Nancy Ouyang, Cathy Wu. These students were on a self-funded, personal visit to China where they visited a number of factories and Chinese makerspaces/hackerspaces. They are members of MITERS, a 30 years old student club at MIT.
Originally founded as a club to give MIT students free and open access to computers, MITERS now features a mill, lathe, band saws, welders, and other hands-on tools, in addition to a host of oscilliscopes, high-end soldering irons, and other EE prototyping tools. It’s a member-run creative haven and build-anything-you-want, if-you-break-it,-fix-it space.
You can see a
short documentary of MITERS on Youtube.
The event was very popular and we had a full house. The large audience included MIT alumni Benjamin Koo (and his assistant Jeadon Chen) in addition to a few students interested in opening hackerspaces-type organizations inside their own universities. Throughout their presentation they shared with us how they ran their space and what type of projects they did in addition to their impressions of China.[gallery link="file"]]]>
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.
]]>