新车间 [Xinchejian]

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

Simple Analog Line Follower

One of the easiest way to participate in XinCheJian’s next robot racing compeition is to build a simple analog line follower robot.

No programming skill required at all!! You will not only learn some basic knowledge about analog circuits, but also gets to exericse your soldering skills.

With only less than 10 common electronic parts and recycled bottle caps as the wheel, you can construct a very simple line follower, arguably the most simple one ever!

This workshop is suitable for people who are interested in soldering and robotics. Participant must be 10 years or older.

Please register here: http://xinchejian.com/event/?ee=117

【2012《JUE》Music + Art】2012.3.11 XinCheJian &《JUE》Workshop #1：DIY Sound synthesizer OSC6 workshop（pictures：YU）

Totally popular!!! We have almost 30 kids plus parents. Thanks to Sunny teaching the workshop and Infy and Joshua to help out.

Introduction to vvvv workshop at Xinchejian; a multimedia development environment. Next week: advanced practical workshop.

Squishy conductive men and women!!

February 26th, 9AM to 12PM will be the first conductive dough workshop, be a god and make a your own male & female dough (conductive and non-conductive) with a simple recipie with your own hands, create a funny conductive “man” doll or “female” doll.

The dough recipe is very simple, which uses common everyday materials, flour, salt, vegetable oil, water, and so on. with simple mixing and kneading with a splash of color to make any color.

Want to make a squishy circuit?
1) build all kinds of circuits from buzzers to LEDS to motors
2) A safe and easy way for kids to play with dough and experiment with electricity (Low power)
3) Pick and choose the color of the dough to make what ever comes to mind
4) Use the dough with arduino to make some eye popping artistic projects (great for the entire family)
5). . . . . . . . . . . .

Welcome children over the age of five and the playful spirit of moms and dads together in this workshop, and our dough carnival

Attribution:

Crazy dough (squishy circuit) is the product of the American University of St. Thomas University UST Design Lab AnnMarie P. Thomas, professor and her team developed and used to help children quickly and securely visual learning circuit. Thank AnnMarie P. Thomas and her team around the world to share the results of this teaching, but also thanks to Squishy Circuits, project Matthew Schmidtbauer in the process of organizing this workshop to provide technical guidance. Text pictures from facebook and Squishy Circuits, the project’s website.

The filmmaking workshop is going on and Jerome is showing the process of the filmmaking.

Happy New Year – Welcome to 2012, this is the first update of the year.

Thank you all for making 2011 a great year, we’re hoping 2012 will be even better.

Wednesday talks
Mariane Petit and Dan osulivan from ITP NYU will be giving a presentation not to be missed, learn more about http://itp.nyu.edu

The awesome TheNelson is also arranging an EagleCAD workshop this Wednesday before he goes back to the US, EagleCAD is used to design your own PCBs, expect it to start around 8pm, register online before the event and save 10rmb http://xinchejian.com/event/?ee=92

Wednesday evenings are one of the best times to meet like minded people and build things with, it’s about making something happen.
This week

*Saturday 7th* 2pm – 5pm
InsectBot workshop – This is the best introduction to Arduino and building something that moves – No Programming needed, this little Insectbot will take on what ever your imagination can throw at it. Register online before the event to guarantee you a spot.

http://xinchejian.com/event/?ee=93

*Sunday 8th* – 1pm – 5pm
Arduino Programming workshop in Chinese, If you want to dive in the deep end and learn something for 2012 then jump into this course, it will introduce you too and orientate you in one of the most popular micro-controller development platforms out there, the Arduino.
Register online to save yourself 10rmb

http://xinchejian.com/event/?ee=90

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

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.

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..

http://xinchejian.com/2011/12/13/cooking-a-product-3-hungry-hackers-needed/

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.

Thanks to Innovati in Taiwan for sending us a sample that we had fun assembling on Sunday afternoon. Great gift idea for the holidays.

Although rated as 12+, the assembly is definitely not trivial and it would probably be best to have an adult helping; we had Angie, Paul, Ricky and Angie’s friend help out with the assembly and it still took an hour or two…. And we’re still not sure the neck servo is assembled correctly.

The kit retails for NT$1200 (about 254RMB or USD$40).