MITERS (MIT Electronics Research Society) at XCJ

January 6th, 2012 § 0 comments § permalink

Nancy Ouyang, Cathy Wu. These students were on a self-funded, personal visit to China where they visited a number of factories and Chinese makerspaces/hackerspaces. They are members of MITERS, a 30 years old student club at MIT.

Originally founded as a club to give MIT students free and open access to computers, MITERS now features a mill, lathe, band saws, welders, and other hands-on tools, in addition to a host of oscilliscopes, high-end soldering irons, and other EE prototyping tools. It’s a member-run creative haven and build-anything-you-want, if-you-break-it,-fix-it space.
You can see a short documentary of MITERS on Youtube. The event was very popular and we had a full house. The large audience included MIT alumni Benjamin Koo (and his assistant Jeadon Chen) in addition to a few students interested in opening hackerspaces-type organizations inside their own universities. Throughout their presentation they shared with us how they ran their space and what type of projects they did in addition to their impressions of China.[gallery link="file"]]]>

wednesday meetup – Free – XinCheJian – 7-9pm

January 4th, 2012 § 0 comments § permalink

Wednesday talks Mariane Petit and Dan osulivan from ITP NYU will be giving a presentation not to be missed, learn more about http://itp.nyu.edu The awesome TheNelson is also arranging an EagleCAD workshop this Wednesday before he goes back to the US, EagleCAD is used to design your own PCBs, expect it to start around 8pm, register online before the event and save 10rmb http://xinchejian.com/event/?ee=92 Wednesday evenings are one of the best times to meet like minded people and build things with, it’s about making something happen. This week *Saturday 7th* 2pm – 5pm InsectBot workshop – This is the best introduction to Arduino and building something that moves – No Programming needed, this little Insectbot will take on what ever your imagination can throw at it. Register online before the event to guarantee you a spot. http://xinchejian.com/event/?ee=93 *Sunday 8th* – 1pm – 5pm Arduino Programming workshop in Chinese, If you want to dive in the deep end and learn something for 2012 then jump into this course, it will introduce you too and orientate you in one of the most popular micro-controller development platforms out there, the Arduino. Register online to save yourself 10rmb http://xinchejian.com/event/?ee=90 Volunteer Jobs 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
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.
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Milkymist One video synthesizer

December 28th, 2011 § 2 comments § permalink

The Milkymist One team will do a presentation at XinCheJian on January 11th – register now!

Milkymist One is a video synthesizer to create real-time visual effects from live audio and video input. It can be used as a turnkey solution without any modification. No computer needed. But it doesn’t stop there. For more advanced and creative usages, Milkymist One also provides interfaces to:
  • MIDI devices/controllers
  • DMX512 input/output
  • OpenSoundControl clients
  • USB computer keyboard, mouse
  • Infrared remote control
The simple yet rich Flickernoise Patching (FNP) language allows any individual to create unique and personalized visual effects without requiring any computer programming experience.
Miikymist One can be used in Concerts, Performances, Clubs, Festivals, Installations, Parties, and more.
For hardware and software open source enthusiasts, Milkymist One is the choice of your new development ground.
Hardware features:
  • XC6SLX45 Spartan-6 FPGA
  • 128MB 32-bit DDR400 SDRAM
  • 32MB parallel flash
  • VGA output, 24bpp, up to 140MHz pixel clock
  • Multi-standard video input (PAL/SECAM/NTSC)
  • AC’97 audio
  • 10/100 Ethernet
  • Memory card reader that accepts microSD cards
  • Two USB-A receptacles that accept USB peripherals
  • Two DMX512 ports
  • MIDI IN and MIDI OUT ports
  • RC5-compatible infrared receiver
  • RS232 debug port
  •  JTAG port
Software features:
  • Flickernoise VJ Application
  • RTEMS real-time operating system
  • YAFFS flash filesystem
  • Verilog HDL code for Milkymist SOC (LM32 CPU, MIDI, DMX, etc)
  • libpng, libjpeg, openjpeg and jbig2dec image decompression libraries.
  • freetype font rendering system.
  • MuPDF library for the online help system.
  • MTK, a modified version of the Genode FX embedded GUI toolkit.
  • liboscparse, a variant of liblo, for OpenSoundControl communications.
Milkymist One is a mutual effort from it’s designer Sébastien Bourdeauducq (http://lekernel.net/), the developers of qi-hardware community (http://en.qi-hardware.com/), and the technology designer and manufacturer Sharism at Work Ltd (https://sharism.cc/milkymist/).
You can find more about Milkymist One at:
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XinCheJian on 88Bar

December 22nd, 2011 § 0 comments § permalink

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Spaghetti bridge test run

December 19th, 2011 § 0 comments § permalink

Make-something-Wednesdays @ XinCheJian – FREE – 7-9pm

December 14th, 2011 § 0 comments § permalink

Wednesday talks Michael will be introducing the upcoming challenge to Spaghetti bridge in collaboration with Techyizu.. it’ll be interesting to see if they can build as good as they can talk. This week Friday 16th 6:30pm – late MakeSense is running a technology cook-off this Friday in Chinese and are looking for hackers, social entrepreneurs and designers to make a mess in the kitchen to produce some Michelin Star food.. http://xinchejian.com/2011/12/13/cooking-a-product-3-hungry-hackers-needed/ Saturday 17th 9am – 4pm Processing – Intense course – 800RMB Learn processing from the Master himself, Raven will be teaching this class again, but this time it’s an intensive course to keep you on your toes. After 3 weeks you’ll be ready to rock & roll http://xinchejian.com/event/?ee=81 Sunday 18th 9am – 1pm Arduino workshop – By Paul and Ricky Learn the basics of Arduino Programming from Ricky followed up by Pauls hands on examples using what you learnt from Ricky. This will get you kick-started and launched into Arduino and hacking. You’ll need a starter kit to preform all the fun examples. You’ll also need to have the Arduino IDE running from http://arduino.cc if you’re not sure then come on Wednesday with your computer. Sign up here:  http://xinchejian.com/event/?ee=85 Sunday 18th 2pm – 4pm Communication Between Max/Msp and Arduino – By Ziyun Peng Learn about how to integrate MAX/MSP with Arduino, this powerful toolkit will add the dimension of audio to your projects, offer you an alternative to link the digital sounds with the physical world. Learn from a leading sound artist. sign up here: http://xinchejian.com/event/?ee=84 From the Mailing list TheNelson is heading back to Shanghai for the winter Holidays, he’s setting up camp at XinCheJian and learning LISP over the holiday, so throw an email on the mailing list if you’re interested. Volunteer Jobs 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.      ]]>

"Cooking" a product: 3 hungry hackers needed! (Chinese event)

December 13th, 2011 § 2 comments § permalink

  • “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]]]>

    Insectbot workshop yesterday

    December 12th, 2011 § 1 comment § permalink

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    Robot RQ-5: paper robot

    December 12th, 2011 § 1 comment § permalink

    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"]]]>

    Shyu Lee and XinCheJian

    December 7th, 2011 § 0 comments § permalink

    Shyu Lee introduces himself to XinCheJian and talks about his presentation on Saturday.
    Dear Entrepreneurs and Dream Weavers,
    I am Shyu Lee, a company starter in Shanghai. I resigned from my previous job and started an electrical design service. It looks Google+ is having an increasing level in my social life, as it recently connected Ricky in my “Circle” and made me know XinCheJian. I feel so excited to know a big group of people here are doing innovative work together, that after visited here last weekend, I decided to do all of my best to cooperate with you guys and realize the wildly new ideas. I used to be working for an American company plotting and designing wireless IC products, and I am also good hand on embedded system design. During this Saturday, I am going to come to XinCheJian’s space to introduce DS1000E, an ARM+FPGA development platform, with its,
    • 120 MHz, ARM Cortex-M3 based STM32F207 MCU of great power for controlling algorithms!
    • 1MByte On-Chip Flash, unleashes your ideas of programming!
    • 1MByte SRAM and 128MByte records whatever you want to collect!
    • Altera EP3C16 FPGA awesomely glued with STM32 MCU brings extensive real-time logic and I/O expansion!
    • 4.3” TFT LCD brings PSP feeling and a geeky keyboard!
    • DM9000 100Mbps Ethernet connects your system with Internet!
    I am standing with this development for XinCheJian, answering your questions and helping with your applications! By the meanwhile, I will
    • Donate one of the DS1000E development platform to XinCheJian,
    • Answer the questions from your guys,
    • And have a discussion about the applications and projects in XinCheJian.
    For the future time, as I have promised, I will be a volunteer in XinCheJian, start with,
    • Provide technical consultancy for designs with ARM, FPGA, analog, wireless, motor control and so on,
    • Help with identifying electrical components, give suggestion on purchasing, and provide discount information,
    • Actively join in the discussions of XinCheJian, help with the projects and contests,
    • Reply Emails of technical questions from senior members.
    So, I’ll see you around!
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