My first full day in China was spent at Electronica, an absolutely massive conference showcasing companies involved in electronics manufacturing and distribution. It’s difficult to comprehend how large this event is, filling multiple halls at the New International Expo Center in Shanghai.
I’ve seen the equipment used for PCB assembly many times before. But at this show you get to see another level below that, machines that build components and other items needed to build products quickly and with great automation. There was also big news today as the 2019 Hackaday Prize China was launched. Join me after the break for a look at this equipment, and more about this new development for the Hackaday Prize.
First Ever Hackaday Prize China!
For the past five years, the Hackaday Prize China has been open to engineers from around the globe. But this year we’re stepping up the effort to help involve a lot more people from China who enjoy developing new products. On Wednesday, a large audience gathered at the Bom2buy booth (one of Supplyframe’s China-based companies) to celebrate the beginning of the 2019 Hackaday Prize China. This design contest is specifically for hackers, designers, and engineers who are more comfortable documenting their development process in Chinese. Up to ten finalists from the Hackaday Prize China will be invited to the final round of the soon-to-launch Global Hackaday Prize with the assistance of translation services in order to share their product development process with in English. We know there’s all kinds of amazing work going on here in China and this will make it easier to share those stories with the non-Chinese-speaking Hackaday community.
It was great to meet some local hardware hackers at the launch ceremony. This is Yoyojacly who gave a talk about the Raspberry Pi based arcade console he built. This is obviously an eye-catching build, and I got to speak with him for a half hour or so afterward and his projects run deep! He and his office colleagues have automated everything from the fish feeder to the lights. They recently picked up a used LIDAR sensor and are working on building an autonomous robot to take out the garbage after seeing much success with their Donkey Car (a tensor-flow based autonomous rover) project. Yoyjacly is a member of the Mushroomcloud hackerspace here in Shanghai.
It’s really cool that two people from the Dexter robotic arm team were able to make it to Shaghai for the conference. Dexter won the 2018 Hackaday Prize and were invited to exhibit in the Bom2buy booth. Dexter has silky-smooth movements and great positional awareness thanks to its high-accuracy optical encoder scheme. …read more
Source:: Hackaday