August 4th, 2011 § § permalink
We haven’t been very good about posting blog posts, but the weeks since the Roboracing competition on July 11th have been as busy as ever! Our members are all doing great things and the Weekly Wednesday Meetup has been key in offering an outlet for those who can’t join us on the weekend.
As an example, tonight, we welcomed Andria Payne from CET Academic Programs, the same program that found us our fantastic summer intern Jonathan Kalin to XinCheJian. We had the pleasure to have a new paying member join us: Scott, who’s been very active in the urban farming project. We also welcomed a new visitor (Severin, originally from Germany) who immediately got to work helping Michael assembling a new CNC mill and trying to repair the broken Apple Time Capsule that Scott brought in (with some impressive capacitors sparks!).
All this in the middle of a very busy evening with Paul fixing the Internet access (a simple re-crimp on the RJ45 cable did the trick), soldering together ultra-bright LEDs for the interactive plant project and taking apart the bubble jet printer with Michael. In the meantime, Lio whipped up a converter from 12V to 6V for the alarm battery (with a homemade heatsink) and figured out the rookie mistake that Ricky made preventing him from controlling the servos with the Freescale XL Star board (note to self: all grounds need to be connected to each other!). Ricky also helped out with Fan’s piano-driven RGB LEDs project MCU software.
Lili was also in the space to promote her Bee Housing project (codename: Goldendust). Of note also is the successful daytrip to the Beijing road electronics market where Nelson bought the components for this weekend H-Bridge soldering extravaganza.
See you next week!
August 3rd, 2011 § § permalink
XinCheJian is looking for people to join in the “Goldendust pollination” project.
What is the Goldendust project? A collaborative reflexion toward the preservation of the bees in town involving researchers, designers and urban thinkers centered around the creation of wild bees refuges.
There’s many technological challenges to this project: take pictures of the bees, count how many bees are using the refuge, keep the refuge orientated towards the sun at all time. It’s also a big component in existing urban farming practices to pollinate plants.
For more information, contact: infoshumus@gmail.com. A workshop led by Aurelie “Lili” Moyon has been tentatively scheduled for August 14th 2011 depending on how many people sign up.
August 3rd, 2011 § § permalink
We have weekly meetup every week and open to all to discover a bit of what is going on in XinCheJian. Feel free to take the opportunity to visit us!
We have a few things going on this evening. IF it’s raining we’re still hacking! so grab that umbrella and come on down, put down the TV remote or grab a TV-B-Gone kit and build it tonight from 7pm.. Access is free so come and hangout.
TheNelson is running the 2nd part of his workshop this weekend for the upcoming roborace, after a good turn out last weekend for PCB design workshop our new H-Bridge shields for Arduino should be in this week just in time for putting them together and hacking on your Robot for the competition at this weekends workshop, so if you havn’t got yourself a cheap R/C toy yet, start shopping on TAOBAO or come on down and talk to TheNelson for some winning ideas.
Michael will be around tonight – the user-controlled champion of R/C toys if you want a good insight to how he done it and how he managed to literally “blow the competition away” with his tank. Michael just got back into the country, Jet lag wont stop this guy from hacking tonight, he’s bringing with him a new CNC mill to put together – this will be awesome!
So show your support and come on down to Meetup Wednesday tonight at 7pm at XinCheJian, sign up and let us know you’re coming!
