新车间 [Xinchejian]

Shyu Lee from Meteroi came by the space and he wants to help with ARM/FPGA classes,  buying components, spare parts and providing some of his own hardware so members can experiment.

His big project at the moment is software radio with hardware-acceleration. The hardware component will have a USB and/or Ethernet interface to PC to be compatible with GNURadio. Another similar project, from Microsoft, is SORA. His innovation is to provide an higher performance hardware solution; while other solutions rely on computers for processing and ADC/DAC interface to do the data acquisition, he has everything done in hardware. He’s currently looking for a supportive university or other organization to support his work full-time for 3 to 5 years so he can focus on software integration and hardware improvements. You can read the proposal “An Open Source General Purpose Software Defined Radio Development Platform” (note that the project name will be changed because of trademark conflict).

He’s also really interested in space communication; one of his project is to bounce a radio signal off the moon. Radio communication with space will be very useful to communicate with our space robots as part of the 100YSS project.

He’ll be giving a class on ARM and FPGA at XinCheJian Saturday December 10th using his own development platform, DevStation 1000E. He will be leaving one development station for members interested in getting some practical skills after the introductory session at XinCheJian (Register Now!)

XinCheJian is on the December issue of “That’s Shanghai” with Gilbert on the cover.

December 1st XinCheJian members Ziyun Peng and Paul Adams launched their latest collaborative piece at LifeHub Mall in Jin Qiao.

This Touch based interactive piece is a demonstration of human interaction with plants, these fragile worlds are encased in glass just millimeters thick and suspended by just a few wires and wired up to sense touch through glass.

By working together with people you may have never met, you’re able to achieve harmonious results and feel the feedback through audio and see the faster than touch response through light. We deliver this with our passion for technology, interaction and music, so come and play in our world and season greetings to all.

The exhibition piece is on show through December at LifeHub @ Jinqiao, A Special thank you goes out to Edward from XinCheJian for his amazing support and help and 张微雨 Weiyu Zhang.

Take line 6 and exit at Jin Qiao station #3, cross the road and head into the courtyard to the red boxes, best to view it from 4pm onwards.

I went to Chaihuo Hackerspace in Shenzhen for the first time yesterday night, they have regular meetup on every Thursday night. I’ve met lots of interesting people there, got a few Hackerspace passports and Chaihuo stickers ^_^

Spencer from the new website Usable Devices (“Devices that work, those that don’t and those that need to be created!“) has already some interesting writing on its blog with both technical articles such as an attempt to build a robot for the next roborace, a flattering article towards XinCheJian with a profile of two out of the three founders (the other being of course Min Lin Hsieh) and a report on the presentation from MakeSense at the last Wednesday Open House. Always interesting for us to get an outsider perspective to our space and insights in more of the local projects!

Updates for everyone.  First, thanks Alex for the continued dedication on the printer. He identified a few problem we can fix and improve on.  2 major issues:

1. Z axis is stuck, moves a little bit but then stops. Not sure if it’s a mechanical issue where something is jamming or possibly electrical. Alex will try loosening and tightening the belt tension to see if that helps. Other potential issue is one of the screw rods and bearing seem to be canted, which may be the cause of the jam. I recall being able to make it move up and down by pulling on the belt by hand. If that continues to work, maybe the problem is the motor isn’t strong enough. Lucky me, I’ve been playing with motors and have one that’s 3x more powerful. Will mount that one if nothing else seems to work.

2. Filament feeds into the first hole but can’t find the second hole into the heating chamber. Seems Alex can push the idler bearing block back and feed the filament into the first hole and then between the brass gear and idler bearing. But then the filament is pushed to the side slightly and can’t find the second hole itself.  Likely problem is the brass gear I used is too large. 2 solutions, reduce the gear size or help the filament into the second hole. Reduce gear size by either buying a smaller one or file down the one we have. Help the filament into the second hole can be done with a small ramps or funnels around the second hole. I’ll give the ramp/funnel method a try first. If that doesn’t work, then we’ll go gear hunting.

Z axes works after untightening the belt. Bearings may be too tight now
but is easy to adjust and we need to fix up the broken part. The part is
not a essential but helps to have precision on the axis.

I wasn’t able to unassemble the extruder part to try hand feeding and
see if extrudes but Ricky just told me that he received the new parts
so Saturday we will be able to change the whole thing… hopefully ;P