新车间 [Xinchejian]

Shanghai Maker Carnival badge 2012

XinCheJian attended the first Shanghai maker carnival this weekend showing off members projects. There were also lots of really interesting projects from other Chinese hackers.

Heaps more photos and videos can be found via these links:

• slashdot
• Reddit article link
• Reddit photo link
• Reddit videos link

Upvotes and comments – will help get more attention on the articles

Shanghai Maker Carnival is this weekend!! XinCheJian makers will be presenting lots of fun projects!

Location: Century Park Pudong, Shanghai (subway line 2, Science Museum station, exit 4 and 5)
Date&Time: Nov. 2 to 4, 9AM~5PM

The event is free but the park charges 10rmb entrance fee.

Summary for Wednesday/本周三开放日综述
Jared from Picarty will be presenting on his new app, recently famed for his presentation at barcamp “how i built my first app but still cant program” and it’s also adhoc wednesday, so get up and talk, just keep it to 9 minutes

Wednesday Presenters/本周演讲者介绍
Jared from Picarty will be presenting on his new app, recently famed for his presentation at barcamp “how i built my first app but still cant program” a good insight into what it take and where he is taking it – get hands on with his app this evening.

who else? *your name here* it’s adhoc, so get ready, just keep it to 9 minutes plus Q&A afterwards

Upcoming Events/近期活动安排
Friday, Saturday and Sunday

Join us at maker carnival shanghai for shanghais first maker carnival, its located in century park and xinchejian will be demoing projects, we’re still looking for more helpers over the 3 days.

Weihong Guan (@aGuegu) a fellow hacker and researcher will be presenting his projects this evening, from Nixie tube heaven from the 70s to showing off his amazing 8x8x8 led cube, this guy makes his living by selling his inventions which can be found all over the internet. His awesome 8x8x8 cube kit will dazzle anyone and is the perfect table top conversation piece, with integrated arduino in a tiny tiny form factor driving 512 LEDS! plus 4 more for fun!

Every Wednesday XinCheJian hosts the Xinchejian Wednesday Open House. This is a chance for people to give interesting presentations on projects that they’re working on. If you would like to give a presentation at the Wednesday Open House, please read the http://wiki.xinchejian.com/wiki/Wednesday-guidelines and contact us on wednesday@xinchejian.com

Summary for Wednesday, 18 July 2012
Presentations
* Richard Summers, W+K – Multiple Projects
* Freda, XinCheJian – Pet Abandonment Project
Upcoming Events
* New Members Orientation Party on Friday, 20 July.

Wednesday Presenters

Richard Summers
Richard Summers longs to live next to the ocean and from the people upstairs (W+K). He will be giving a talk on past and future projects, and his goal of blurring the line between reality and virtual reality. He’s worked on a few projects:
* Large scale pinhole photography
* Photosynthesized Easter eggs
with his latest initiative
* Project: “High Tide”

Freda 冯佳
Freda will be talking about an initiative to deal with pet issues. Many people view pets in this way: “A pet is for Christmas and not for life“. She wants to tackle the problem of abandonment and mistreatment of pets, and she’ll be soliciting your ideas on this subject.
* Pet abandonment project

Are you interested in giving a talk? Write to us at wednesdays@xinchejian.com.

Web version

Yesterday’s Young Makers Open Day was pretty successful! Thanks to all the participants for coming! Thanks to all XinCheJian volunteers who spent time and energy preparing and helping out!

For more pictures: http://is.gd/c2aXuB

Extra, extra, Read all about it! Shanghai’s younger generation to rejoice, XinCheJian to hold “Young Makers Open Day”!

April this year saw the creators at XinCheJian traveling off with their projects to Shenzhen and Beijing, participating in the first recorded mini-maker faire and maker Carnival. We’ve been faced with the same question: how can our children participate? So we are answering…

To celebrate Children’s Day, XinCheJian will host on June 2 from 1:00 pm to 5:00 pm a specially organized children’s carnival, the Shanghai youngsters can share in the magic of building things!

This “Young Makers Open Day” you’ll be able to see all kinds of fun we’ve had at XinCheJian in the last year, come see chopsticks the robot, see the crazy mousetrap, play with conductive dough, see the magic cap line patrol car, children’s programming software,  DFRobot presents their bomb disposal game with many many more things to see and do, you can also chat with some of the people behind XinCheJian and meet like minded people. We’ve also prepared a few workshops to get you started , “Soldering Workshop”, “ultra-light clay Workshop”.

XinCheJian along with the great people from Techyizhu will also be preparing the spaghetti bridge challenge – a classic project, that teaches team building skills, builds character, introduces problem solving challenges and is also a fun competition to take part in. Parents are welcome to join in and will be expected to get their hands dirty, you’ll also learn something new. We Believe that participating in this event will bring a good deal of fun, education and allow everyone to explore.

For more information and questions please use www.xinchejian.com website or find us on http://weibo.com/新车间. Due to space limit, please register online using the form below.

Children’s Carnival: June 2, 1:00 to 5:00

XinCheJian address: 2nd Floor, 1035 Changle Rd, Xuhui District, Shanghai (corner Wulumuqi Rd)
Transportation: we recommend you the best public transport to participate in our activities, you can get off in Changshu Rd., Rail Transit Line 7 or line 1, about 10 minutes walk) or you can use line 10 and exit at Shanghai Library (15 minutes)

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.

=Workshops=

* Portraits of Makers Photoshoot! – 2012/05/24

Dress in your best birthday suit, round 2 of “stars in their eyes” by the Shanghai Strobist Group (http://www.flickr.com/groups/strobist_shanghai/) will be taking place, dont forget to bring your projects. Help us out and sign up so we know how many are coming http://xinchejian.com/event/?ee=128

* 机器车竞赛 – Roboracing Competition – 2012/06/24

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.