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Fab Academy 2016

Week 9 & 10

Mechanical and machine designing


Machine designing week is one of the most intersting weeks in the entire Fab Academy. 5 members are doing Fab Academy from Fablab Kochi and we worked as a group on this single project.

Our Team



The idea was to brainstorm and come up with some cool project idea which can be implemented making use of the things we learned in the previous work at Fab Academy. We decided to make a low lying wheel chair which can be used by handicapped children to travel around.

Fab Academy 2016


A basic rough design was drawn on the whiteboard by Athif. We instantly agreed to go ahead with this particular design. We also decided to keep a frugal budget for doing this particular project.

Fab Academy 2016

The project was completed as a team effort. The video below show our project scrapbot in action.





My contribution

Five of us worked on this project. The responisbilities were split equally between all team members. Athif managed the designing part, Riyas took the responsibility of getting all the mechanicals right, Nizam and Arsheena worked on the electronics part and as I manage the activities at our FabLab, I took the responsibility of managing the entire project development and coordination.

It was my job to source all the things needed to complete this project. To keep it frugal, we used only the left over consumables available in Fab Lab and other scrap material. So we decided to name this project Scrapbot.

Fab Academy 2016
Ufortunately we found that the size of the structure is not adequate of a full grown person or a kid above 8 years of age. We also were skeptical whether the viper motor will have the power to move the body weight of a kid or a full grown adult.

Fab Academy 2016
Once of the impoartant decisions we had to take on midway between the project was to scrap the entire idea and use the things we have developed so far and turn into something more useful.

So we went back to the drawing board to figure out ways to complete this project without letting go the things we developed so far.

Fab Academy 2016
So we dismantled the parts and decided to convert the automated wheel chair into an automatic vaccum cleaning robot. The idea was to use the same structure, create two battery operated dust collector from scrap. We wanted the device to collect dust without hitting any obstacles. To acheive that we used ultrasonic sensor and IR sensors, connected it to arduino which controls the viper motor.

Fab Academy 2016
We were able to sucessfully implement the changes and get the project to work perfectly. I contributed to the project by making sure that everybody is completing their alloted tasks on time. I also ensured that everybody's suggestions are considered and nobody argues with each other.

View the details of the project on our group project page