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You are here: Home / Guest Appearance / #414 – An Interview with Scotty Allen (Strangeparts)

#414 – An Interview with Scotty Allen (Strangeparts)

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(image thanks to the Hackaday.io)

Welcome Scotty Allen of Strangeparts.com!

  • Chris and Scotty were just hanging out at Supercon. Scotty gave a talk from there last year.
  • Scotty’s latest video is about making an RFID chip
  • Kitchen Confidential
  • Scotty did software consulting in college and then joined the Google search team.
  • He decided to quit and travel more and was became a “Minimalist by default” when he accidentally set apartment on fire.
  • Blog posts in 2014 had him curious about Shenzhen, including posts from Ian from Dangerous Prototypes.
  • He first visited with Mitch Altman during his yearly tour to China.
  • Greg from RevRobotics makes parts for FRC
  • The process to stay in China
  • WePay (really “WeChat Pay”)
  • QR codes
  • Scotty knows some conversational Chinese, but also relies on Google translate and Microsoft translate (OCR).
  • Videos
    • iPhone
      • Making the phone
      • Bringing back the jack
    • RFID
      • Checking out the stickers
      • 2nd video at Impinge
    • Factory tours
      • JLCPCB
      • Industrial SLA
      • Accidentally went to a hockey stick factory
    • Videoes with Collin Abroadcast in the Yiwu commodities market outside of Shanghai
      • Inside the massive market
      • Cashierless convenience store
  • Places Scotty wants to tour (please contact if you know of any contacts)
    • Silicon fab
    • Batteries – LiPo
    • Injection molding – greg nedall
    • White label modification
  • 100 units
    • Chinese entrepreneurs use local manufacturing
    • iPhone testing board (also pictured above) is a good example
    • Intermeshed network of specialized manufacturing
    • People shop around for quality/relationships
  • Finding factories
    • Moving outside of Shenzhen
    •  Mismatched expectations
  • Chinese entrepreneurs
    • Moving upmarket
    • Shanzai phones
    • Made in China 2025
    • 100 year plan with 5 year plan segments
  • Scotty doesn’t plan to start a QVC channel
  • DSLR video shooter
  • Video
    • Background in video/theater
    • Story telling
    • Quest
  • The Engineers journey
    • Any complex project goes through the heroes journey
    • The only way through is to change who they are as a person
  • There are two ways the story can finish
    • Succeed
    • Explaining why it can’t be done
  • Battery stories with past guest Steve Kreuzer
  • Boards brought from the market
  • Scotty is growing the Strangeparts team, namely looking for a COO.
  • Contact Scotty on
    • Twitter @strangepartscom
  • Scotty@strangeparts.com

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Comments

  1. Слободан says

    November 6, 2018 at 4:51 am

    Good guest. But I am still waiting for Clive Mitchel (bigclivedotcom).

  2. Nicer online says

    November 7, 2018 at 10:18 am

    I’ve listened to every TAH episode. Some have been harder to listen to than others.
    This one is the worst I can recall.
    A lucky millennial pretending to know about electronics, trying to monetize becoming a personality.
    The valley-girl way of speaking, ending every statement as a question, I can tolerate.

    It’s just the total lack of content that was frustrating.

    • Chris Gammell says

      November 7, 2018 at 10:49 am

      In the past two days, I’ve now read the term “millennial” meant as a pejorative. It isn’t, any more than saying “baby boomer” (and arguably there’s a lot more to be mad about with the latter group). Regardless, I’m starting to think we may have ourselves a troll problem here.

      Sorry you didn’t like the interview, though. I thought Scotty was fascinating. His insight into the Chinese ecosystem was a lot healthier than many I’ve heard and his curiosity about the world is a very redeeming feature.

Trackbacks

  1. Ergs Per Second | The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast says:
    November 11, 2018 at 6:53 pm

    […] Scotty from Strange Parts (our guest last week) gave Chris iPad PCBs, which were pretty thin! […]

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