2013-01-10

This is day 3 of the MIT Media Lab organized Shenzhen Trip and it feels like it's already been an eternity. I can feel a lot of my attitudes towards design changing by seeing the manufacturing flows and factories. Previously I would unconsciously limit myself to different possibilities because things like doing an injection molded enclosure felt outside of my reach in terms of cost and volume. After seeing and talking to the people here, many are willing to take on all kinds of projects and offer a lot of help. It all depends on the relationship you have with them. It's a very Asian thing.

Today we're taking a break from the factory tours and going to the South China Market. This market is kind of in the middle of nowhere about an hour's drive outside of Shenzhen. It's a huge market spanning probably a few kilometers on each side and rather than small stalls, each manufacturer occupies a proper shop space. The storefront is just a showroom and you go into the shops to discuss business with each manufacturer.

2013-01-09

 Okay, I think there were some issues with the old pages that I put the original journal on. I've just moved them to some new pages that should be faster. Sorry about that.

Anyhow, on with the story. Today, we went on a tour of a bag and luggage factory in the Dongguan area. It's really nice because it's a change from the decidedly tech nature of the trip. Many of the Media Lab members are interested in textiles and soft circuits, and Bunnie and I have pretty much seen a lot of electronics assembly lines.

2013-01-08

The first day of tours started and it was an amazing experience. I've never been really super interested in the process of injection molding but after seeing how things are done, I found the subject fascinating. We started the day off taking the van to an injection molding factory. The owner of the factory welcomed us with open arms and surprisingly allowed us to take pictures inside the facility.

Our first stop was a meeting room where the owner brought out samples of injection molded devices for us to examine. Coleman, an injection molding expert from AQS (a contract manufacturer that's helping us organize the tours) and Bunnie were explaining how the parts were made, the materials, finish, what decisions went into making the mold, defects, and identifying the markings from the different parts of the mold. I was impressed how much information could be had just by looking at a plastic enclosure. They were able to reverse engineer the design tradeoffs that the designers had to make, some bad decisions, and were easily able to approximate the cost of the tooling and cost per part.

2013-01-06 - The Beginning

It started out with me, Bunnie, and some other members of Tokyo Hackerspace on one of his trips to Tokyo about six months ago. We were talking about possibly doing a summer hacker train trip across Northern Siberia using the TransSiberian Railway or the Baikal Amur Mainline which runs parallel to it to tour the back country of Russia. This actually turned into an active project and one of the (crazier) girls in Tokyo Hackerspace is organizing the trip for this summer. Here's more info.

Of course we were also getting buzzed off of beers at the izakaya we were at when Bunnie casually mentioned that he might do a month long workshop in Shenzhen for MIT Media Lab. The purpose was to teach the grad student designers about how to take their designs to manufacturing. My immediate reflex when I heard "month, shenzhen, manufacturing, bunnie" was to force myself into the project. 

So here I am, prepping to leave for Hong Kong today, then take a bus up into Shenzhen to meet up with Bunnie. He's arranged living apartments for all the participants including myself and Sean Cross (formerly of Chumby) as mentors. The MIT Media Lab students are grad student designers and this is technically an (independent activities period (IAP)) study project.

Hi everyone.

I made some bug fixes to the chibiArduino stack. The main fix is to prevent the wireshark bridge firmware crashing when there is heavy traffic. It was a stupid mistake where I had the wrong data type for checking to make sure the buffer didn't overflow. That's been fixed so if you're running WSBrige under heavy network traffic or if you're using a large radio buffer with heavy traffic, then you should see the behavior become much more stable. 

There are some other minor fixes as well and I also added support for the AT86RF212 and the AT86RF231. Hopefully there should finally be some interesting stuff coming out soon. Things were too crazy the past year and a half with all the stuff going on in Tokyo Hackerspace and Safecast. 

Anyways, that's about it. Here's the link to the project page:

Link