I am happy to write to you because the last three days have been the time for us to discover in depth the famous Huaqianbei electronics market.
Huaqianbei (华强北) might be the biggest consumer electronics shopping in the world. A long and modern street unveiled as we got out of the Huaqian metro station. On each side, markets and towers rise above the street. Each is specialized on only one specific type of electronics components (LED, IC, wearable electronics …) and are filled with small electronics shops.
As the prototyping of Flowlin is advancing towards having a functional prototype we needed to buy the components that are going to fit on the PCB that we sent to the factory on Friday and that we will receive on Monday.
With a list of components to buy, we decided to start with the lights (LED) and most of the pictures are therefore related to this first encounter.
I’m going to walk you through the negotiation process for this first components by making a small recipe that any beginner to the HQB market can follow to your own risk.
- Find the right mall on the street, you can count a little while for that depending on the component. If you need to walk to the end of the street count 15 minutes.
- Find the right floor inside the mall, this might be tricky as experience showed that people are not willing to help you if you are not interested in their components; otherwise, they act candidly about components outside of their expertise. This can really take a while, you should count at least to spend 15 minutes going through different kinds of elevators. Here you will also need to memorise where you are going because sometimes finding back to your group can become a nightmare, or at least feeling like the adulthood equivalent of children losing their parents in the shopping center.
- Find a friendly looking booth and start asking questions. You might want to check the brands that are on display or the products displayed, in this case, the light hanging from the ceiling because most often then not, all of the stock is on display. If you are not successful at doing this then go back to step 1 because you are in the wrong building.
- Get your best traduction app going because things are going to get tough in terms of communication. Make sure to be extremely clear about what you want because you might just start buying components with the wrong specs because the seller said « yes, yes » when looking at your reference.
- Once you have successfully found the part you need and made sure that everything is in order you ask for the price for different amounts. Make sure that the seller understands that you would like to « try the part before mass production » so that you don’t get the tourist rate.
- Finally you can shake hands and go away with the goods or eventually you will learn that you will need to come back in an hour or a couple of minutes to let the vendor get the components somewhere around the corner (maybe buying it to some of his friends? going to his secret «stock » or going « to the factory »)
Once you have your part you can repeat the process for all of the other parts that you need.
Some extra steps might include:
- Ask for the data-sheet and footprint for the components that you bought and receive a hand-written data-sheet in Chinese (we experienced this one pretty positively).
- Realise that the electronics you bought was fake and get back to the vendor to find someone else at the shop which doesn’t know what you are talking about.
- Talking with your co-workers to realize that your negotiation skills are not as good as theirs because you paid twice the price but they believe they might have bought fake components, and maybe you did too and become the double-looser of the day.
Even if looking around and negotiating can be both long and tedious, the definitive upside of this technique is that in only one day’s work you can get all of the pieces that you need. As the market closed at 6 we needed to come back the day after to get some more parts and we spent a long day hunting down increasingly rare components. One positive side effect of the negotiation is that you will add vendors on WeChat and you will be able to experience the app as a social media (if you are a foreigner).
All in all this experience was extremely positive for us, fun, unexpected and sometimes slightly scary we feel that without the CHIC we would not have been to experience the thrilling sport of component hunting in the most intense environment.