新车间 [XinCheJian]

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Insect Robot Body

Inspired by Lumi’s Insect Robot, we had our first insect robot workshop today.

The BOM

• Cloth hanger
• 9v battery
• Batter Holder
• Ultrasound Distance Sensor
• Servo
• Arduino UNO
• Velcro!!!

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Check out here for project updates.]]>

Make: Arduino Bots and Gadgets.

Video on Youku

And Video here.]]>

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.

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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

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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

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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.

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新车间的机器人课程是针对对物理运算有兴趣了解的朋友提供入门的课程和实践机会，适合十岁以上的人参加。 课程内容为： 8小时的授课时间：

• Arduino入门
  • 电子和物理计算硬件概念
  • 编程语言处理
  • 物理计算: 软件與硬件的互动
• 机器人入门
  • 什么是机器人？
  • 如何用遥控车和Arduino來做机器人
  • 自主玩具机器人 (A.R.T.) 入门

16小时的实验室时间：

• 实验室共有2〜3个教师提供援助
• 动手做自主机器车

对于15岁以下的孩子，我们希望看到家长一同参加。 课程总费用为1500元，包括8小时授课时间和16小时的实验室时间，Arduino材料费，玩具遥控车一台和基本传感器（价值500元），并赠送两个月的新车间超级会员（价值4000元）。 课程時間為周日下午，有兴趣参加可以写邮件到 [email protected] 报名。 Robot class@Xinchejian aims to promote the understanding of physical computing and provide hands-on experience with Arduino platform. This class is designed for 10 years old and more. The robot class consists of 8 hours of lectures and 16 hours of practice. 8 hours of lecture:

• Introduction to Arduino
  • Hardware Concept of Electronics and Physical Computing
  • Processing programming language
  • Physical Computing: Interface Digital and Physical world
• Introduction to Robotics
  • What’s robot?
  • Robotics using RC car and Arduino
  • Introduction to A.R.T.

16 hours of supervised hands-on labs:

• 2 ~ 3 teachers in labs offering assistance
• make your own autonomous robot car

For kids under 15, we’d like to see parent participate. The cost of the courses is 1500RMB, including 8 hours of lecture plus 16 hours hands-on lab, the Arduino starter kit, RC car and basic sensor (500RMB in value). We will also provide you two-month Xinchejian super membership (4000RMB in value) for free. The classes will be on Sunday afternoon. For class registration, please send email to [email protected].]]>

ARTv4 to have interesting, pseudo-intelligent behaviors (and not running out of SRAM which causes it to reset randomly…), I’m also working on the next generation electrical design for ART… I’m naming the bundle of software and electronics ARTv5. The plan is to support more infrared and ultrasonic sensors with an RF transceiver for sending telemetry information.  I also want to start producing and using PCB boards to get away from the fragile breadboards. More specifically, these PCB will take the form of Arduino-shields that I can stack on top of each other. The plan right now is to create three boards that are stackable:

• One for the ultrasonics sensors (front, rear, left, right);
• One for the infrared sensors (front, rear, left, right);
• One with four connectors to ultrasonics sensors, infrared sensors, motors control in addition to the connector for the RF transceiver.

The last “shield” will also host the CPLD (Xilinx xc9536). All incoming and outgoing signals go through the CPLD to give me the flexibility to do additional processing using digital logic instead of the microcontroller code. In addition, I also have a Texas Instrument CC1101 chipset transceiver (supposedly RFC1100-A but the board they sent me has FT1100A-100) with Power Amplifier that I’m adding so that the Microcontroller can send back telemetry information to the PC… So there’s the following connections:

• Ultrasonics sensors shield: 10 wires (1 VCC, 1 GND, 4 echos, 4 triggers);
• Infrared sensors shield: 6 wires (1 VCC, 1 GND, 4 signals);
• RF transceiver: plugs into two 9×2 headers (1 VCC, 1 GND and the SPI wires);
• Four control motor wires for the H-bridge (used right now to connect directly to the RF transmitter as a hack).

To do the design, I’m still using the fantastic Fritzing 0.4.3. Although it does crash regularly and has various nitpicks that, if solved, would make this even better there’s nothing really comparable. The workflow feels natural and the results are attractive. I haven’t been able to produce etchable versions of my PCB design due to what seems to be a bug, but the Gerber RS-274X files it generates seem to work fine (if GerberView output is any indication). I’ve compiled a list bought so far and the cost so far is a bit under 800 RMB. On the basis of that new design I need to add to the wishlist a whole bunch of stackable female headers in addition to figuring out the cost of producing the PCB. The BoM generated by Fritzing for the ART Shield says:

• 1xGeneric female header – 10 pins;
• 1xGeneric female header – 2 pins;
• 2xGeneric female header – 4 pins;
• 1xGeneric female header – 6 pins.

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