新车间 [XinCheJian]

“Cooking” session: Friday 16th December 2011 at 6:30pm

“Chefs”: 9 hackers, social entrepreneurs and designers.

“Kitchen”: XinCheJian hackerspace (address: Anhua Road No.76 suite 301, Changning District, Shanghai, near Jiangsu Road)

Ingredients: some fresh seasonal hardware components carefully selected by XCJ

Creative Fusion Cuisine to be cooked: A Creative Product Prototyping! EVENT FORMAT: Chinese event, 6:30pm- 10:30pm

• 6:30pm:
• who is XCJ?
• who is MakeSense?
• Event presentation
• Q&A
• 6:50 pm: chefs self introduction of 3 minutes each
• 7:15 pm: team formation (3 teams of 3 people:1 hacker, 1 social entrepreneur and 1 designer per team)
• 7:20pm : team building
• 7:45pm : cooking > go!
• 10:15pm : feedback (smiles, happiness and interviews)
• 10:30pm: closing of the kitchen

So for now: COOKING OR NOT COOKING,that’s the (real) question? …Isn’t it? 3 hungry hackers needed, to participate please contact [email protected]]]>

Innovati in Taiwan for sending us a sample that we had fun assembling on Sunday afternoon. Great gift idea for the holidays. Although rated as 12+, the assembly is definitely not trivial and it would probably be best to have an adult helping; we had Angie, Paul, Ricky and Angie’s friend help out with the assembly and it still took an hour or two…. And we’re still not sure the neck servo is assembled correctly. The kit retails for NT$1200 (about 254RMB or USD$40). [gallery columns="2"]]]>

Tonights topics Tonight we should have three interesting topics, Farming in an Urban window presented by Jeff followed up with the 8x8x8 cube you might have previously seen on the mailing list.. if anyone knows the 8x8x8 cube takes some serious multiplexing.. find out how many pins this guy uses! Also Raven will start the show with his awesome processing introduction for those who might be interested in signing up to the processing workshop. Notice XinCheJian is run by volunteers, by donating time, toys or money can the space continue to be what it is. If you’re interested in being part of the group we have several positions open for volunteers or those looking for a community driven internship at the end of this newsletter. If you cannot help out by taking a membership then consider buying a drink from the fridge or even kits, every little helps. What else is happening this week in XinCheJian *Thursday* 7pm – embedded engineers event in Chinese by Shen Jie, with pizza! *Friday* 7pm Habib from MakeSense Social Enterprises & companies meetup *Saturday* 3pm Shyul lee giving an introduction to FPGA and ARM http://xinchejian.com/event/?ee=82 *Sunday* 2:30pm – insectbot workshop by David and Lutz This is a key workshop to getting started with Arduino and getting a feel for the hackerspace, Highly entertaining, safe for kids and adults. “The Insect bot workshop got me started at XinCheJian back in may, confused and disorientated about a hackerspace this put me on the right path to making great things — Paul” Sign up here.. http://xinchejian.com/event/?ee=75 Memberships Having a Membership in XinCheJian means you’re supporting the community and giving back, you’ll get to pick your membership level either 300rmb or for the generous 500rmb a month that goes to keeping the space alive and replacing consumables. Open Volunteer positions 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

*Event Manager* The Event manager will play a key roll in helping keep the space running and getting the correct information out there, this is a dedicated position and will take several hours per week online. This person needs to be compassionate but firm, well organized, able to follow up and personable making it easy for people to run workshops.

• Schedules events within the space
• Confirms events with people based on signups
• Encourages and guides people to get content together to promote event
• Handles external media for events (posting to media sites)
• Posts events to the XinCheJian site

*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, without annoying them

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“That’s Shanghai” with Gilbert on the cover. ]]>

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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!]]>

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Hackerspaces in China.]]>

Startup Sauna is a “open source” organization 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 (Startup Sauna Wingman) and Peter Vesterbacka (Rovio Mighty Eagle – they’re 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! ]]>

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

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