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About Me

Hey there ! This is Paul Anand, from Gods own country.

I am an entrepreneur by living, scientist by nature and humanist by belief. I work with start up companies, build technologies in some too ! We are building some cool ideas in our labs, soon rolling out as new products. Our focus is to bring advancement in fundamental sciences, which leads to better workspace, better healthcare, and better livelihood.

I curiously connect with Innovators, Thinkers, Dreamers, Artists, Scholars, Entrepreneurs, Scientists, Makers, Learners, Robots, Friends etc.

write to me@paulanand.org.

Preface

Ever since I stepped into the world of electrons in my childhood, it inspired me to go behind them deep. Learn more. Here I am making quick notes on HTMAA experiment by fabing and brewing ideas. While deliberating thoughts weather Design Thinking should be focussed in labs,

Neil suggests a different approach, where sense of design is learnt collectively while making things in the fab lab. Understanding different tools and techniques will give a greater sense of manufacturing your dream design.

Curiousity leads to understanding.
Understanding leads to knowledge.

Making things gives a sense of reflection. Reflection leads to meaningful iteration. Succesful iteration is essential to natural design. I look for design, which inspire our life.

This semester long interaction with design, tools and learning is to understand the fundamentals of How to Make (almost) anything aka HTMAA, a course which Neil teaches in Center for Bits and Atoms, MIT. If you are interested to learn, make or play with digital fabrication tools, you should have a look at Machines that Make Machines aka MTM.

I am gonna dabble around, experience the tools and techniques, find insights and build things for a reason. Reason could be anything fun or learning. What matters is the personal experience. I am curiously following an array of people who are activeley contibuting in development of tools, software and processes in this ecosystem. Will get in touch with them whenever i get stuck in my learning process, and hopefully crunch some insights from them too.

Learning from Gurus come from a tradition we practiced in India. Fab Academy is a distributive learning platform, where the content and tools are locally available, but distributed globally. Its moderated by fab gurus, who suggest and support participants to get their projects ready for evaluation. Most of the lab will be moderated by a fab guru, or a remote fab guru or a local instructor.

This is a social learning experiment for me. I am understanding how peer to peer knowledge transfer brings value to an individual inside a larger learning group. Moreover I believe behavioural learning is fundemental building block of human knowledge creation. I presume the whole program is built on philosophy of constructivism. Reading Jean Piaget will be a good start to understand it. It suggests learning as an active, social process, demands dynamic interaction between task, instructor and learner, encourages collaboration among learners, and learning by teaching as some of the key factors. I see HTMAA, or Fab Academy model around the same thoughts.

Happy fabbing guys. Its going to an intense process to assimilate and accommodate the whole idea of fabacademy in 20 weeks.

Course Overview

Neil delivers weekly lecture on fundamental aspects of week’s theme. Week long learning and submission of our work is a key to evaluation. Our job is to go through the content, experiment and finish the assignment using a novel approach.

Principles and Practices, Project management : 27 Jan

Neil gave weekly lecture on digital fabrication and different possibilities emerging as its by products, evoking CBA and fab lab community perspectives. The second half of lecture went as a detailed showcase of different web development standards, version control architectures, and project management tools.

We all love to do audacious projects. To see the results effectively it needs to be collaborative, modular and reproducable. Using webpages to document and express our ideas are essenial for others across the globe to understand and support meaningful projects.

My objective

  • Explore different markdown language flavours.
  • Keep the theme of site like a book.
  • Simple and one page architecture.
  • Able to convert the content into a html file in one step.
  • Able to include computational plots and graphs.

My Experience

  • Git Repository : For any project we need a file storage system in place. FA16 uses gitcloud, supported by popular gitlab.com. Its a combination of file storage in cloud and git based version control. This solves many issues like tracking changes in our code, secure transfer through ssh key pair created etc.

I used our remote guru Francisco’s tutorial for setting up git repo in my ubuntu 14.04 LTS. It went smooth. I tried couple of git push pull events to see the way how it works. Each student is getting a shared linux server space managed by gitlab. It needs an index file to point our web content, when the url on fab academy student page is clicked.

  • Webpage Documentation : This took me to find a suitable web development workflow. I started from Francisco’s documentation tutorial again. This made me more curious to check out different markdown language flavours. W3C gives an idea of web frameworks and philosophy behind it. I looked at HTML and few other formats from here.

Web Documentation Workflow management was another challenge. Initially i tried the method Francisco mentioned and installed Atom for documenting the pages. Also installed pandoc for converting the file into html. It worked and I was happy. But when i tried to make a table of contents, its getting tricky. So I looked for other packages.

I liked Brackets.io, but i feel its not a documentation platform, more of a web designing tool. It helps to convert your psd web designs to code in an easy way. Came across GFM - Github flavoured Markdown language. But i wasnt sure of it yet, so I browsed again to find an easy to write, easy to convert, easy to export workflow. Finally found RMarkdown with an extension .Rmd.

RMarkdown Approach

RMarkdown is a dynamic documentation technique with built in support from R language. We can write in conventional markdown format and convert the output to HTML, PDF or Doc formats easily. Fun lies in ability to include R code chunks in document which makes it responsive. Another interesting factor is that, you can make the document intelligent with this. I can write, I have 'r 4+6+5' lines of code in this page and it will display as, I have 15 lines of code in this page. So cool right, A simple inline computing engine is fun to work while documenting. Moreover this format can include table of contents easily with styling css themes available to beautify the document.

The best way to go for RMarkdown is to download Rstudio, an open source IDE for developing R based packages. Its very helpful because the

  • R console,
  • realtime html viewer,
  • markdown text editer all available under one single window.

While executing R commands, I can see how my code reflects without going to a browser, console gives warnings and text editer responds to syntaxes. What more i need to jump start. This tutorial will help you to install r base packages in ubuntu.

Rstudio needs knitr, a package which gives several dynamic capabilities and pandoc for file conversion into html. Once you have rstudio ready with above packages, go to File and create a new RMarkdown file.

Go to File > New File > RMarkdown (.Rmd)

I got a sample page iside Rstudio with some demo code. Clicked on the Knit HTML icon at the top-center of text editor. Boom !. I got my HTML page rendered in a second on the right side pane. Its just awesome.

rmarkdown

rstudio

Decided to remove all the contents and started my documentation saga with Rmarkdown. It can also use css files to stylise. I havent experimented much with it so far. All I am doing now is to get familiar with RMarkdown and finish my initial documentation.

I am keeping a book based documentation theme. Every week’s documentation will be divided as

  • Introductory notes from Neils lecture,
  • Stating My objectives,
  • Sharing my experience with tools,
  • detailing the approach i used to finish the assignment
  • publishing my insights of the week.

Finally copied my files to my local git folder, and pushed to fablabtrivandrum repo.

git pull                  # pull other students changes
git add --all             # add your changes
git commit -m "message"   # write a meaningful message
git push
  • Task Management is done with Taiga. I tried many other platforms. What I wanted was an online task management platform, where a bit of data visualisation tools are also available. I created a profile in Taiga in my name. Created a sprint, (sprint is a time bounded tracking event), FabAcademy2016 from 27 Jan to 22 June. Created next sprint from 3 Feb to 10 Feb, with CAD as name. I am gonna use the platform to manage my weekly tasks and final project. My final project can be tracked here and weekly projects on corresponding sprints.

My Insights

  • Git and Version Control : GitLab is the online repo linked to your workspace, Git is the version control architecture to manage the repo. Git commands help you do the basic updates and analysis. Commit gives you the history of project.

  • Markdown and Documentation : Markup and Markdown are two different web content creation standards.HTML is Hyper Text Markup Languagae, which uses markup elements to distinguish form and function. Markdown is created for user generated content platforms like stack overflow, github etc where the content made by any public user will not conflict with existing markup elements. John grubber created markdown approach, which helped different markup languages.

  • RMarkdown

  • Html conversion

  • Basic syntax

  • Markdown-Cheatsheet

  • RMarkdown-cheatsheet

  • Task Management and Taiga : Taiga is an open source platform to track project development. Basic workflow is interesting, user needs to tell taiga a userstory and tasks can be created out of it. Time bounded tasks can be created as sprints. Assigned Points related to each user story will be added when the tasks marked as complete.

Final Project

I have been dabbling around robotics for a while. This semester i am gonna experiment a two 6 DOF arms working collaboratively to help the master in his works. Modules of project will be basic Robotic arm design with 6DOF, Two Arm control/communication interface, I/O device to teach the arm for an action, Basic Gripper design.

Not sure how far i will finish in this semester. To me its worth spending my time and curiosity on something like this. Ofcos it can be mounted with whatever we want to on the hand. Still my aim will be to impart some AI into the platform.

A first look of what i am intented to make is shown here.

Ofcourse many things including selection of motors, torque calculation, weight management, forward and inverse kinematics, code for close loop feedback, communications etc need to be figured out. Still the effort is pushing me to look on different aspects of HTMAA while designing and making the project.

Computer Assisted Design : 03 February

The introductory lecture gave some ideas on the design philosopies we follow conventioanlly in our design tables. Being a product designer all my life, i was quite comfortable with the tools shared except Antimony. The idea of interfacing CSG with Graph engine is super useful to follow an ordely visual language by keeping a fine line between f-rep and b-rep functionalities.

The idea of this week is to experiment with a rapid software prototyping tool for your designs. This will help us to draw or code our designs in multiple ways.

My Objective

  • Experiment with different CAD tools.
  • Find an end to end design package for 3d models, probably with scripting support.
  • Design a nested pattern.
  • Design and model draft of final project.

My Experience

There is a wide range of tools available in the syllabus to explore. Check out here : http://academy.cba.mit.edu/classes/computer_design/index.html

The tools include both 2D and 3D content creation, manipulation built with different philosophical foundations.

I started from Antimony perspective. Played a bit with the mac version. This is a great tool to learn, teach and draw physical objects using mathematical modelling techniques. I am sure, if i got a chance to interact with this in my school days, my understanding on mathematical modelling would have been much much better. But more or less, i am enjoying it. I decided to play with few of my artistic thoughts and design some jewellery.

I started with an idea of a ring. Used few of the tools and made the progress. Its so playful using its graph engine, so that the entry barrier for artists would be much lesser than conventional CAD tools.

I first made a torus and then added a single text to it. I added my first letter p and made this. You can download the script and edit the letter to yours and make your own personal customised ring.

Design Files can be downloaded from here.

Antimony script of this ring : Ring Script

Stl for 3D printing : Ring STL

Cura GCode : Cura Gcode

I was happy that i could finish the ring with a decent design. I am planning to make it refined for my personal use cases.

Final Project : I used Fusion 360 to do the basic cad modelling of final project. Fusion 360 is an end to end solution pack to sketch, design, simulate, render and make in with a machine. I like the ease of use and cloud connectivity option. I was totally stranger when it comes to use a 3d software. I have designed many products, customised different product ideas etc interacting with Product Design/Industrial Design guys. When I started to draw 3D model of my design, a different sense of challenge was forming up internally. Still i guess, i made a quite a good streak.

I started with drawing a sketch of how my design should look. The 2D sketch was drawn freestyle and then extruded for further design changes. Later i found this approach may not give best results in first time. So I switched back to the conventional approach of building on top of primitives. You can look at the way how i did the final assembly.

Model

The files are listed here :

Handy_draft_V1 : Iges | Handy_draft_V1 : F360 | Handy_2d : Iges

My project is a dual arm robot platform to be our personal assistant in our repetetive tasks. I decided to make a conceptual model which gives a close call to the idea i have. Fusion 360 is effective for a quick design prototyping. But getting use to the tools will take some time for a newbie user.

Creo is a great tool for optimising industrial manufacturing designs. I am exploring more of this to understand and optimize the workflow in CAD-CAM in a single package. Did few simple designs and assemblies to get familiar to the concepts in traditional CAD package. Will explore more and share.

OpenSCAD is a great tool for parametric designing. I am exploring this also to teach artists and other creative enthusiasts. Did few designs for pattern ripping and pattern embedding in utitlity designs andartifacts.

Unreal is a great platform for Game design. What i found more interesting is the use case for VR development. I installed in Mac, downloaded 5.3 GB file and it suggests to have 8GB ram minimum. I think the push VR lies in optimum design package within affordable computing power. I am bullish on AR/VR as the next significant user based computational tools after personal computer and mobile.

I tried to write something in unreal, but i should say not an easy way to learn it. iwill continue my experiments in unity also in a while.

My Insights

Create a mental blueprint of your design before sketching it in any software.

Convert them into a combination of primitives like circles, cubes, cones etc to begin the designing.

Setup a windows machine as your personal designing system. It helps yoou from switching between linux, windows and mac for different packages. It reduces the time management activities.