Shenzhen, China is the home of the legendary electronics markets of Huaqiangbei. Friday was my first full day in the city, having spent the previous three days in Shanghai. We got a little bit of a late start as our flight didn’t arrive until after 1 am and we stayed at the first night at an airport hotel. We met up with Scotty Allen for an amazing meal followed by a very unique experience in the electronics markets, not just seeing the items, but meeting the booth owners who showed off some of their secrets.

The day was capped off by an absolutely packed meetup at X.factory, the collaborative creative space run by Seeed Studio. They lined up a half dozen hardware talks that were quite excellent, and there was a ton of hardware being demonstrated as the night progressed. They had to kick us out or we’d have stayed all night!

Packed House for the Meetup at Seeed

When we arrived at X.Factory the space was already packed with excited hackers enjoying pizza, popcorn chicken, and beer (Budweiser is really popular here from some reason). Sophi Kravitz and I gave a talk on the 2019 Hackaday Prize China — a design challenge focusing on product development that can be entered with Chinese language documentation. After five years of the Hackaday Prize there are so many amazing entries to show off that it’s really exciting to share these stories with people who missed them the first time around, and who are exited to join in on the challenge.

The first hardware talk was a story about iterating on PCB business cards that can be cut out and notched together to created 3D sculptures. In red you can see the first iteration of the card which forms a robot. But Nico received so much positive feedback that he kept going. Along the way he began incorporating circuits and components into the designs and you can see the walker he built, along with a Millennium Falcon and a few others.

It was really cool to see a talk about a project I had recently noticed on Hackaday.io The Robo HAT MM1 is gearing up for a campaign on Crowd Supply and it’s great to see the team getting out and showing demos of their work. This a logic board aimed at making …read more

Source:: Hackaday