新车间 [XinCheJian]

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member today! Xin Che Jian Open House Date: Sunday, April 3rd 2011 Time: 2PM to 5PM Location: Anhua Road No.76 suite 301, Changning District, Shanghai (near Jiangsu Road) Metro line 2, 11 (Jiangsu Rd Stop Exit No.4) Please sign up here for the event.]]>

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

XinCheJian, the first Hackerspace in China, is one of the 30 Hackerspaces across the globe that have been selected to participate in the Great Global Hackerspace Challenge (GGHC) competition. The objective of the competition is to create an electronics build that will make a real and positive difference in an educational establishment. The competition runs for six weeks, from Monday March 21^st to May 3rd2011. Projects are evaluated on the following: How reproducible is the final project? How easily can the parts be sourced in locations around the world? How low cost is the final output? How well are the plans documented? How relevant is the project to helping education today? How inventive and creative is the design and build of the project? The selection of our participation proposal includes a 5900 RMB (US$900) budget in electronic components (including the required microcontroller and portable power source) generously provided by element14.com. Every Hackerspace that completes their project will receive 10 soldering setups while the three semi-finalist Hackerspaces will each receive over 13000 RMB (US$2000) worth of electronic tools. The Hackerspace with the winning project gets a Tektronix MSO2024 oscilloscope worth over 36000 RMB (around US$5,600)! As an extra incentive, semi-finalists will be invited at the California Maker Faire 2011. To address the objectives of the competition, XinCheJian will focus on getting elementary school students acquainted with the intellectual processes of cooperative problem solving with out-of-the-box thinking. This will translate into an interactive and intelligent educational toy that stimulates students into a variety of challenging experiences. Want to join or help our team? Contact us at: [email protected]. To reach the competition organizers, contact [email protected]. You can also take a look at our Press release or the Participant information pack from Element-14.]]>

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.

Xin Che Jian is moving!

After a 3 months of experimenting in Xindanwei, we have proven the potential of having a hackerspace in Shanghai but we need a bigger space. We found a new 100 square meter location in Anhua Lu and Jiangsu Lu inside a old factory. The place is definitely a ideal location for setting up a hackerspace. The new space will be ready by the end of March!

Lovely neighborhoold

There are all kind of business around. I am sure we can use them in our making.

Yes, it’s a real factory (che jian)!

Let the be light

One big side of the room is full of window.

Plenty of space