新车间 [XinCheJian]

The drinks are a bit pricey and it’s only one arcade cabinet right now, but we obviously love the idea of an arcade-themed bar!  The games are from the Winnitron Indie Game Arcade Network – you may remember the talk last Wednesday at XinCheJian by Bryan Ma. We particularly liked Paper Moon from Infinite Ammo although it’s a single player game.

Arcade: 57 Fuxing east road (corner Yongfu road) in Shanghai.

We’re definitely due for a resurgence of arcades… At XCJ, Lio is helping doing our part by building our own game cabinet (based on Commodore 64 games).

Startup Sauna is a non-profit from Finland. They do not provide funding but coaching (different from mentoring…). The delegation (from left to right in the picture) was made up of Jevgeni Peltola (specializing in doing business in Russia), Antti Ylimultka (board member) and Peter Vesterbacka (also working at Rovio who are opening an office in Shanghai). They want to create a startup hub in Helsinki by inviting selected startups internationally to come and spend 8 weeks in Finland in an intense marathon. They’re looking for ideas that can work globally and good teams. Expect a warm-up event in Shanghai at the beginning of 2012.

Bryan Ma on Winnitron machine.

Laser microscope, pcb printing, arcade cabinet making, lego mindstorm building, busting Pandaboard Linux config… Busy evening!

2. 一小滴的水。这里用的是水耕箱里面的营养液。

Location:Xuanhua Rd,Shanghai,China

Alex update on the progress of the new Botmill 3d printer:

I was working on the 3d printer with Mike last Saturday and the parts for the frame, Z and Y axes are almost ready and calibrated.

We are missing some parts to assemble the motors and the head. And the X axis is still work in progress.

It’s a bit strange that Botmill would sell kits with missing parts. Some of the reprap parts are low quality (misprinted gears)and you have to be extra careful tightening nuts as I’ve accidentally cracked the extruder carriage.

Work on this will continue on Wednesday evening at the space; feel free to help out!

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It’s still got warts but I’m personally pretty happy with the results… You can see the PDF here.

40 pages in less than 72 hours is a big achievement and it’s truly been a global effort and a nice example of inter-hackerspaces collaboration. Huei Ming Tan (who did the bulk of the writing!) and Eddie Choo from Ground Up Initiative in Singapore (http://groundupinitiative.org/) with a lot of incredibly valuable and numerous feedback from Paul Szymkowiak and friends from Connected Community Hackerspace (http://hackmelbourne.org) in Australia and Jerry Isdale from Maui Makers (http://mauimakers.com) plus many others leaving comments here and elsewhere.

Thanks in particular to Paul and Jerry who made it possible for the document to go from mediocre to passable!

And a big, big thanks to Justin Myers from HacDC in Washington DC (http://www.hacdc.org/) who hand-delivered the document at the DARPA office in Arlington as you can see in the attachment…

When you think about it, this is hackers from 4.5 countries (China, Singapore, Australia, US and honestly, Maui, Hawaii is in the middle of the Pacific so far away from the continental US) collaborating together. I think whether or not we get the grant (and we should, as I’m convinced Hackerspaces are the only viable option for 100YSS) this is awesome!

Now we have to wait to see who gets selected for the half a million dollars grant… If and when this happens, the initial caretakers will create the 100YSS nonprofit and a charter. Interested Hackerspaces representatives (one per Hackerspace) will be voted in the organization. These representative will then select staff members from candidates for the first 3 months (renewable), gather project proposals and start funding each one by one.