On Mon, 21 Dec 2015 21:02:55 +0000 (UTC), Cydrome Leader
wrote:

Jeff Liebermann wrote:
On Mon, 21 Dec 2015 17:23:02 +0000 (UTC), Cydrome Leader
wrote:

Jeff Liebermann wrote:
On Sat, 19 Dec 2015 01:55:44 -0800 (PST), wrote:

[stuff cut]

- Most embarrassing moment: When the Chinese clone works better
than the original.

Anybody have good stories of this?

No. I'm taking the 5th ammendment.
What you don't know, won't hurt me.

Ha.
Did the unnamed parties steal back some of the enhancements?

Of course, with my help. But when they wanted some of the money they
paid me back, I diplomatically declined. Business ethics in many
parts of the planet are very different from the US.
[Q] What's the difference between a bribe and a commission?
[A] A bribe is paid in advance. A commission after. Otherwise,
they're the same.

I know of several other cloned products were are better than the
original, but I'm not talking and not worried. A fair chunk of my
income comes from what I euphemistically call "design reviews"[1].

There are also companies that can't even copy a product and get it
right. One favorite is a company that fired its outsourced designers,
only to find that the documentation they had supplied with the product
was fatally inaccurate. The company then had to reverse engineer their
own product. The resulting clone was dead on arrival. I was hired to
fix the problem without changing anything. Right. I traced the
problem to whomever measured the parts misreading the range setting on
the LRC meter. All the values were off by a factor of 10 because
someone had removed the range knob, and replaced it rotated by one
detent. It was obviously not an accident. After that was fixed, I
had to deal with an "improved" PCB that closely matched the schematic,
but not quite. The highlight of the project was when one employee,
with a very guilty conscience, offered me a bribe to not blame him for
any of the problems. I didn't take the money because I thought it
might be a trap. It wasn't.


[1] The difficult part is keeping a straight face. I once worked on
a BlueGoof wireless speaker system, where the designers had placed the
BT chip dead center in the middle of the PCB, located the chip antenna
nearby, and put a shield over both. Range was suppose to be about 30
meters minimum, but was only about 0.5 meters. I couldn't believe it,
but there it was. It was amazingly difficult for me to NOT burst out
laughing during my initial fee negotiations and artificially
protracted circuit analysis. I found plenty of other problems and
mistakes, so they got their money's worth.


--
Jeff Liebermann
150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com
Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com
Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558