around a room.

A while back we did this really fun project designing an exhibit about the International Space Station with some guys from gsmprjct, due to open at the Cosmodôme in Laval this last winter. We helped brainstorm the concept for the ISS portion of the exhibit, and then came up with some game mechanics and put together the interaction design to get a whole group of visitors to work together gathering components from all over the world to assemble the International Space Station. We also developed a deep and abiding love for cosmonauts and their moustaches.

So we ran across some promotional videos and some pictures of how the exhibit turned out. (The video’s in French, FYI.)

And there are some lovely pictures up on the Cosmodôme’s Facebook page. (#9 and #1 are the room we worked on.)

We’ll have some more photos of the final project to post here soon!

luciole is simplicity itself. It’s a kit for building adaptable, rechargeable lights. It’s a great first-time project for someone who wants to learn about electronics (or teach their kid). But we wanted to go above and beyond what most electronics kits offer you.

We’re putting a lot of thought into the design of the circuit boards for luciole, aiming to create something that you can assemble and reassemble into lots of different shapes. This gives you the freedom to create whatever form you want for your light, and to change that form if you change your mind.

Moreover, if you want something with a little more polish, we’ll be offering a few different kinds of cases designed specifically for luciole. Forget about finishing your assembly and ending up with a bare PCB, or stuffing it inside an altoids tin (which, OK, sometimes conveys a sense of DIY-chic, but you want other options, don’t you?). luciole gives you the sense of know-how and ownership that comes with hacking your own electronics, but if you’ve got it on display when your grandparents come over, they won’t think you’re a crazy bomb-maker. They’ll just think you have great taste.

You can assemble the components on these guys in various different ways — whatever suits your purpose. The center piece of the PCB where the LEDs attach can pop out of the board.

With LEDs separated from the base and batteries, you can use luciole to make yourself a focal desk lamp. Or you can make something like the cute little hockey puck pictured above for ambient light, using the exact same electronics kit.

The IQ light is versatile, good looking, relatively easy to put together, and in the public domain, so you can do whatever you want with it. Using just a single shape cut from thin plastic or thick paper, you can put together some pretty cool modern-looking polyhedrons. luciole works great inside of these.

We anticipate that we’ll be able to make the bare-bones kits available around May, with some beautiful cases to unveil at the end of the summer. If you are a product designer and/or an awesome crafter, and you’re interested in having some of your work featured on our site, get in touch with us at info [at] wyldco.com

What we’re saying here is basically that innovation and original design work is certainly not limited to university and corporate research settings. This isn’t a competitive threat, it’s awesome for all of us! Open-source hackerly devices like Arduino, Xbees, Makerbots, etc. are making it much easier to create cool tangible interfaces than it was when I started out back in 2004, so we can focus on great interaction design instead of trying to be electrical engineers (which we’re not).

We wrote about Open Source Hardware and hackerspaces in particular. While one is about licensing and the other is about physical space, both of these things allow for the dissemination, development and maturing of good ideas among researchers, professionals, hobbyists, community members, and all kinds of smart and motivated people from a variety of backgrounds.

So this doesn’t just make things easier for professional researchers in tangibles and in interaction design, it means that small-businesses and hobbyists are increasingly turning towards custom-made tangible, spatial, in-the-world interactions. Which is just how we like it.