https://news.microsoft.com/2012/01/11/memo-from-bill-gates
And other useful stuff:
Andrew "Bunnie" Huang - Xbox Hacking:
My best advice to aspiring hardware hackers is to be persistent and to be thorough. Significantly, persistence and thoroughness come naturally if you love what you are doing. Also, part of being a hardware hacker is being a pack rat. Buying new equipment is prohibitively expensive, so I accumulate broken and depreciated equipment and tools habitually, even if I don’t know exactly what I might do with them, or if I can fix them. It turns out that trying to fix test equipment is a learning experience in itself, and can be quite rewarding even if the conclusion is to junk the darn thing for spare parts.
Intuition - Pattern Matching - Experimentation!
Before attaching anything to the Xbox, turn it upside-down and shake it gently to ensure that there are no loose screws or parts that you might have accidentally dropped into the Xbox. A loose screw will spell the end of your video game console and presents a potential fire hazard, so this is a worthwhile check if you have any doubt in your mind.
My advisor at MIT, Tom Knight, once told me, “There are two kinds of designs in this world: those that are useful, and those that you can formally prove to be correct.”
Do you have any advice you’d like to share? (Interviewing Andy Green)
My final thought is to encourage people, especially young people, to listen to their brain when it comes to things that interest them. Don't be afraid to dig around and try to learn about things that snag your attention. That feeling you get when you wish you understood something, a kind of yearning, is your brain's way of telling you that it thinks the knowledge might be useful later. If you listen to it enough, you stand a good chance of knowing the right thing at the right time to make some small difference.
You should have an idea of how big you want the final board to be, how much it should cost, and of course what it should do. I always find it helpful to draw sketches and, in the case of large projects, to write design documents that help me organize and record my thoughts.
Andrew Huang: Hardware Hacking
One reason I write is to solidify my own understanding of complicated subjects. It’s easy to believe you understand a topic until you try to explain it to someone else in a rigorous fashion. Writing is how I distill my intuition into structured knowledge; I only write when I find something interesting to write about, and then I post it with a CC BY-SA license to encourage others to share it.
I made friends at several medium-sized factories in the area (ShenZhen). I started to inquire about how, exactly, these factories were able to so nimbly produce their internal test equipment, and how shanzhai were able to prototype and build such bespoke phones.
The bosses and engineers were initially reticent, not because they wanted to hide potential competitive advantages from me, but because they were ashamed of their practices.
Ans : Don't be picky. So what if you have to reach in the scrap bin? If what you find is suitable, use it! (Pg 21 of 436)
Three blocks down the street from SEG lay the Shenzhen Bookstore. The first and most visible rack was a foreign book section, packed with classics like Stanford University professor Thomas Lee’s The Design of CMOS Radio-Frequency Integrated Circuits and several titles by UCLA professor Behzad Razavi. I picked up Lee’s book, and it cost 68 kuai, or $8.50 USD. Holy cow! Jin Au Kong’s book on Maxwell’s equations? $5. Jin Au Kong taught me Maxwell’s equations at MIT.
(Quiet aside: Bunnie is a super engineer, MIT pedigree, etc. How come he couldn't make Chumby a success and Tony Faddel could with Next, and iPod and iPhone? What does Tony know that Bunnie doesn't?)
民以食为天 - min yi shi wei tian - people consider food divine - for people, food is next to heaven - the government's mandate is only as good as the food on peoples' plates
It’s absolutely mesmerizing to see a chip shooter in action. The chip shooters at the chumby PCB assembly factory were capable of placing 10,000 to 20,000 components per hour, per machine. This means that each machine could put down 3 to 6 components per second. The robotic assemblies move faster than the eye can see, and it all turns into an awe-inspiring blur. The chip shooter I saw at the chumby factory worked something like a Gatling gun: the chip gun itself was fixed, and the board danced around beneath the gun.
.. coming soon
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