新车间 [XinCheJian]

Sponsorship XinCheJian is asking for 50,000 RMB from the main sponsor of the Soccerbots Exhibition. These costs are the minimum requirements to cover the basic materials, components, tools and support costs. Due to the extreme time constraints, half of the funds (25,000 RMB) must be provided before May 18th 2012. The overall engineering cost of the Soccerbots exhibition is estimated at well over 200,000 RMB when taking into account the cost of the expert engineering team donated by Xinchejian. The exhibition will be on loan to a space designated by the sponsor for the duration of the event. Given the transportation costs, the sponsor will need to provide the field based on a design and set of specifications provided by XinCheJian. XinCheJian will provide four robotic teams of seven players, remote controllers for the audience to play, the special football field sensors, the special game ball, and recharging units for the robots. All robots, playing field, remote controls, and equipment must be returned to XinCheJian at the end of the exhibition. Soccerbots Swarm Robotics Team XinCheJian has assembled a team of two senior engineers, Michaelis Lutz and Edward Jiang, with over 10 years of robotics experience. Assisting them to build the robots will be more than 10 part-time engineers and designers. Project Lead Engineers:

• Edward Jiang
• Edward Jiang is Vice-President of Technology at Tradesparq, the world’s fastest growing trade social network. Edward is a robot enthusiast with multiple robotics projects.
• http://xinchejian.com/2012/03/27/portraits-of-makers-edward-jiang/

Michaelis Lutz

• Michaelis Lutz is technical German translator for ASUSTEK COMPUTER, the PC manufacturer, with 40 years of experience in electronics and robotics.
• See his videos on Youku: http://u.youku.com/lumi3005
• http://xinchejian.com/2012/03/26/portraits-of-makers-lutz/

Xinchejian Project Engineers: Spencer Featherstone, Mika Lin, Valentin Gauffre, Raymond Walintukan, Tim Lan, Chong Yang, Robin Lee, Chris Carey, Infy Zhang XinCheJian supporting team: Ricky Ng-Adam and Kevin Chen (proposal), Otto Mao (translation) Previously Built Robots: Mr. Lutz and Mr. Jiang have built multiple robots at XinCheJian including:

• “Insectbot” autonomous robots
• Hacked RC car, turned into an autonomous robot
• R2D2 autonomous robot
• Micro-sized line-follower autonomous robot
• Four-legged autonomous walking robot

View a list of projects and pictures here:

• http://letsmakerobots.com/user/14721/pages/robot

Parting words At XinCheJian, we believe this would be a unique and attention-grabbing exhibition. This will be the first robotic football swarm game in China, which could draw interest from both traditional media and social media. Most important, we think the robots will attract lots of people who will come to watch the robots playing football! Our organization has positive visibility in the local media including magazines and TV media, many online social networks (such as Weibo) and our own blog. Our sponsor can gain positive exposure by associating itself to this ambitious and attractive project. We have a strong self-interest in seeing this project succeed and driving traffic to our sponsor to build an audience for the project and enhance our reputation as a creative and innovative space. 概念图Concept Proposals Figure 1: Audience members watching the Soccerbots playing football. Figure 2:  Proposed 3D model shell for the soccerbot robot exterior. Figure 3: Concept of external skins for soccerbots, based on European Football teams. ]]>

Simple Analog Line Follower

One of the easiest way to participate in XinCheJian’s next robot racing compeition is to build a simple analog line follower robot.

No programming skill required at all!! You will not only learn some basic knowledge about analog circuits, but also gets to exericse your soldering skills.

With only less than 10 common electronic parts and recycled bottle caps as the wheel, you can construct a very simple line follower, arguably the most simple one ever!

This workshop is suitable for people who are interested in soldering and robotics. Participant must be 10 years or older.

Please register here: http://xinchejian.com/event/?ee=117

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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"]]]>

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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!]]>

http://www.demohour.com/projects/297265 ]]>