The Hardware Hacker: Adventures in Making and Breaking Hardware

Great book for people who want to know what working with manufacturers in Shenzhen is all about.For anyone who doesn't know, there's a renaissance currently in computer parts. Maybe you're learning to program with Arduino or connecting parts to a Raspberry Pi. Maybe you're learning to solder a kit and need a cheap LCP screen. Maybe you have the next big idea for a connected IoT device. Any computer part you want- an mp3 player board, capacitors, SD card readers, sky's the limit- can be gotten from China at jaw-dropping-low prices. But, you have to know your sources. You have to be able to read a datasheet, to deal with ordering through Mouser or AliExpress, and to avoid dangerous counterfeits. If you're in this world, you must read this book. Do it now.Pros: Gives you real-world tours of Chinese factories and processes, warts and all. The author ended up working right on the line, teaching assembly line workers how to debug his product or how to install anti-RF "cans" to protect his chips. This is the 100% down and dirty of how Chinese knockoff electronics work, how they're made, and how you can take advantage of this market to get your product made. He talks about combing through racks of knockoff SD cards and discovering which were counterfeit- and sometimes even the company responsible was reselling these counterfeit parts! The counterfeit SD cards were breaking his devices, so there's a ton to learn and study on how supply lines work and how to operate safely when sourcing parts for a product.Cons: The product the author was making for most of the book is Chumby... which was terrible. It's an overly expensive internet device. It's wrapped in Italian leather and priced like a premium product, yet it has a terrible low-resolution screen seriously limiting its uses. It's just a bad idea all over. You kind of wish he was making a product that had some market feasibility, because it makes you distrust his judgement elsewhere. I think his hardware skills are all in order so I trust his factory stories, but the kid is/was terrible at reading the market before launching a product.Overall, it's a must-read for hardware hackers. I really want to do a field trip to Shenzhen and buy a $5 cell phone just to play with it. Maybe get a sleeve of SD cards just to see how many actually work. Who knows what you'll find.

Bunnie Huang, you're awesome! I am very grateful to the author for taking time to put this together. Even though I've had a career full of hardware, software, and intellectual property, this book makes me want to call him up and ask for a job. How can you not want to work with a guy like this? His obvious technical skill makes him someone to admire. Combine that with his enthusiasm and fearlessness about learning and experimenting, and you have someone that is truly inspiring. This book teaches you a lot about what it's like to take an idea from concept, to finished product. You also learn a good deal about the Chinese manufacturing culture. A real eye-opener for me. The really great part about this book is that you learn the lessons presented in the best way possible - painlessly. It feels like you are right there with the author, experiencing the discoveries, the highs and the lows, yourself. One of the best books I've read in a while - I really didn't want to put it down, but I had to sleep sometime!But wait - there's more! Near the end of the book, the author compares hacking hardware to hacking biology, and extends the analogy by comparing the structure and tools used to analyze DNA to those used for debugging a computer program. The end result is a demonstration that uses the H1N1 virus (swine flu) to show how many corrupted "bytes" it takes to make human sick. And how decoding the viral DNA sheds light on its strengths and weaknesses. Fascinating.

Andrew "bunnie" Huang's new book "The Hardware Hacker" is full of surprises. The most notable is that the final chapter is all about biohacking from a reverse engineering hardware developer perspective. While you might know Bunnie as a guru of reverse engineering he admits at the end of the book that he flipped a coin when he went to MIT about his major. The EE side of the coin toss won, but biology was the road not taken.As an open hardware developer I loved the first nine chapters. Bunnie shares all of his trials and experiences offering many valuable lessons about designing hardware which he learned the hard way. He goes further than most and gets into laptop, phone and FPGA adventures where as many of us have not ventured passed simple microcontroller projects. The book is easy to follow as it is loaded with stories, people and factories from around the world."The Hardware Hacker's" final chapter blew my mind. Bunnie dives into H1N1 virus compared to computer viruses, analyzing DNA sequences with UNIX CLI tools, decompiling protein sequences and patching our genome. These topics are often explained by biologists, but it was much easier to absorb when the biology was explained with hardware analogies.

For anyone who DOESN'T know who Bunnie Huang is, but who either aspires to BE an electrical engineer, or who just loves hardware hacking, arduino hacking, or watches EEVblog.. I highly recommend it!Once I found out bunnie was the guy behind the Novena open-source laptop, I skipped right to that chapter and couldn't put the book down. I loved hearing all the prototyping stories, the wisdom of going to a fab-lab to see the build process first hand, the logic behind the various design decisions and gotchas to watch out for.. Lots of good wisdom for prototype design and working with Chinese sources and fab shops.It gives you a real feel of what's needed if you're going to get into crowd sourcing open hardware designs.. or even how university researchers need to look beyond the old way of doing funded research (demo or die), and look into the new crowd source research funding model and doing "deliver it or die".Now I need to start following this guy.

Livro bem abrangente sobre hardware em todos os níveis

I've been reading Bunnie's posts for years. It's awesome to have all that important knowledge in one publication!

If you like this stuff you're gunna love this book,

Very informative

Immer wieder hört man hier zu Lande: billiger "China Schortt", das kaufe ich nicht. Liesst man dieses Buch versteht man endlich, das in den Fabriken hochmotivierte und bestens ausgebildete Leute sitzen, die sich den Arsch aufreißen und dabei viel zu wenig verdienen, damit alle auf der Welt freudig konsumieren können. In der Produktionslinien werden an einem Tag iPhones und an anderem Tag Teddybären zusammen geschustert von ein und den selben Leuten. Es gibt keinen billigen "China Schrott", es sei denn er wurde HIER explizit bestellt.Einen Punkt Abzug, da die ganzen Bilder nur in Graustufen und für mich schlecht erkennbar sind.