A few thousand words are used to describe a huge number of components. This installment of the comic uses “only the ten hundred words people use the most often” to explain all the parts of a rocket. It’s a very accurate analogy, and once non-Chinese speakers grasp this they are able to more accurately define their search terms when sourcing online. In Bunnie Huang’s Essential Guide to Electronics in Shenzhen (yes, it is ( absolutely essential), Bunnie compares Chinese to XKCD’s Up Goer Five. So long as you know roughly what the code represents that’s all that you need. Once you find that string of characters you don’t need to be able to read it any more than any other snippet of code needs to be human readable in order to be manipulated. Figuring out what an object or part is called in Chinese is therefore the first and largest challenge. While the site can be navigated using Google Translate, it can’t accept English language searches. This doesn’t mean you need to speak Chinese, but you should understand how it works. You can find nearly anything on TaoBao, if you know the Chinese name for it. XKCD: Up Goer Five Understanding How Chinese Works is Helpful Learning how to effectively source parts from Taobao will be both entertaining and empowering. The selection is vastly greater and with delivery times rarely over 48 hours and frequently under 24 hours for local purchases it fits in nicely with the high-speed pace of Shenzhen’s hardware ecosystem.įor overseas buyers, while the cost of Taobao is comparable to, or slightly less than AliExpress and Chinese online stores, the selection is again, many, many times the size. While Huaqiangbei is a tremendous and still active resource, increasingly both Chinese and foreign hardware developers do their sourcing for components on TaoBao. For hardware aficionados and Makers, trips to Shenzhen’s Huaqiangbei have become something of a pilgrimage.
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