We’re into the full swing of things here at XinCheJian and the space is beginning to organically form.
Project swarmbots is full steam ahead, plenty of chatter in the evenings going on, and there is still time to join.
The WiFi network is up, if anyone has Radius experience (freeRadius) + WPA/WPA2 Enterprise using PEAP on windows vista, windows 7 let yourself be known but Linux/Mac users you’ll have no problems, and those on windows 8!
The Machine room is beginning to be setup, the table was split in half by our favorite social glasses man Valentin and welded back together!
Tonight we have several presenters all in agreement to keep it to less than the 9 minutes, we also have “Grand Design Magazine” coming down this evening, so dress in your best birthday suit and bring your projects.
=Wednesday Presenters=
theNelson is back for a week, and he’ll be talking about RankBin and his Solar Charger.
Team Swarmbots will be giving us a little update and a way to join the team.
Axel aka Guttertec from FabLab, Cologne co-working space Will be giving us the insight into his latest projects and projects out of FabLab.
Steve Dalton visiting from Gold Coast TechSpace (http://gctechspace.org) in Australia will talk to us about their space and their projects.
Ladies and Gentleman it’s time to start your engines, keep a lookout on the wiki page for the latest line follower course, if you havn’t already built a car, Now is the time, for reference the track line is 1″ wide (same thickness as electrical tape) – Sign up if you’re racing http://xinchejian.com/event/?ee=110
This was a very successful first Makercarnival, at the Contemporary Modern Art of China (CMODA). An event where makers and hackers from around the world and China came together to show off their projects, do talks and lead workshops.
Biggest thanks to Beijing Maxpace with a lead role by Justin Wang (王盛林). Thanks to the help of many students from various Chinese universities in Beijing.
Thanks to the organizers for arranging the space, inviting interesting speakers and attendees from all around the world, providing us budget for travel and hotel costs, preparing wonderful t-shirts and very pretty event booklets. The volunteers were also a big help with last minute shopping for us and providing us with food and water.
Thanks to Mitch Altman for being such a leading figure of the Hackerspaces and inspiring us.
Thanks to Min Lin for being an essential part to making XinCheJian participation to this event successful.
Congratulations to the spectacular DFRobot table who went all out with a really cool and busy table in addition to all the help they’ve provided to XinCheJian and projects.
Thanks to our XinCheJian members who take time and energy to go there, explain our projects and space to visitors: Lionello Lunesu, Paul Adams, Mika Lin, Edward Jiang, He Qi Chen, Min Lin Hsieh, Ricky Ng-Adam.
Special Thanks to Lio for helping out in the workshops, at the table and hacking together solutions for many of our problems.
Thanks to those who’ve done workshops for XinCheJian: Sunny Sun (Squishy Circuits), Mika (LED Heart), Edward Giles (Arduino keyboard), Edward Jiang (line follower and useless machine), Min Lin Hsieh (Insectbot), He Qi Chen (Ardublock).
Also, thanks to both Andrea Carlon and Russell Giles for assisting in many workshops.
We are grateful to have had so many patient and enthusiastic participants to our workshop.
Congrats to our members who had exhibits at the Makercarnival: Paul and Clemence (mini interactive worlds and rat trap), Lutz walking robot and Angie’s monster bin.
Pictures by: Ricky Ng-Adam, Andrea Carlon, Mitch Altman, Paul Adams
Makercarnival is the first of its kind in Beijing, at the Contemporary Modern Art of China (CMODA). An event where makers and hackers from around the world and China came together to show off their projects, do talks and lead workshops. The event was mainly organized by Beijing Maxpace with a lead role by Justin Wang (王盛林) and the help of many students from various Chinese universities in Beijing.
For the four main days of the event there was talks scheduled daily. The first day had the keynote speech, the second day I missed and supposedly not very well attended with 10 persons maximum. I participated in the Monday talks on the third day which had a sizable audience. Although the audience was mostly Chinese and many came from the general public, the talks had an international flavor to it with more than half executed in English. Speakers came from Germany, France and both coast of the USA.
I kicked off the presentations with a talk about Lophilo, the ARM+FPGA development board that we are developing. Lophilo found it’s inception in XinCheJian so it was natural to combine both subjects. The talk started with some background about myself, how XinCheJian was created, how me and Shyu Lee met, how the idea developed for the project and what it was exactly.
Jihyun Song was after me and was doing a presentation on the Seoul Hackerspace, talking about their projects, the people they have and the challenges they face. She had this video from a foreigner excited at visiting the electronics market in Seoul. This reminded me that we could do more organized visits of our own electronics market at 668 Beijing East Road in Shanghai.
During Jihyun Song presentation, I was asked by Zhang Hao from Beijing Maxpace Hackerspace to take over the introduction of other people’s presentation.
The next topic was by 林欣杰 (Lin2 Xin1 Jie2) who topic was “New Media Art=Energy Conversion” with the accompanying statement: “The important element of Being new mentioned in the concept isn’t the sole or even primary determinant during the art creation”. As the talk was in Chinese and I was researching other following speakers, I missed some of the elements of the presentation.
Tobias Schneider followed as a presenter from the Computer Chaos Club Munich in Germany. He was accompanied by Sophia Schillai. They talked about their electronic name badge (the “r0ket“), how it came about and more generally about the Hackerspaces in Germany. r0ket is quite an interesting little platform and seems like a lot of fun for something started as a reusable electronic badge. One key improvement I could see is to figure out a bigger display as the name is barely visible on the current one.
刘得志 (Liu2 De2 Zhi4, Kevin) had a talk entitled “From Love to Work” translated into English as “A maker’s life”. He’s founded an “Hackerspace” in 广州(Guang3Zhou1) called d+dimension in 2009, although I think it was never really opened to the public. He showed a very impressive “Hello Kitty Robots” interactive installation that looked quite sophisticated.
Mitch Altman followed with theme common to all his talk: “do what you love”. He’s also inserted some interesting predictions about what he felt the global trends were. He predicts a crash of the American financial system and strongly suggested that China needed to become a creative economy.
Astrida Valigorsky (Astrid) from Wonderbred and an active hacker at the NYC Resistors Hackerspace showed up too, this time with a edible piano called a Jeltone. Jeltone is an interactive music instruments made out of Jello and fruits. One of her key observation is that there’s always some strong conflicts in developing a new idea; it’s normal and you just have to push through!
肖文鹏 (Xiao1Wen2Peng2, nicknamed FlamingoEDA) talked about “Electronic Bricks”. He’s been a big driver of OpenSource and OpenHardware in China and is a co-founder of the Beijing Maxpace (which was originally called FlamingoEDA). He talked about some of the newer products and some of the innovations they have in the pipeline.
高磊 (Gao1 Lei3, nicknamed Whaleman) came out next. He’s an interaction designer and CEO of IMLAB with a strong interest in the area of health. He does a lot of research into this area and has a very clear design process called Tamagome to make his own products.
Greg Saul presented the OpenSource software he’s working on: “SketchChair“. Funded in large part by a very successful Kickstarter campaign. It’s a really impressive tool that allows users to design their own furniture. Not only that, but you can actually test the stability of the chair using a built-in physics model! Quite impressive and sophisticated. It’s also one of my favorite subject: local and customized manufacturing. Greg finished the talk with Piccolo, a tiny open-source stand-alone and modifiable CNC-bot for under USD$70.
Dr Garnet Hertz from UC Irvine followed. He’s a Fulbright scholar and contemporary artist (http://conceptlab.com). His presentation was originally scheduled to be about Dorkbot, an event for which slogan is “People doing strange things with electricity”. He’s one of the organizer in LA. XinCheJian has hosted two such events so far in the space and we’re hoping to do more. But he decided instead to show videos from his previous projects. The first one disgusted quite a few persons in the audience as it showed a robot driven by a giant cockroach! Very cool even if the project is already a few years old. The next one was a cool retro-arcade racing game dynamically generated from the actual road. His conclusion was that having an idea is more important than the technology; we shouldn’t start with Arduino or any other piece of hardware, we should start with an idea. He also did an aggressive broadside attack towards the Hackerspace Space Program, pointedly criticizing taking funds from DARPA and equating it to making weapons. I think that last one was directly addressed to me…
Antonin Fourneau from ATOCorp talked about HCI (Human Computer Interaction) experiments that he is doing, often modifying consoles such as Nintendo to do so. In addition, he talked about the Makerfaire-like event he’s organizing in France called ENIAROF but with a slant towards being similar towards old-time “faire”. They have a fairly complex and extensive set of rules for participants which I found interesting as a key cultural difference when compared to other hacker cultures.
Devon Sean McCullough was the final presenter, but since he had left the room without explanation we decided to gather all the presenters that were still in the room and get them on a Q&A panel for the audience. It was cut short when Devon showed up later and asked to do his presentation.
XinCheJian space is moving along, not entirely finished as the dust is still settling but we’re doing it again tonight! Most, if not all of the participants are back from the Beijing Maker-carnival the first of its kind, some interesting pieces! and XinCheJian done well with a hackerbooth and a permanent piece, taking all the workshops from shanghai and a few new ones for them up north!
Tonight we’re open but not unpacked, we have lights, but no light switches and we have power but no power sockets.
7pm – free @ XinCheJian 2.0 1035 Changle Rd, 2nd floor – 上海徐汇区长乐路1035号2楼 see here for a map and directions: http://xinchejian.com/contact-us/?lang=zh
=Wednesday Presenters=
Tonight we’re going to hear a little from a few members of foulab in Canada who have formed Wyld Collective and are solving a few problems in Bangkok with a little twist that save lives and use local workforce!
Lio from XinCheJian will be giving his view on the Gadgeteer an Arduino board compatible .net wielding device that has a processor that outdoes the Arduino and maybe a sneak-peak at his head counting application built on it.
=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 is no bigger than 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. 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
=A quick blurb about XinCheJian=
XinCheJian is a community run hackerspace located in the heart of Shanghai, without your support with time, workshops, donations and memberships we would not be able to keep the space alive and in the same form as it is today, think about giving back in any way you can and help alleviate the financial burdens of those few who are funding the space.
=Volunteer Jobs at XinCheJian=
As a Volunteer you’ll earn your membership, you’ll also be expected to joinStaff meetings at least once a month. Only apply if you’re serious. Without the generosity of the current volunteers and 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 <strike>have your own calculator</strike> we’ll provide you a calculator. 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 from the bank account
- We’ll even send you to business accounting with the government (we’ll pay for this)
- Kind reminders to members to pay their membership dues
*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.
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
stop ! David Ricky and Min Lin what do you do to the cake!
Infy now fighting?
no no no, Lio don’t do that!!!
March 25, 2012, in thexinchejian,friends come together to celebrate the first anniversary of xinchejian, we share a sweet cake, we spent a pleasant evening.
The special correspondent of the xinchejian @rockets at the scene reported.
Happy new year, welcome to the Year of the Dragon, to kick off this dragon year come on down to XinCheJian tonight from 7pm – 9pm, 301 – 76 An hua Lu.
Wednesday talks
Roger Mu will be giving a presentation on his hobby – Aquaponics, his past, present and future with hydroponics and he’ll talk about is simple hand watered bucket system along with the continuous flow PVC pip system, some technical shots at flood and drain techniques along with deep water culture, come loaded with your questions
Justin – the cofounder of Max Space, the Beijing Hackerspace and organizer of Maker carnival – a 3 day theme park built to be enjoyed by everyone young and old with some creative people building their ideas into reality – full of performances, workshops, talks, activities from April 29 to May 1, 2012!
Arvind Gupta – famed for designing the DJammer which was used by P. Diddy at the MTV music awards, will be introducing himself to the community this evening with a talk on Creative Confidence and Design Thinking.
This week
电影制作入门工作坊 – Introduction to Filmmaking – 2012/02/04 (FULL)
Jerome will be guiding this workshop from script writing filming and editing.. want to be involved but didn’t make the signup, think you can act and want to be an extra.. send an email to the xinchejian@googlegroups.com mailing list.
Op-Amps for Everybody! 运算放大器工作坊 – 2012/02/05 2pm-4pm
Sean Boyce from Foulab Hackerspace is visiting and will be giving this easy workshop that will involve SMD techniques and you’ll build your own guitar pickup! sign up here and learn something awesome.. http://xinchejian.com/event/?ee=98
This Month
Processing课程 – 2012/02/11
By Great demand, Raven is at it again, this media artist will take you on an extensive and indepth tour and practical application with processing, sign up early here: http://xinchejian.com/event/?ee=100
机器车竞赛 – Roboracing Competition – 2012/02/26
Robo racing is opening on the 26th for the opening race, if you’re building at home it’ll be a left hand race sign up before the race so we have an idea who is racing, participation is free. Line followers, autonomous and user controlled all welcome, keep an eye out for more information on this.. http://xinchejian.com/event/?ee=96
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 <strike>have your own calculator</strike> we’ll provide you a calculator. 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 from the bank account
- We’ll even send you to business accounting with the government (we’ll pay for this)
- Kind reminders to members to pay their membership dues
*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.
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!
We’ve had the pleasure of welcoming four students from MIT last Saturday. You can check out the blogs of two of them: Nancy Ouyang, Cathy Wu. These students were on a self-funded, personal visit to China where they visited a number of factories and Chinese makerspaces/hackerspaces. They are members of MITERS, a 30 years old student club at MIT.
Originally founded as a club to give MIT students free and open access to computers, MITERS now features a mill, lathe, band saws, welders, and other hands-on tools, in addition to a host of oscilliscopes, high-end soldering irons, and other EE prototyping tools. It’s a member-run creative haven and build-anything-you-want, if-you-break-it,-fix-it space.
The event was very popular and we had a full house. The large audience included MIT alumni Benjamin Koo (and his assistant Jeadon Chen) in addition to a few students interested in opening hackerspaces-type organizations inside their own universities. Throughout their presentation they shared with us how they ran their space and what type of projects they did in addition to their impressions of China.
