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Anyone here building ai hardware with china suppliers?

I’m working on an AI hardware project and have been going back and forth between SF and Shenzhen.

Over the past year I’ve talked to a bunch of factories, module vendors, device makers, and suppliers in China. After seeing enough of the process up close, it changed how I think about China manufacturing.

The part I didn’t expect is that “finding a factory” is usually not the real hard part.

The messy part usually starts before that. Which features sound good on paper, but start creating problems with battery, heat, weight, or assembly?

If a module involves cameras, mics, data, or cloud services, does it create compliance issues in the market you want to sell into?

And when two factories say they can make the “same” thing, how do you tell what is actually different?

For AI hardware, everything starts touching everything else. Change the size and battery gets harder. Add more sensors and now heat is a problem. Change the structure and assembly/yield start moving too.

So a lot of the real work happens before production even starts.

I used to think China manufacturing was mostly about finding the right supplier. Now I think a lot of it is knowing what you actually want them to build, and what you’re okay giving up.

I’ve made plenty of mistakes here myself, so I’m mostly trying to compare notes with people dealing with the same thing.

Is anyone here building AI hardware or smart devices right now? Smart glasses, wearables, voice devices, personal AI devices, weird consumer hardware, anything like that.

Where are you getting stuck with China manufacturing?

  • Supplier search?
  • Module choices?
  • ODM vs custom?
  • Compliance?
  • Quality control?

Curious what others are running into. If you’re dealing with China manufacturing questions, feel free to comment or DM me. I can share what I’ve seen from the Shenzhen side if useful.

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u/northguo — 7 days ago
▲ 0 r/hwstartups

The Real Mistake That Kills Hardware Projects Is Not Bad Manufacturing

I just spent a week in San Francisco and the Bay Area meeting hardware founders and builders. Some of them are genuinely among the strongest technical people I’ve met.

What impressed me most was not whether they could make products better. It was the kind of questions they were asking.

Anyone can make a product better. The real question is: which version of “better” is actually worth building?

Take smart glasses as an example.
The obvious question is: how do we make them lighter and more comfortable?

The sharper question is: lighter at what cost?
One example is the G2 from Even Realities. It takes one path: around 36g, no camera, no speakers, and much of the AI experience pushed to the phone. The assumption is clear: smart glasses should blend into daily life and feel as close to normal glasses as possible. This path optimizes for “being glasses”.
Ray-Ban Meta is around 50g depending on the model. Heavier, but it keeps the camera, microphone, and open-ear audio. It optimizes for “capture”.

You can’t simply say one is better. They are answering different market questions.
For some users, an extra 5g is already too much. For a creator, if those 5g mean capturing a moment hands-free, they may not matter at all.
The same technical variable can carry completely different market meaning depending on the product.
That is why in hardware, the first question is not “how do we make this better.” It is “what trade-offs are we willing to accept?”
Make it smaller, and you may lose battery capacity.
Make it lighter, and you may sacrifice sensors, thermal stability, or durability.

Hardware design is never about optimizing one parameter. It is a system problem.You have to balance physical limits, module supply, power, thermal design, assembly, cost, compliance, and user experience at the same time.

This is also where many hardware founders hit a wall when they start working with the Chinese supply chain.
A common misunderstanding is that Shenzhen factories will help define the product.
Most factories are manufacturers, not product definers. They assume you already know what you want, what trade-offs you accept, and what specs they should build to.But if you haven’t seen the full option space, you may not know where the real trade-off boundaries are.
A lot of hardware startups end up making very specific decisions before they have seen enough of the map.

That’s why hardware design is not just product design.
It is judgment across the whole system.
You need to know what users actually value, what suppliers can really build, where physics pushes back, and how each decision changes cost, reliability, compliance, and speed.

Hardware is not about making every part perfect. It is about constantly balancing local optimization with system-level control.

u/northguo — 8 days ago
▲ 9 r/catpics

When my dog first meets my adopted cat

Just standing there like… 😶

u/northguo — 23 days ago