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Dec. 8th: Embedded Engineers Meetup
December 6th, 2011 § 0 comments § permalink
Shanghai Hairless Crabs
December 5th, 2011 § 0 comments § permalink
Checkout Lutz new robot platform.. this thing waves at you, nothing beats a productive Sunday afternoon.
The little guy gets a fancy photoshoots treatment with beauty!
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木有用的盒子工作坊 Useless machine workshop
December 4th, 2011 § 0 comments § permalink
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Open Source General Purpose Software Radio Platform
December 3rd, 2011 § 0 comments § permalink
Meteroi came by the space and he wants to help with ARM/FPGA classes, buying components, spare parts and providing some of his own hardware so members can experiment.
His big project at the moment is software radio with hardware-acceleration. The hardware component will have a USB and/or Ethernet interface to PC to be compatible with GNURadio. Another similar project, from Microsoft, is SORA. His innovation is to provide an higher performance hardware solution; while other solutions rely on computers for processing and ADC/DAC interface to do the data acquisition, he has everything done in hardware. He’s currently looking for a supportive university or other organization to support his work full-time for 3 to 5 years so he can focus on software integration and hardware improvements. You can read the proposal “An Open Source General Purpose Software Defined Radio Development Platform” (note that the project name will be changed because of trademark conflict).
He’s also really interested in space communication; one of his project is to bounce a radio signal off the moon. Radio communication with space will be very useful to communicate with our space robots as part of the 100YSS project.
He’ll be giving a class on ARM and FPGA at XinCheJian Saturday December 10th using his own development platform, DevStation 1000E. He will be leaving one development station for members interested in getting some practical skills after the introductory session at XinCheJian (Register Now!)]]>
XinCheJian on That's Shanghai: "New Frontier: Is this innovation ground zero?"
December 3rd, 2011 § 1 comment § permalink
“That’s Shanghai” with Gilbert on the cover.
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An interactive Christmas story
December 2nd, 2011 § 0 comments § permalink
Take line 6 and exit at Jin Qiao station #3, cross the road and head into the courtyard to the red boxes, best to view it from 4pm onwards.]]>
Chaihuo hackerspace visit
December 2nd, 2011 § 0 comments § permalink
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XinCheJian on Usable Devices
December 1st, 2011 § 0 comments § permalink
Usable Devices (“Devices that work, those that don’t and those that need to be created!“) has already some interesting writing on its blog with both technical articles such as an attempt to build a robot for the next roborace, a flattering article towards XinCheJian with a profile of two out of the three founders (the other being of course Min Lin Hsieh) and a report on the presentation from MakeSense at the last Wednesday Open House. Always interesting for us to get an outsider perspective to our space and insights in more of the local projects!]]>
The Mendel 3d printer Z axis working (kinda of)!
December 1st, 2011 § 0 comments § permalink
Mike, after chatting online with Alex over Skype, updated the group with this:
Updates for everyone. First, thanks Alex for the continued dedication on the printer. He identified a few problem we can fix and improve on. 2 major issues:1. Z axis is stuck, moves a little bit but then stops. Not sure if it’s a mechanical issue where something is jamming or possibly electrical. Alex will try loosening and tightening the belt tension to see if that helps. Other potential issue is one of the screw rods and bearing seem to be canted, which may be the cause of the jam. I recall being able to make it move up and down by pulling on the belt by hand. If that continues to work, maybe the problem is the motor isn’t strong enough. Lucky me, I’ve been playing with motors and have one that’s 3x more powerful. Will mount that one if nothing else seems to work.2. Filament feeds into the first hole but can’t find the second hole into the heating chamber. Seems Alex can push the idler bearing block back and feed the filament into the first hole and then between the brass gear and idler bearing. But then the filament is pushed to the side slightly and can’t find the second hole itself. Likely problem is the brass gear I used is too large. 2 solutions, reduce the gear size or help the filament into the second hole. Reduce gear size by either buying a smaller one or file down the one we have. Help the filament into the second hole can be done with a small ramps or funnels around the second hole. I’ll give the ramp/funnel method a try first. If that doesn’t work, then we’ll go gear hunting.
Alex followed up a bit later with exciting news:
]]>Z axes works after untightening the belt. Bearings may be too tight now but is easy to adjust and we need to fix up the broken part. The part is not a essential but helps to have precision on the axis. I wasn’t able to unassemble the extruder part to try hand feeding and see if extrudes but Ricky just told me that he received the new parts so Saturday we will be able to change the whole thing… hopefully ;P