新车间 [XinCheJian]

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

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

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.

IDEO模式: 山寨设计是创新的开放平台 时间: 2011年元月二十二日，下午两点到五点 地点：徐汇区永嘉路50号新单位（近陕西南路） 费用:  30元/人 山寨是一个为草根创意阶级提供的开放式创新平台: 复制苹果, 诺基亚, 三星智能手机, 这些仿冒品由原产品改装而成同时加入了更吸引于中国消费者的设计. 山寨设计师为电子产品注入闪光点和关键元素. 其目的正是为了使产品在价格, 外观, 价值和用户需求上能接近普通消费人群. 山寨设计为国际公司向中国本土消费者介绍他们的品牌提供了一个机会, 他们也能借机观察中国本土文化如何作用于他们的产品, 如何相互磨合与适应. 这些公司怎样通过观察山寨设计来学习? IDEO 将分享他们对于这一重大领域的观点和方法学. 2:00pm 开放: 新单位CEO 刘妍介绍活动内容,演讲者, 来宾, 目标阐述 2:15pm 1. 山寨设计作为一种商业创新的开放平台- IDEO (15分钟) 2. 怎样山寨? -快速原型-IDEO-30分钟 -原型的工具 -Arduino – Flamingo EDA -20分钟 – Android –20分钟 -从原型到制作 – C2Tech –20分钟 4:30pm Android原型板以及工具的使用说明 参访新车间, 相互认识新朋友. Shanzhai Design as an Open Platform for Business Innovation – Pattern from IDEO Time: 14:00 – 17:00, Jan 22, 2011 Location: Xindanwei, 50 Yongjia Rd Cost: 30yuan/person Shanzhai is an open platform for grassroots innovation. Apple, Nokia, and Samsung smartphones get copied, but the knockoffs adapt the original designs in ways that appeal to Chinese customers. Shanzhai designers might add a flashlight, key in areas with unstable electricity. The effect is to make products accessible to common folks in terms of price, aesthetics, values, and needs. Shanzhai designs are an opportunity for international companies to introduce Chinese consumers to their brands, and then observe how local Chinese culture adapts their offerings. How might companies harness learning by observing Shanzhai designs? IDEO will share their perspectives and methodologies on these big questions for business. 2:00pm Opening: Introduce the event, speakers, guests and talk about the goals, by Liu Yan(xindanwei) 2:15pm 1.IDEO: “Shanzhai as an open platform for innovation” – 15 minutes 2.How to Shanzhai? – “Rapid prototyping” – IDEO – 30 minutes – Tool of prototyping – Arduino – Flamingo EDA – 20 minutes – Android – – 20 minutes -From prototype to production – C2Tech – 20 minutes 4:00pm Part Two: Android prototype boards and tools demonstration Followed by a visit to Xinchejian and networking ]]>

新车间开放日：休闲机器人的时代 时间: 2011年元月十六日，下午一点到五点 地点：徐汇区永嘉路50号新单位（近陕西南路） 费用: 免费 随着数字零件价格的降低加上丰富的开源机器人软件，DIY机器人已经可以当做事一个假日的休闲活动。这次的新车间开放日我们将介绍几个会员DIY的机器人和介绍一个将要举办的积极人竞赛。如果你对机器人有兴趣，请在这个周日加入我们，一起了解现代机器人的发展，一起讨论如何玩机器人。如果有小孩的话，非常欢迎他们一起来参加这个的活动。 – 关于HC Robot http://code.google.com/p/hcrobot/ – 关于A.R.T. http://xinchejian.com/?p=289 在这里注册 Robot Contest Kick Off- Xin Che Jian Open House: the coming of entertainment robots Time: 13:00 – 17:00, Jan 16, 2011 Location: Xindanwei, 50 Yongjia Rd Cost: Free, Open house Building robots is fun and building robots to race is doubling the fun! The era of robot building as hobby has come and we plan to celebrate the beginning of this era with a festive robot contest. At this Xin Che Jian open house, we will present a few home built robots and the plan for a contest for discussion. Come and see how you can get involved! If you are a parent, bring the kids! We are sure they will love the robots! Robots on site: – HC Robot: open source home help robots http://code.google.com/p/hcrobot/ – A.R.T. http://xinchejian.com/?p=289 Register for the event here]]>

Xinchejian kicked off the first of the “Xinshanzhai” series of talks and discussion on how “Shanzhai” micro manufacture efficiency combined with open innovation process and open source hardware will change how China innovate. We had the honor to have Eric Pan, CEO and Founder of Seeed Studio to give the talk “Facilitate Open Innovation – The Seeed Studio Approach” [Speech Slides]. Seeed Studio was founded 3 years ago in Shenzhen to explore combining open source hardware and the electronics supply chain in Shenzhen. Today, Seeed Studio employes over 30 engineers and support staffs with over USD$1 million in annual revenue mainly from US, Europe and Japanese customers which are 98% of its business. Seeed does not yet focus on Chinese market as Eric points out that the tinkers/makers community in China has not yet matured enough for Seeed and there is not enough community. Seeed Studio has so far depends on words of mouth of open hardware community for its marketing and will launch its first marketing campaign in 2011. The following is one of the first ads to be run in Make Magazine. Seeed’s current focus is to grow its WISH platform described by Eric as a ecosystem to support open source hardware designers to better manage the product life cycle. WISH platform let designers and users propose requests and new design and through the community voting and pre-ordering process to help to bring products to the market. The process is best illustrated by this slide from the speech. Seeed also works with partners sites such as Dangerous Prototypes to promote the platform. Eric’s 30 minutes talk was followed by over 2 hours of heated discussion on the topics of open source hardware, innovation and manufacture. The talk and discussions were livecast on Sina Weibo by Steven Cheng under #新山寨#. ]]>

Time: 3pm Dec 26, 2010 Location: Xin Che Jian, 2nd floor, Yongjia Rd 50 (close to Shaanxi Road South) Cost: 30RMB for non-Xinchejian members, free of charge for Xinchejian members. Seeed Studio is an open hardware facilitation company based in Shenzhen, China. Benefiting from local manufacture power and convenient global logistic system, we integrate resources to serve new era of innovation. Seeed also works with global distributors and partners to push open hardware movement. We design modular electronics for quick prototyping and small scale projects, which could be found at Bazaar. It also carries inventories from community innovators, we help people make, distribute their designs and collect the revenue. It’s a win-win situation and taking a shape towards an ecosystem. By working with us, innovators could focus on the designs, provide better support to the user and promote the product. Seeed Studio or similar service provider could get more traffic and bring up other product sales. The manufacture part of hardware involves a lot details. We provide Propagate service to facilitate the process. Innovator send finished prototype with manufacturing files including Gerber file, BOM, test plan and other requirements. Our engineering team will validate and integrate the design into small batch production line. All products will be tested and packed under instruction. Innovators could also view current manufacture and distribution status from propagate. After deducting the manufacture costs, profit will be returned to innovators when inventory sold out. To estimate the popularity before investing manufacture, innovators could post the idea or prototype to Wish. The community would vote, comment and collaborate on projects. You could also join interested groups to see what’s hot being worked on. By participating Wish, ideas with many votes could convert the popularity into coupons to purchase product or service. The idea poster could also share some coupon to the valuable commenter as appreciation. Products and service info are hosted at a wiki called Garden. Feel free to add your guide, project or yourself as a freelancer. About the speaker Eric Pan, founder and director of Seeed Studio, grew up with DIY culture in China. He graduated as an EE bachelor from Chongqing University, with experiences and prizes from national wide contests of MCU, Embe dded Design, Robotics, and English skills. He first joined Intel in Chengdu as a FCBGA product Engineer whose main job includes quality control and new product integration. Then he worked at Beamstream LLC as international sourcing manager on system solutions. He established Seeed Studio since 2008 from bare ground and now turning it into an open source hardware facilitator with 30+ employee. 新山寨第一期: 开源硬件与开放式创新 时间:2010年12月26日下午3点 地点:徐汇区永嘉路50号2楼新车间 (靠近陕西南路) 费用:新车间会员免费, 非新车间会员每人30元 Seeed Studio 是一个位于深圳的开源硬件生产公司. 得益于本土制造业的巨大力量以及便利的全球物流系统. 我们整合不同资源从而服务于新纪元创新时代. Seeed也与全球分销商和合作伙伴合作共同推动开源硬件的前进. Eric Pan 是Seeed studio 的创始人, 他从小受DIY文化影响. 他毕业于重庆大学,获得了电子工程学士学位. 他在微型计算机, 嵌入式设计, 机器人, 英文技能领域都有丰富经验集获奖. 他的第一份工作是在成都intel 担当FCBGA 产品工程师. 其主要工作是腹侧质量控制和新产品整合开发. 随后他在Beamstream LLC 工作担任国际采购经理. 在2008年他创立了Seeed studio —从零起点开始到现在拥有30名员工的开源硬件生产中心. 更多信息可以参考 http://seeedstudio.com/]]>