新车间 [XinCheJian]

Shanghai Maker Carnival badge 2012[/caption] XinCheJian attended the first Shanghai maker carnival this weekend showing off members projects. There were also lots of really interesting projects from other Chinese hackers. Heaps more photos and videos can be found via these links:

• slashdot
• Reddit article link
• Reddit photo link
• Reddit videos link

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

All the hackerspaces were invited to participate in the CSDN Mobile Developer Conference

Getting ready the night before

Hackerspace and open source hardware took the biggest booth at the show. It’s over 70 sqm.

XinCheJian

3D Printer from Beijing Hackerspace

ArduBlock on 70″ touch surface

Pretty big event: over 2000 attendents

Lots of visitors to the booth

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Kevin Xie from Xilinx (University Program Greater China manager) came by to visit XinCheJian last Sunday as he’s very interested in helping Hackerspaces in China. He sees Hackerspaces like XinCheJian as a potential opportunity for students to apply the knowledge they gain in university in real devices while inspiring them to do cool stuff. Xilinx programmable logic devices is what is powering many industrial strength devices and an important building block in any larger project. Xilinx offer capabilities that complement micro-controllers very well when continuous signal processing is needed. This could offer us interesting alternatives to real-time sensors data processing and actuators control in a very compact package. ]]>

Mitch Altman, Inventor of the famous TV-B-Gone, a remote control keychain that turns off TVs in public places. He is co-founder of Noisebridge, a San Francisco hackerspace, creator of the Brain Machine project in MAKE Magazine, gives workshops around the world on how to solder and make cool things with microcontrollers, and is CEO of Cornfield Electronics. We’re very lucky to have Mitch visiting XinCheJian on April 17th and give a talk on Hacking Cool Things with Microcontrollers! Everyone can learn and have fun making cool things with electronics! Please register here for the event.

[email protected] Sending a post to our Mailing List : [email protected] Follow us on : Facebook, Weibo, Twitter, Douban ]]>

Mitch Altman, Inventor of the famous TV-B-Gone, a remote control keychain that turns off TVs in public places. He is co-founder of Noisebridge, a San Francisco hackerspace, creator of the Brain Machine project in MAKE Magazine, gives workshops around the world on how to solder and make cool things with microcontrollers, and is CEO of Cornfield Electronics. We’re very lucky to have Mitch visiting XinCheJian and give a talk on Hacking Cool Things with Microcontrollers! Everyone can learn and have fun making cool things with electronics! After the talk, there will be a workshop for interested people to experience fun making cool stuffs: The workshop is free, you only pay for the materials used for the project of your choice and you can bring it back home! ＊ TV-B-Gone (turn off TVs in public places!) Material cost：130rmb ＊ Brain Machine (Meditate, Hallucinate, and Trip Out!) Material cost：130rmb Please register here for the event.

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.]]>

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.