Maker Faire Comes to Shenzhen: What Are China's Makers Playing With?

Driverless cars, armored robots, a high-tech concert... but there is more to a maker party than that.

The temperature outside hit 34 degrees Celsius, yet the Shenzhen Maker Faire, which opened yesterday at the Software Industry Park in Nanshan District, still drew tens of thousands of visitors. This is the third year Maker Faire has come to Shenzhen, and the biggest edition yet: 150,000 square meters, three days, free to the public.

"Whether it's the open-source Linux project of the 1990s or Xiaomi, what they have in common is not that a product came first and a community followed. They started with an idea, went looking for people who truly cared, and only then decided what product to make," Clay Shirky, author of the social-media bestseller Cognitive Surplus, said in Shenzhen today. Chinese hardware companies are rising fast, he noted, and the maker movement has caught the eye of government, markets and investors; the word "maker" has even become a synonym for hardware entrepreneur. But the core of any such community, he warned, is the people who truly care, and who often have no commercial aim at all.

Shirky has a point. This year's Shenzhen Maker Faire has plenty of commerce, from the Mini Coopers parked all over the grounds to the many booths selling robot and circuit-board learning kits for children. Still, we met quite a few excited, enthusiastic makers and found plenty of fun things. Here is what QDaily's reporters saw and heard: lying in a round planetarium gazing at the stars and watching Hatsune Miku dance, seeing a person strapped into a robotic exoskeleton, riding in a Chinese-made driverless car, talking hardware with a 68-year-old maker old enough to be our grandfather, and running into "Silicon Valley celebrity" Kevin Kelly in the aisles...

Exoskeleton robots, driverless cars, LED cubes... the fun stuff on the floor

Makers show off their projects while crowds gather round and ask questions. That seems to be the most common scene at Maker Faire. After a lap of the whole fair, these are the things we found most fun.

A 3-meter robotic exoskeleton

Next to the Maker Faire main stage stood a suit of exoskeleton armor, 2.8 meters tall and worked by a person inside. It was hard to miss. As the name suggests, an exoskeleton wraps the human body in a mechanical frame. The frame acts like bones: it moves as the limbs move, and its machinery multiplies their strength.

It is the work of two 23-year-old Japanese men, Aka and Shiroku, who founded a studio called Team Skeletonics. This is the fifth generation of exoskeleton armor they have built. Compared with the first generation, finished in 2011, it is easier to put on, and its battery lasts up to an hour.

The suit does give the wearer some extra strength, but they built it mainly for performance. So, unlike military armor, theirs is taller, and they stripped out every unnecessary part to keep it agile. It is hard to believe this 2.8-meter giant weighs only 40 kilograms.

Straw robots

Maker Faire has plenty of robots, but most look like heavy, clumsy lumps of metal. Strawbees' robots are different: they are light as swallows, because apart from the motor at their core, they are made entirely of drinking straws.

A robot light as a swallow

Strawbees is a Maker Faire regular. Its real product is not the robots but the little clips that join the robots' straw skeletons. These small, key-shaped plastic pieces can be connected in all sorts of ways to build any robot shape you want. You can also use them to build houses, kites, and on and on. Strawbees hands everyone a lever; how you move the world with it is up to your imagination.

CoffeeBots, which wants to teach kids to build robots

This year's Shenzhen Maker Faire is more commercial than earlier editions. One sign: the many vendors selling robot and circuit-board kits aimed at the education market. Of all the educational products, Coffeebots struck us as the most distinctive, because it is cheap, practical and makes use of junk.

A Coffeebots robot

Coffeebots teaches you to build robots from old things around the house: empty coffee cans, clothespins, wine corks. The slightly more complicated dragon-shaped robot below uses an egg carton for its shell.

A dragon-shaped Coffeebots robot

Judy Castro, who created Coffeebots, told us that an ordinary child needs about 8 hours to make one of these simple robots: from cleaning out the old coffee can to finishing the build, then programming the robot to walk and steer around obstacles. If you are interested, you can download the full Coffeebots instructions, programming code included, from Judy Castro's website.

"Physics concepts are too dull; kids won't sit through them. But tell them, let's build a robot to play with, one that moves up and down and dodges obstacles, and they'll definitely want to. Then they ask you about the physics along the way. That's the best way," Judy Castro said. We thought it was a smart approach.

An energy-saving car and a driverless car, one of each!

"The electric car we built can go 300 kilometers on 1 kilowatt-hour," Wu Tingyang, a sophomore at Hunan University, told QDaily.

Wu Tingyang and the energy-saving car his team built

Several streamlined, single-seat energy-saving cars were on display, printed with the Honda logo and the words "Hunan University." A student club at the university built them for a Honda fuel-efficiency competition, in which each car is tested by running laps on a racetrack in Zhaoqing. Wu Tingyang's team took second place nationally: their car covered 10.5 kilometers on 6.8 milliliters of fuel. At that rate, this oval-shaped car would go 1,000 kilometers on a liter of gasoline.

"I joined the club in my first year, and I'm in charge of this car's chassis. I taught myself after I joined," Wu Tingyang told us.

A driverless car was on show too, developed jointly by Vanke and the intelligent vehicle lab at Shanghai Jiao Tong University. From outside it looks taller and wider than an ordinary sedan, closer in size to a regular SUV.

The exterior of the driverless car

The car has no driver's seat, only two rows of passenger seats facing each other. Between them sits a screen showing a map with the car's current position, along with video from the cameras inside the car.

Inside the driverless car

The car is already in service, though not on public roads, as we might imagine, but inside Vanke's campus in Dongguan. You may wonder how it differs from Google's driverless car.

Lyu Xiuwen, a Shanghai Jiao Tong University graduate student demonstrating the car, told us it is in fact a simpler version of Google's. Like Google's car, it has lidar and sensors front and rear, and it stops automatically when someone crosses in front of it. But because it runs only inside Vanke's campus, not on public roads where pedestrians, bicycles and cars mix, its route is fixed.

Today's weather could become an LED cloud in your living room

At the last Maker Faire we saw an unusual little gadget called Looking Glass: a glass cube with a 3D photograph printed inside. Turn the cube and you see the photo from several angles.

This time the Looking Glass team brought an even cooler cube, packed with hundreds or even thousands of LEDs that can display different light patterns and colors depending on the program. Connect the cube to the internet and program it, and you could even turn each day's weather into a three-dimensional cloud and sun inside the 3D LED cube.

A video shows it best:

OpenTrons, which wants to make everyone a scientist

OpenTrons also caught our eye: it looks like a 3D printer, but it is crammed with test tubes. Mitch Dunn, who runs OpenTrons' production in Shenzhen, told QDaily that it is a hardware device that saves researchers trouble, and that the team has already sent some prototypes to researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to try out.

Mitch Dunn and OpenTrons

"Researchers used to spend a lot of time on experiments, so we built a device that handles the test tubes for them automatically. We're also developing a software platform, so you don't need a PhD or professional training to use it."

Mitch Dunn gave me an example. Say you are at home and suddenly feel like testing some DNA. You download a PCR test program from the companion software platform, Mix.Bio, gently swab the inside of your cheek, and OpenTrons does the rest.

What other hardware can you play with?

At the PCH booth we found Pono, the "non-smart" hardware that was once a hit on Kickstarter: in short, an MP3 player. American rock star Neil Young oversaw its production, and several celebrities endorsed it at the time, praising its sound quality as first-rate. Our untrained ears, in a noisy hall, could not hear the difference.

The Pono player in person

If you keep fish and also like things clean, you know the misery of fish-tank glass that never wipes clean. On the floor we also saw a smart gadget for cleaning fish tanks! You can steer the cleaner remotely from your phone, and it has a built-in camera, so you can check on the inside of the tank even when you are far from home.

The MOAI smart fish-tank cleaner

What we tried ourselves: a 3D otaku planetarium and a high-tech concert

We don't know why, but every fun activity we tried today came from Japanese makers.

A 3D planetarium, founded by an otaku

If you are both a maker and an otaku, don't miss this 3D planetarium. It is a planetarium with a difference: first, it has little to do with astronomy; second, the dome is made of plastic sheeting and stays up only because air is pumped into it.

The plastic-sheet "planetarium"

The show has two parts. Members of the Smile Planetarium branch of the Japanese otaku group Nico Planet run the first half. They rented the plastic planetarium to "spread the gospel" of Hatsune Miku, playing Hatsune Miku videos through a fisheye projector to a soundtrack that includes Thank God I'm a Lolicon and Nyan Cat. So you get to watch hundreds and thousands of tiny Mikus rain down on you to the earworm chant of "Nyanyanyanyanyanyanya!"

The earworm goes roughly like this:

The second half is a handmade 3D show by the inflatable planetarium's owner, Higekita Workshop. Visitors wear red-blue glasses, and a projector casts overlapping red and blue beams onto the dome. A staff member holds a 3D model and sweeps it past the lens; the model blocks the red and blue light in layers, casting a distinctive shadow that, seen through red-blue glasses, looks like a 3D object. It is a crafty trick, and it surprises and delights the audience.

A man projecting shadows with a model

Yamaha incubates hardware teams too

Next to the 3D planetarium's heavy otaku flavor, Show 4, from a Yamaha incubator, is more macho. It is really an ordinary drum kit fitted with sound and motion sensors and a projector. As the drummer plays, the video changes with the rhythm of the beats. The effect they are after: you watch the drummer play while slick video transitions flash up. One look at the video and you'll get it:

A high-tech concert

The last and biggest highlight of the Shenzhen Maker Faire's first day was the concert by Maywa Denki. Maywa Denki is a Japanese band whose defining trait is that it builds every instrument it plays, and most of those instruments, like electric motors, run on electric current. Next to them, every other so-called electronic music sounds feeble.

The Maywa Denki concert; the tadpole-shaped objects in their hands are instruments

And the people who got our ideas flowing

Beyond tracking smart-hardware trends and sitting in on forum talks, perhaps the best way to enjoy Maker Faire is to talk to interesting people and hear stories that go beyond circuit boards and smart hardware.

"How many side projects is this for me? Lots. I've lost count," said Mr. Li, a 68-year-old maker.

Walking the venue, we came across a fun device: an abacus clock, which tells the time by showing the digits the way an abacus does. Tending it were not young people but an elderly couple.

Mr. Li and the abacus clock

The highly original idea of an "abacus clock" came from 68-year-old Mr. Li, a former engineer who loves making little gadgets in his spare time. When he saw the Maker Faire listing, he wanted a booth of his own; getting this one took several rounds of back and forth and many emails.

For his amateur maker career, Mr. Li has printed his own business cards, set up a blog and even opened a Taobao shop, doing things many young people never get round to. "How many side projects is this for me? Lots. I've lost count," he said.

"He just loves this stuff," said his wife, standing beside him. The heat showed no sign of easing, but she stayed at the booth with him while he showed us, in great detail and beaming all the while, how to set the time on the abacus clock.

In fact, all sorts of makers were on site, and you could run into them just walking around. We saw this girl, for example, dressed in a Japanese samurai outfit with the character for "love" on her head.

"Love" and the samurai outfit

At one booth we also ran into Kevin Kelly, the "Silicon Valley celebrity" now hugely popular in China. He was looking at a Bluetooth sensor that sticks onto a baby's diaper and sends an alert to your phone when the diaper needs changing. "Quite interesting," he said, and everyone around him laughed.

Between Maker Faire forum talks, we also managed to grab a chat with Clay Shirky, the author who has long studied social media and collaboration, and he shared some of his views on where technology is heading.

"I think mass collaboration is the future. For a long time people asked me what the next big trend would be after Twitter and Facebook, and I told them I didn't know. Now I think it's mass collaboration, because it makes products around the world iterate much faster. And these things, which started among engineers, will move into traditional industries: business, law, and more of traditional manufacturing."

"This is not another 1979, not another era of 'China becomes the world's factory,'" Clay Shirky told QDaily.