Prefab

Week 1 Day 1

We met our Prefab facilitator and fab guru Francisco today who explained and excited us about Fabacademy, his experience in fabacademy and the weeks of making to come.

The ugly truth behind the modern era and capitalism is the huge amount of resources going to waste as in lieu of pleasing the consumers. More products are created than the number of consumers and the margin of profit is good enough to cover the loss of wastage. This doesnt cover the cost of environmental impact. This is highly inefficient and unsustainable. One option is personal fabrication.

Fabacademy is known as How to make almost anything in MIT.

Preparing Laptops and Lab Computers

Since fabacademy philosophy roots in opensourcing it only makes sense that Ubuntu and the free softwares are used. This allows free and ope access to anything and everything that is done in fablab. It allows repetability and a common framework that anyone can work with. One of most important of them is the OS itself which is the linux based UBUNTU system. The next most inportant software is  the fab modules which can control alomst any CNC machine that is present in fablab.

The pain of Ubuntu 

Ubuntu means 

"A quality that included the essential human virtue; compassion and humanity. there is a need for understanding not vengance, ubuntu is not victimization"

Indeed you need to have a all these to go through Ubuntu install and setup.

Creating digital accounts

During fabcademy you will be evaluated through your documentation which explains the world and the remote mentor or Neil what you have done. There will be times when your projects will be recommended by your remote mentor to higher faculty or Neil. They will see your website or the files you created. For these reason you need to learn to effectively express your work in a document. They should be online and freely available to anyone, they are opensource.

Day 4 week 1

Lab maintenance and Material handling

I took charge of Vinyl cutter and Roland Modela

I learned how to better handle the vinyl rolls. The vinyl rolls when kept vertically deform and get damaged at the edge which happens due to it not being able to support its own load properly. The correct way to keep a vinyl material is horizontal and the rolls to be taped at the open edge after use so that they don’t become loose.

The vinyl rolls were kept on the ground earlier.

Day 2 w2

Laser in our fablab is a trotec speedy 100 with that we have an atmos exhaust filter from trotec. Here's the laser machine and our super cool prefab guide and fabguru Francisco explaining about the filter system.

Polycarbonate lid and Atmos Exhaust Filter system

Filter parameters

Things to watch out for

Exhaust filter should be on.

Week 3 Day 1

This week we move to electronics design and fabrication.

Today we started with electronics production. The goal was to fabricate a pcb from an already existing design. We use roland modela to fabricate the PCB.

Assignment: to fabricate a version of fabISP using Roland modela and fab modules.

Process

We downloaded the the following designs.

Week 3 Day2

Many of the fabacademy cad items are design that have .cad extension. These were designed in kokopelli. .cad file is basically a python script. Today we try to edit and understand how the script ad kokopelli.

Assignment

We add components to a hello.ftdi.44.cad and wires on a board and fabricate it.

Consider the following methods of programing a microcontroller

Arduino ide- most user-friendly, many tools, quick,  easy

C  - intermediate difficult, need to have more hardware knowledge, more efficient in code handling and storing, more freedom to program.

Assembly lowest level of programing, need to have through understanding of the hardware also, more difficult, highly efficient in code handling and occupies least storage, and allows most freedom to program.

Final project discussion, Fabduino.

We are going to put use all the knowledge we gained through the weeks before and try to create a product using fablab facilities ad techniques.

Luciano is going to be our facilitator for this week for this process.

Luciano is product designer by profession and he introduced us to design thinking concepts and process.

Rhino, shopbot and making fabduino ready.

Rhino

We learned operation of Shopbot today and Luciano gave an introduction to the rhino 3d software. Rhino is one of the most popular 3D design softwares. It is easy to use and beginner friendly.

Molding and casting revisit

Luciano explained some design guidelines when think of making something from a mold. I am a mechanical engineer and I knew most of it already but I had never put them to practice while designing yet and to make it in fablab. It was a good reminder, from now on I will increasingly integrate these guidelines in my designs.

The oomoo 25 hadnt set when we checked in the morning. Essentially all the oomoo 25 were a trash now. Later I found online that some people were saying the shelf life of oomoo 25 is just 4 months. We have more of oomoo 25 than any other resin.

Today I'll report the things that needs changing in fablab and some suggestions that hopefully will be reflected in the fablab inventory.

The most atrocious purchase is the dimension 3D printer.