新车间 [XinCheJian]

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.

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

RoboPeak Team

We are very happy to be able to invite this Shanghai based Robot team. I ran into them on Weibo and thought they were professional team. Only when we meet, I learn that they are also a group of robot hobbyist. Wow! That’s some bar they set up for robot hobbyist! We gotta keep up!

There are a lot of information about their work on their web site. We post the faces behind the team and look forward to meeting them again.

Photos by Lutz and David

Aaajiao of Xindanwei gave a talk on what it took to run a space and his personal experience with making and hacking. XinCheJian goes well back with Xindanwei from working together on Scratch for Kids to incubating XinCheJian on 2F of YongJia Lu location.

Rocking with Brad Ferguson‘s CNC’ed Bamboo Guitar and Vacuum Tube AMP

That combo sounds AWESOME!

Photos by Lutz and David

Visualize World Bank Data with Kinect by Harald Haraldsson

There are over 50 people attending the grand opening of XinCheJian. The first talk of the events was given by Harald Haraldsson of Wonwei about hacking Kinect. Harald is one of the most talented interactive hacker in Shanghai. Make sure to see the light painting with Kinect at the bottom of this post.

Getting Ready

Kinect on a stick

Busy Gesticulating: demo skeleton tracking

Light Painting with Kinect and Projector

This is amazing project by Harald. Those of us into photographers have play around with light painting but Harald’s hack took it to the next step. Kinect can detect depth of an object before it. By using a piece of flat surface with projected images on it from projector, the Kinect is used to changed the images projected depending on the depth of the surface. With a camera shooting at long exposure mode, it created a 3D hologram like images. Harald show photos for data visualization.

Visualization of World Bank Data

Here are a few more pictures provided by Harald. He used the light painting to visualize economic indicator data from World Bank.

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’s Neighborhood

I have recently been asked quite a lot of questions about hackerspace, hacker culture and impact of hackerspace in China. This has gotten me starting to think a lot about what it means to run a hackerspace. I decided to take a walk around the neighborhood and find anything that’s related to makers. The following pictures are shops with in 500 meters of our new location in Anhua Lu. It’s a typical Shanghai neighborhood and quite interestingly how many maker related shops are around us.

Welding on the street

Bike modding? The guy is attaching a new rack to the back of the bike to carry more goods.

Window Frame Maker

They got good collection of aluminum windows frame and can cut it to any size we want.

Glass shop

Cotton Shop

This is a surprise fouind.

Lock Smith

Hardware Store

Quite a collection of home improvement materials

Home Appliance Repair

Also sell used home appliances. Will for treasure hunt one of these days.

We have the FRAME!!!

Danny show up in Barcamp with a big surprise! He show me the fiber/aluminium frame of the quadcopter he just got CNCed. What a beauty!