By popular demand we _didn’t_ move last weekend, in-fact this is the last week in the space. we’re moving and nothing will stop us this time, hopefully by Sunday the 15th we will have lights in the new space! otherwise some members of XinCheJian will be hanging Blue and Red Florescent lights near the windows. If you would like to help with packing, 8pm @ XinCheJian on this Saturday or 8:30am on this Sunday @ XinCheJian for the move, spread the word!
Today, Wednesday we have the /ultra-mega-wow-wednesday, a spectacular!/ we have Mitch Altman the Grand-daddy of hacker-spaces along with visiting Hackers, this will be the ultimate Wednesday that you will only kick yourself if you miss, check out the section below titled “Recent changes at XinCheJian” for more updates at the space!
This evenings confirmed presentations: 3D implants, microcontroller hacks and “car-radio-be-gone”.
Wednesday Presenters Mitch Altman is a San Francisco-based hacker and inventor, best known for inventing TV-B-Gone remote controls, a keychain that turns off TVs in public places. He was also co-founder of 3ware (a Silicon Valley RAID controller company), did pioneering work in Virtual Reality at VPL Research, and created the Brain Machine, one of MAKE Magazine’s most popular DIY projects. For the last many years he has been on the road from hackerspace to hacker-con leading workshops around the world, teaching one and all to make cool things with electronics and teaching everyone to solder with his open source hardware kits. Mitch is one of the co-founders of Noisebridge, a San Francisco hacker space, and President and CEO of Cornfield Electronics.
Mitch will talk about his newest project “car radio be gone!” also ask to see his hackerspace passport!
Tobias Schneider, I am an electrical engineering student at Technische Unversitaet Muenchen. I’m interested in embedded electronics and light installations. I was part of the AllColoursAreBeautiful art installation in Munich, which was partly funded by the city. Recently I was involved in producing eco friendly, rechargeable electronic name badges for a big German maker/hacker convention. I’m going to present this name badge at the Maker Carnival in Beijing and give a workshop to create own addons for the badge.
Florian Friesdorf, I studied electronic engineering and system ergonomics at the Technische Universitaet Muenchen (TUM), Munich, Germany. For about two years now, I’m a fully self-employed Munich-based software developer mostly working
with python and javascript. While I earn my living developing software, I’m exploring to extend that to haptic user interfaces involving wooden blocks, equipped with touch screens and sensors to measure their relative position. One application would be the hierachical modeling of workflows in health care. In cooperation with the The Department for Human Factors Engineering and Product Ergonomics at the Technische Universitaet Berlin, Germany an open source software was created. I now want to produce arduino-based prototypes of the haptic UI and am looking forward to the Maker Carnival to share thoughts and ideas. When not in Munich, I’m on sprints and hackerspaces around the world.
Jimmie Rodgers, I am a full time hacker, maker, circuitbender, etc. I design open source hardware kits, as well as teach a variety of workshops, and give talks on many topics that interest me. I travel and run workshops quite a bit! My most popular kits are the Atari Punk Console, a simple and fun sound generator, and the LoL Shield, an Arduino shield with lots of LEDs on it! I am co-founder of Artisan’s Asylum, a huge hackerspace in Boston.
Charles Paul, I am an IT consultant from New Orleans, LA. Currently the lead software developer at Pixt.com. I consult, design, develop and deliver non-trivial solutions for tricky problems; doing this in the past for Charles Schwab, Hewlett Packard, Wells Fargo, and the largest class action firm in the USA, among others. In a previous time I was also employee #1 at Metrix:CreateSpace, and am currently involved in a similar endeavor here in New Orleans. I am very much looking forward to visiting China and better learning the language!
Yair reshef, An art technologist and educator, consulting some of the leading art and design institutes in Israel. In this capacity I help promote creative technology in the arts and vise verse. A recent such example is fabrication of an hepatic car wheel for a year long collaboration between Bezalel academy of Arts and General motors. as an educator I give workshops and help people experience rapid prototyping of electronics and code. My students ranging from small kids to teachers and faculty. Coming from Israel, I keep a close watch on our start-up culture, and am always amazed by the power of a few committed talents to bring things to be.
Simon Schubert , I’m an EE major converted to Computer Science PhD student, currently studying in Lausanne, Switzerland. While doing my EE studies, I balanced myself by being a developer for the DragonFly BSD Operating System; now that I’m doing Computer Science, I picked up electronics as a hobby. Besides being a member of our local hackerspace, I am a (inactive) HAM radio operator and I keep dismantling and hacking various electronic and mechanical items in my house. My latest venture is a cheap, compact and powerful microcontroller development platform, the MC HCK (http://mchck.org).
Simon will be giving a talk on micro controller hacks
Jacob Rosenthal, I’m a freelance embedded and erstwhile web and database developer. I’ve spent the last two years founding and educating at the Phoenix Arizona hackerspace HeatSync Labs where I am still on the board of directors. My personal interests include body computing and modification, 3d printing, and electronics. I am passionate about making the future practical.
Jacob will be giving a talk on 3D implants! Recent changes at XinCheJian
Membership is now Just 100rmb per month per member, for an additional 200rmb a month you can also store your projects/stuff in the space in a box that does not exceed 50x50x30cm, you can contribute more money if you want as a donation. Failure to pay membership will result in your junk being stored at XinCheJian becoming a donation to the space. XinCheJian will no longer offer community parts but instead sell them in sets, for example 10 resistors for 1rmb to cut down on waste and mess. Members will have access to the space and the tools, strangers must be accompanied by a member at all times and will be responsible for that friend during that period at XinCheJian. For Full details see http://wiki.xinchejian.com/wiki/Policy or http://wiki.xinchejian.com/wiki/Policy/zh
YN460 is a nice Chinese made flash for photography. The first hack is to enable controlling the power and flash trigger with Arduino. In the following video, the Arduino runs a 3 second step that trigger at its 7 power level.
Next step, adding network capacity to the flash and control it from iPhone!
Welcome to another week of XinCheJian Wednesday open house. First of all we’d like to thank everyone for coming out Rain or Shine in support.. and soon to be Snow and Ice. This week will be no different, with lots happening in the space.
Remember XinCheJian is funded by the community for the community, buy a kit from us, a membership or even a drink, it all goes back to support the community.
Wednesday talks
Michael will be introducing the upcoming challenge to Spaghetti bridge in collaboration with Techyizu.. it’ll be interesting to see if they can build as good as they can talk.
This week
Friday 16th 6:30pm – late
MakeSense is running a technology cook-off this Friday in Chinese and are looking for hackers, social entrepreneurs and designers to make a mess in the kitchen to produce some Michelin Star food..
Saturday 17th 9am – 4pm
Processing – Intense course – 800RMB
Learn processing from the Master himself, Raven will be teaching this class again, but this time it’s an intensive course to keep you on your toes. After 3 weeks you’ll be ready to rock & roll http://xinchejian.com/event/?ee=81
Sunday 18th 9am – 1pm
Arduino workshop – By Paul and Ricky
Learn the basics of Arduino Programming from Ricky followed up by Pauls hands on examples using what you learnt from Ricky. This will get you kick-started and launched into Arduino and hacking. You’ll need a starter kit to preform all the fun examples. You’ll also need to have the Arduino IDE running from http://arduino.cc if you’re not sure then come on Wednesday with your computer.
Sign up here: http://xinchejian.com/event/?ee=85
Sunday 18th 2pm – 4pm
Communication Between Max/Msp and Arduino – By Ziyun Peng
Learn about how to integrate MAX/MSP with Arduino, this powerful toolkit will add the dimension of audio to your projects, offer you an alternative to link the digital sounds with the physical world. Learn from a leading sound artist.
sign up here: http://xinchejian.com/event/?ee=84
From the Mailing list
TheNelson is heading back to Shanghai for the winter Holidays, he’s setting up camp at XinCheJian and learning LISP over the holiday, so throw an email on the mailing list if you’re interested.
Volunteer Jobs at XinCheJian
As a Volunteer you’ll earn your membership, you’ll also be expected to join Tuesday Staff meetings from 7-9pm. Only apply if you’re serious. Without the generosity of the current volunteers, sharing tasks in their free time, it would be near impossible to keep xinchejian alive.
Treasurer
As the Treasurer you’ll be responsible for.. treasure. you need to have your own calculator and some experience with keeping records. the following are what you’ll need to handle on a monthly basis.
- Income/Outgoing spread sheets
- Look after the donation box
- Organizes the rent and bills
- Talks to founders for more money
- Kind reminders to members to pay their membership dues
Event Manager
The Event manager will play a key roll in helping keep the space running and getting the correct information out there, this is a dedicated position and will take several hours per week online. This person needs to be compassionate but firm, well organized, able to follow up and personable making it easy for people to run workshops.
- Schedules events within the space
- Confirms events with people based on signups
- Encourages and guides people to get content together to promote event
- Handles external media for events (posting to media sites)
- Posts events to the XinCheJian site
Journalists
A Journalist will be expected to write at least 1 article a week on a topic of whats going on inside XinCheJian, you pick a project and review it, can be a few hours an evening writing and a few hours in the day interviewing.
- you’ll be given an account on xinchejian.com
- You will need a camera
- English or Chinese – or both is encouraged
- confident and outgoing
- get as much information possible from people in the shortest amount of time.
Lutz and Min Lin led the Insectbot workshop yesterday with some help from Paul for soldering the boards and Ricky to program the Arduinos. About 10 parent/kid pair showed up for the workshop each assembling their own robot. The kit has an DFDuino (Arduino Uno from DFRobot) and two servos that will be useful in future projects.
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.
This morning, we had two classes for the price of one: learning how to program (for non-programmers) and using the Arduino to interface with electronics. Given by Ricky and Paul with some help from Edward.
Nanode is a set of improvements on the original Arduino board with an integrated Ethernet controller and a design that is easy to hand-assemble while paying attention to some details such as the placement of the board LED and reset switch. The ability to connect to the network gives us a whole new universe of possibilities for Internet-connected devices.
Thanks to Ken Boak and Toby Yu for their generous donation, we’ll be received five free Nanode boards to play with in the XinCheJian hackerspace. Pricing will be around 200 RMB at the moment.
Below is a picture of the first two boards at XinCheJian running the default program (flashing the LED connected to pin #6). The Ethernet controller (ENC28J60) is the same we’ve used in the Transfabric’s interactive door project.
