Ricky just make an update on his quest to streaming video from Android.

element14: XinCheJian GGHC: XinCheJian coming out of the depths of video streaming from Android!: “”

Just got these pictures from a event a while back. Very cool design

Insect Robot Body

Inspired by Lumi’s Insect Robot, we had our first insect robot workshop today.

The BOM

• Cloth hanger
• 9v battery
• Batter Holder
• Ultrasound Distance Sensor
• Servo
• Arduino UNO
• Velcro!!!

XinCheJian has published the Simplified Chinese version for Mainland of Mitch Altman’s “Soldering is easy” comic book. Let’s give a big thank to Linkin Li (李英臣) and Min Lin Hsieh (谢旻琳) for their great work! Min Lin will work on Traditional Chinese version and publish it as soon as possible.

You can download the PDF version on MightyOhm’s website.

Please feel free to distribute the document widely, it’s completely FREE! You are also welcome to practice soldering at XinCheJian!

Pilot FIRST® Tech Challenge Robotics competition in Shanghai

Time: Saturday, April 23, 11:00 am to 4:00 pm

Location: Shanghai American School, Pudong campus

International school team robots will compete in the pilot FIRST® Tech Challenge high school robotics competition, developed by FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology), a U.S. based non-profit. Teams design, build and program robots to compete in an exciting, sports-like challenge. Reaching 250,000 students in grades K to 12 worldwide, FIRST engages students in science and technology learning and leadership and provides an opportunity to apply classroom concepts to ‘real-world’ engineering problems, work on open-ended challenges and create their own solutions. The event is free and open to the public. Contact Paula Joseph at pjoseph@ptc.com for more information.

For more information, contact Shelly Shen at qishen@ptc.com 13564738316 or Paula Joseph at pjoseph@ptc.com 18601794144

Insect Robot Workshop

Workshop instruction will be in Chinese.

• Date: April 24, Sunday
• Time: 1 ~ 5 PM
• Audience: any person aged from 5 ~ 99 interested in robotics
• Bring your own notebook
• Fee：250 rmb
  The kit includes the following:
  • Arduino borad
  • 2 Servo
  • 1 Ultrasound distance sensor
  • Other material for the robot structures

I Love My Job!

Mitch started with a good slide. Loving your job is important!

Kevin Xie from Xilinx (University Program Greater China manager) came by to visit XinCheJian last Sunday as he’s very interested in helping Hackerspaces in China. He sees Hackerspaces like XinCheJian as a potential opportunity for students to apply the knowledge they gain in university in real devices while inspiring them to do cool stuff.

Xilinx programmable logic devices is what is powering many industrial strength devices and an important building block in any larger project. Xilinx offer capabilities that complement micro-controllers very well when continuous signal processing is needed. This could offer us interesting alternatives to real-time sensors data processing and actuators control in a very compact package.

A telepresence robot allows teachers or experts to remotely teach classes. It can also enable parents to remotely observe their kids performance in class. By customizing height and appearance we can make the robotic teacher more appealing to the students. Although telepresence robots already exist commercially, we believe we can make it a lot more useful on an open platform and cheaper with Shanzhai components. In addition, none of the competitors have selected this idea putting us in a category of our own while still very much focused on the educational goals of the competition.

We already have propulsion and collision detection/prevention mostly worked out (through the Autonomous Robot Car project). With the iPad Shanzhai clone we have (and its integrated Wifi, video camera, host USB port, tactile screen) we have the perfect “head” of the robot. We’re expecting total cost per unit to be below USD$300, allowing us to build up-to three units within the USD$900 budget.

The telepresence teaching robot will make a great technological demo for our Hackerspace and get kids excited even more about robotics….

Check out here for project updates.

Mitch Altman, Inventor of the famous TV-B-Gone, a remote control keychain that turns off TVs in public places. He is co-founder of Noisebridge, a San Francisco hackerspace, creator of the Brain Machine project in MAKE Magazine, gives workshops around the world on how to solder and make cool things with microcontrollers, and is CEO of Cornfield Electronics.

We’re very lucky to have Mitch visiting XinCheJian on April 17th and give a talk on Hacking Cool Things with Microcontrollers! Everyone can learn and have fun making cool things with electronics!

Please register here for the event.