Mechanical Design

This week was a very interesting and intense week, mostly the weekend as between the Friday Afternoon and Sunday Morning , around 20 hours or hard working for make a functional machine of a hot wire foam cutter with all my classmates of the supernode of León.

I would like to thanx to all of them Luis Diaz, Marta Verde, Paco Gonzalez, Jose Real, Maria Santisteban and Victoria Retana so much effort with so many smiles and great ideas.

Also to all the instructors specially mine, Nuria Robles, that is a pure Fab Angel, and of course any people that saw us work and give us advices and encouraging and cheering up us.

MTM Machine Design Page (CEU)

Here is the video of the MTM weekend.

MachineBuilding_v4 from Marta Verde on Vimeo.

My accountability and duties in the Assignment

I had the great honor and pleasure to work with such skillful and nice people that became a very well balanced workgroup, with great willing and disposition. When you have good coworkers everything is possible.

Also the workflow was very fluent with many brainstormings and in each duty everyone knew how to work in group sharing ideas, knowledge and charges, without any laziness.

Research

In the previous days before the meet up weekend, as we have chosen to made a foam cutter machine by hot wire, I study all the projects of the previous year, that was the first that the Gestalt nodes were introduced

I focused in the foam machines that groups in Amsterdam , Singapore, Puebla (Mexico), Rome and Tecsup had built.

I gather as much information possible and share to my classmates, for getting a better understanding of what we have to do, and start producing ideas.

Also I start to save parts of python code for programming a nice code.

Logistics

This year for this assignment we join forces all the Fablabs that made the supernode supervised by Fablab León (Leon, Madrid CEU, Deusto, and Universidad Europea), in total 7 students.

So almost everyone has to travel to León, is not so far of the others FabLabs around 4 hours of travel, but it needs some planning with accommodation that was made by instructors and students.

As I'm the only student that lives and was born here, and also the only student that knew Fablab León, I offered to do some little but needed duties to keep all my classmates productive, like go to buy little things like bolts and nails, show where some tools were.

The group was well balanced in skills with 4 students with architecture background that focus in designing and building the structure the machine, and other 2 more students and me with the goal to make the electronics work and program the machine.

As everyone knew their part and we were skilled in teamwork, and with so few time to work, a Group leader was not needed, but I tried that everyone has what was needed, that the communication was fluent between the group and identified any potential problem that stop us and maintain the fablab charter as much as possible and workspace tidy. This is difficult when we are tired, busy and stressed.

Besides the group split by skills, I tried to explain how the gestalt nodes works and the structure of the python program and what we were trying to do, to the building group, more technical explications were done by Luis Diaz.

Setup the Fablab León Macbook

To try, program and operate the machine, I installed all the Python and Gestalt libraries needed, in the macbook the Fablab owns. Some of this work was done in the previous week in the assignment of programming the Attiny44 boards.

Everything related of Python were installed and updated, like library Pyserial, and Gestalt python libraries.

Programming the Gestalt Nodes

As we started from the previous machine made in FabLab León, I checked that everything was fine. The most important the Gestalt node boards that are the heart of this assignment. The ISP cable was acknowledged by the computer, and start trying to communicate with the boards. I edited the make file to start trying to upload code to them, with the FabUsbTiny I got the info of the boards, but just connecting the 5v of the usb cable.

We also start learning about the variable power source we have in the fab, as the motors need 12v to move.

We connect, the gestalt nodes together and start trying to run the examples and how the connections works.

I didn't get any results. After some troubleshooting, I prefer to wait for next day as Luis Diaz that has more skill in electronics that me and Marta arrive and helps to solve it.

After Marta Verde checked all the cables and Luis, figure out how to work them, that was to be sure that all the cables were connected in the right position and upload again to all the boards a fresh firmware we could advance.

After labeled the boards and check the firmware we still have a little programs. I use the fablab macbook to upload the firmware of boards #2 and #3 and were much faster than in the pc of Luis Diaz, maybe is because the version of avrdude but in the time you program one in pc you can do 2 on mac. As was important to check that all the steps can be made by the machines in the fablab León.

We split the duties of how to solve the problems and start making test when the structure was finished by the other group.

Programming and beta testing can be a very funny and frustrating task.

Python Programming

I'm trying to program some GUI for the program, at least I'm make some little advances with the wxphython library.

Updating and Upgrading the machine

The machine builded is going to be keep at FabLab León so I have to understand every part of the process and the ideas that each group have, and the ones must to be finished before living and the ones that can be done the next week when everyone are at their Fablabs.

I will update the code of the machine, as is only possible to test in Fablab León as the code of the gestalt nodes can't be run without of them and see some results.

For that I will be the spokesman of the group showing the machine at the presentations of the global review with Neil and the other Fablabs.

Everything with lights is better.

You can see more about my progress with python programming in the next week, where I upgraded the GUI interface.