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. They were moved into a dedicated stack. Actually better arrangement has to be made for it. It is recommended that it be kept hanging on a rod so that the material itself doesnt take any load of its weight and is in perfect condition. For this we need to make a holder or fork that holds the rod. The rod is inserted into the middle of the roll and placed on the fork.

I made an inventory of the material available in the lab.

Roland Medela
Roland modela is a fantastic piece of machinery and a machine I most like in the fablab. I just like how it packs so much of engineering and innovation into a timy package. It high precision, compact and sturdy. You do have exercise care and precaution not to damage the machine and use it effectively.

The material relating to modela are the bits of sizes 0.01mm, 1/64,1/32,1/16 and 1/8 inch tools, PCBs double sided, single sided, smal and large size, the scanning attachment, the allen key for the spindle and the vaccum. 

I prepared the inventory for modela. I counted the number of PCB of each category, Single sided PCB smal and laege, Double sided pcb  small and large.
They come in bundles. and wach bundle size varies so i made sure I counted how many of the pcbs each category bundles had. 

I counted the number of bits available. But here I faltered a little. I didn't know at that there are two kinds of tools available. One was flat end and the other was the ball nosed. For now I counted them as one. I will have to count again later. The ball nose bits have "BN" attached in the name.

On laser cutting day we created an acrylic replica of the modela's bed plate. This plate is detachable and it is secured with two screws in the front of the plates. The acrylic is solely used for wax cutting. This will allow us to switch jobs easily. The metal bed plate that came with modela will be solely used for pcb milling. PCB milling is more delicate and requires a rigid bed, to avoid unnecessary vibrations. Wax doesn't need this since it is soft and large. 
We made 3 pieces of the acrylic plates. 

Handle PCB with care don't touch the copper surface or else it might start oxidising. 

All the material related to modela were kept near it in a drawer. A small cache of PCBs of each category were kept in the drawer but most of them were stored in a stack. We need also the scotch double-sided tape and paper double-sided tape too near it. 
It is important to keep the machine clean.Suppose we vacuuming the wax chips after milling, we wouldnt want the dust should not be collected with it hence a clean machine top is essential.

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.

Vinyl cutting

Used to make sticker and best use is to make PCB that are flexible. Can cut copper, epoxy and vinyl sheets.

Loading the material 

Use this lever to release or secure the vinyl.

Materials should be between the two translucent patches as shown in the picture. These have rough surface in order to grip the papaer better. The wheels should secure the paper when the lever is engaged.

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.

Molding Casting and Roland Modela

The basic idea for this session is to create an 3D object through computer and try to make it in machinable wax in such a way that a molding pattern is created directly from it. Roland modela will machine the wax. We will try to replicate this object by creating a silicone mold and later use the silicone mold to cast hard plastic into it.

Day 5

Shopbot

Notes:

Designing for milling

Due to tool radius inner corner of a hole or a pocket cant be sharp. Overmilling is advised in such cases.

Good design guidelines for milling.

http://blog.inventables.com/2014/06/learn-about-milling-inside-corner.html

http://www.efunda.com/processes/machining/mill_design.cfm

Better to use antimony to design material to be milled.

Dia max to be used for milling in shopbot- 6mm

Dia max to be used for milling in roland -3mm.

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.
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