DimSumLabs

Even after all these years the bao still helps teach people how to solder and take something home.

We had a couple of people (old members, new visitors) learn how to solder! Our old member had trouble soldering with a plug-in soldering iron with dubious tips, and we worked on how to best make use of it. A visitor also wanted to learn more about electronics. and instead of talking about it we taught him how to solder as well using our electronics bench! practical learning!

As always we…

This time we had two guest for our Tuesday HackJam. Torrey came from Shenzhen and brought his Pomoduino kits, which we soldered together. The Pomoduino is a timer that helps you structure the day, concentrate on work, and take regular breaks. It also serves as an introduction into electronics and soldering.

Valentin showed us the technology behind DigitRaver, a social virtual world where you can meet friends, chat, and enjoy music together. It runs on modest hardware while supporting a…

Dim Sum Labs partnered with AI Tinkerers HK to bring Deep Dives highlighting developers who are working in the GenAI/ML/CV in Hong Kong.

The talk was hosted by Iulian Arcus, an events coordinator at Dim Sum Labs and a co-organiser at AI Tinkerers HK.

Today we’ve had two talks:

The first by Way Fai Godfrey Cheng who presented his work on designing a Neural Network based Snooker game tracking for a local club. He took us through his hardware purchase, labeling fails and wins, and the…

We had a full house for Adisbladis’ presentation during our weekly open evening, the HackJam. Adisbladis gave an introduction to the Nix package manager and to NixOS. He then showed us how to make use of Nix’s powerful features in the context of doing Python development with pyproject.nix.

Adisbladis is a freelance Nix consultant & nixpkgs committer, where he mostly enjoys working on lower level plumbing such as lib & stdenv, but also maintains Emacs & it’s package ecosystem. With his…

Engineer-artist Eli Silver popped over from Shenzhen to tell us about his latest experiments with cable driven parallel robots and their use in art and tech. He had announced his talk with a question: “What happens when we use our built environment as the structure of a robot?”

We were shown examples of robots at vastly different length scales, from desktop size to sports stadium size. Challenges in implementation were discussed. Finally, Eli showed us his latest creation that had been…

Dim Sum Labs hosted the inseparable duo of PUG and OSHK this week with two talks and a mini christmas party.

First Allen Wyma presented how Python can be sped up by integrating Rust in the critical path of your applications, and did a live benchmark.

Then William Sun showed us how far Python use in iOS has come, demonstrating Jupyter Notebooks and Python automations that integrate well with the share menu, allowing seamless data transfer and productive work. In this case the example showed a…

For a workshop during our weekly HackJam open night, Sadale brought electronics kits that he designed and got produced. We followed the instructions and were rewarded with a circuit that can count up to three: You press a button, and the next LED will light up. There are three LEDs, and there is a reset button. One of us tried to add auto-reset as an additional feature.

Sadale originally created the kits for Toki Pona Day 2021. Toki Pona is an artificial human language. Fortunately for…

During his second workshop at Dim Sum Labs, Sam, a Berlin based creative technologist, gave an introduction into the AI image generator Eden. It gives access to the features of Stable Diffusion. We learned the basic creation of images, including how to use ChatGPT as a prompt generator. Then we moved on to train our own concepts. Finally we played with ControlNet, and Sam showed us how to turn simple geometric shapes into sophisticated looking renderings.

Sam, a Berlin based creative technologist, gave an introduction to printed circuit boards (PCBs) as a creative medium for doing art and all kinds of fun things. We learned how to do a simple PCB design in the software EasyEDA, from schematic to board layout. Finally, we ordered preassembled boards from JLCPCB and its Chinese sister site JLC. As a bonus at the end, Sam showed how to import custom graphics into EasyEDA.

See also the detailed notes shared by Jay, one of the workshop…

The topic of LLM is quite popular right now so Iulian Arcus covered how to regain sovereignty over the tools we may be using day to day very soon.

Regardless of the quality of the tools, the discourse seems to be heading towards LLMs being more integrated in our daily tasks. But with models changing every month, sometimes without recourse, and funding for the big providers uncertain, having control over your tools becomes more important.

We covered how to install LM Studio, a simple…