Insect Robot Body

Inspired by Lumi’s Insect Robot, we had our first insect robot workshop today.

The BOM

• Cloth hanger
• 9v battery
• Batter Holder
• Ultrasound Distance Sensor
• Servo
• Arduino UNO
• Velcro!!!

Insect Robot Workshop

Workshop instruction will be in Chinese.

• Date: April 24, Sunday
• Time: 1 ~ 5 PM
• Audience: any person aged from 5 ~ 99 interested in robotics
• Bring your own notebook
• Fee：250 rmb
  The kit includes the following:
  • Arduino borad
  • 2 Servo
  • 1 Ultrasound distance sensor
  • Other material for the robot structures

Our members Lumi just posted his insect robot built according to Make: Arduino Bots and Gadgets.

Video on Youku

And Video here.

Ricky just posted a detail article on hacking HaiPad m701!

The M701 in itself is an example of hacking in China: here, hacking hardware that wasn’t thought to be workable together to achieve something close to a device that is much more expensive is not called a hobby but a full-time job!

Like many others, the extremely low-cost of this 7 inch tablet is made out of a even lower cost chipset, the Telechips 8902. The Telechips was originally designed to fit high end automotive applications, not do tablets or robotics. This chipset powers a variety of similar devices: Augen Gentouch, Coby Kyros, HSG X5A, Haipad M701, Dawa D7, SmartQ v5/v7, Coby Kyros MID7005/MID7015, Imito iM7, Smartbook Surfer (Pictures)

“Shanzhai” integrators prefer to keep their supply chain discreetly low-profile as they consider it their “secret” sauce. This is because in Shenzhen, manufacturers are in a race to produce a whole bunch and sell them before the local competitors do the same, often advertising capabilities of the underlying chipset that are actually unavailable to the user since unsupported by the OS.

Xin Che Jian Opening Special (until end of April 2011): new members sign up for one month membership will get an Arduino Uno Starter kit (value of 300 rmb)!

We only get to live once and in that life we have many dreams to realize! Xin Che Jian provides space, tools and community for makers, tinkers and hackers who want to play with electronics, physical computing and robotics.

Please bring your passion and creativity to Xin Che Jian, let’s do some crazy and fun projects together!

Become a member today!

Xin Che Jian Open House
Date: Sunday, April 3rd 2011
Time: 2PM to 5PM
Location: Anhua Road No.76 suite 301, Changning District, Shanghai (near Jiangsu Road)
Metro line 2, 11 (Jiangsu Rd Stop Exit No.4)

Please sign up here for the event.

Quadcopter Team

We have come a long way since the day trying to build the frame out of window frame. Thanks to Danny and Qicheng’s effort!!! Damn, the aluminum and carbon fiber looks awesome!!! Hopefully, we can fly this in the next few months.

Photos by Lutz and David

Building Quadcopter

Quadcopters are interesting to a lot of people and we have set up a quadcopter team looking into how to build a quadcopter from components we can find around Shanghai and finding instruction from the net. Researching quadcopter are a lot of fun and we have made some progress in the past few months.

Getting the frame

The first try to get the frame was fun. We Basically went down to the neighbor aluminum window frame maker and bought a few 50 cm aluminum frame and try to shanzhai our way to the frame. It doesn’t quite work but it’s a fun learning experience.

Getting the motors to work with Arduino

Getting the motors and propellers are easy. We can always count on Taobao for that. It took a while to get Arduino working with the motors tho.

Prettier frames

Danny got a friend to design an aluminum and carbon fiber frame and have the structure CNCed. This is beautiful! We have come a long way and hopefuly we will get to fly this in the coming month.

RoboPeak from Shanghai

We are so glad that RoboPeak, a robotic R&D team has agreed to be one of the speaking at our reopening event on March 26. We ran into this team founded in 2009 on Sina Weibo and are very impressed by what they are doing. We look forward to seeing their presentation.

Quoting from their web site:

RoboPeak is a research & development team in robotics platforms and applications, founded in 2009. Our team members are Software Engineers, Electronics Engineers and New Media Artists that all come from China.

RoboPeak develops both software and hardware, which include personal robotic platforms, Robot Operating System and related devices.

Our vision is to enrich people’s daily-life with the ever-changing development and innovation in robotic technologies.

From their blog, they are doing very impressive work with Arduino and Robotic. Here is a picture of their robot. Definitely check out the blog! Click on the image to read more about their works.

iPad controller

XinCheJian was in Barcamp Shanghai!

We took the Green for the afternoon to talk about Hackerspace, Maker, Open Source Hardware and of course ROBOTS!!!

The crazy robot car David was carrying around at Barcamp

The robot was built the night before barcamp with YM4 from Embedream, Arduino Uno and a HC-SR04. The little YM4 is a lot of fun. The independently controlled wheels allowing the car to turn on a fix axis and this saves the use to savor to turn the limited angle SR04 around to inspect the environment. But at 3AM, it was discovered a little drawback of controlling two independent wheels while trying to make the it going straight. Well, it was 3AM so I decide to let it acts a little crazy. I am dedicating this crazy robot to the crazy Shanghai taxi driver who took me to the barcamp in the morning! I will name it 840.

Pitching Hackerspace

Kicking off the afternoon with pitch of Hackerspace and Maker Culture

Hmm, this is why the call this session “THE GREEN.” Get to make fun of making is much more fun then golf as hobby.

HCR, the open source robots from DFRobot

Rick Ye gave a talk on his open source HCR robot. I was driving it around to round up people to the talk. This version has a cam pointing upward and a automated navigation mode. It’s a lot of fun to watch it walking all over the place on its own from the video at the control.

This little guy has great potential to be a good caddy on the green.

Video of HCR

Thanks to Scott for the video.

@theliuyan just posted a few pictures from the Sunday’s Cub Scout event. It was fun to introduce some hardware hacking to cub scouts. I think they enjoyed it with their great group of supportive parents. Just put Tiger Mom on the title for SEO. The activity is part of their scout engineering and we were making Electronics Dice.

Got a chance to introduce Arduino to the boy scout at YCIS. It was a fun afternoon working with the boys and the parents. Here are more on the design of the electronic dice. Look forward to seeing the boys completing the system next week.

The tool used to design the dice is Fritzing. It’s an open source design program for interactive electronics. The functionalities of the dice is pretty straight forward: when the button is press, the LEDs start to flash and on the release of the button, one of the LED is randomly picked.

Arduino is used to drive the dice logics. Arduino is a popular open source microcontroller for building interactive electronics. It comes with an easy-to-use IDE that can be downloaded here.

The complete program of the dice is here. Just connect up the Arduino board to the computer using the USB cable and launch the IDE to upload the program. Would be fun to see some tinkering with the program to provide different behavior of the dice.

#define RANDOM 1
#define PICKED 2
#define BOUNCEDELAY 50

int state;
void setup()
{
  pinMode(7, INPUT);
  pinMode(2, OUTPUT);
  pinMode(3, OUTPUT);
  pinMode(4, OUTPUT);
  state = 1;  
  Serial.begin(9600);
}

int reading = 0;
int button = 0;
int last_button = 0;
int picked = 0;

void loop()
{
  if (state == RANDOM) {
    digitalWrite(2, HIGH);
    digitalWrite(3, LOW);
    digitalWrite(4, LOW);
    delay(50);
    digitalWrite(2, LOW);
    digitalWrite(3, HIGH);
    digitalWrite(4, LOW);
    delay(50);
    digitalWrite(2, LOW);
    digitalWrite(3, LOW);
    digitalWrite(4, HIGH);
    delay(50);
  } else if (state == PICKED) {
    digitalWrite(2, LOW);
    digitalWrite(3, LOW);
    digitalWrite(4, LOW);
    digitalWrite(picked, HIGH);
  }
  
  reading = digitalRead(7);
  if (reading == last_button) {
    button = reading;
  } else {
   last_button = reading; 
  }
  
  if (button == 1) {
    state = RANDOM;
  } else {
    state = PICKED;
    if (button != last_button) {
      picked = random(3) + 2;
    }
  }
}