Fab Academy 2017 - Victor Macul

My Final Project: A DIY Giraffe Lamp

Motivation

I did this final project thinking in a way to teach my students how to use Fab Lab in the first part of the course I teach at Insper, for the first semester of engineering majors. It's a kind of Cornerstone Design Course, called Design Nature, where we challenge the students to design and build a bioinspired toy for kids aged between six and eight years. However, before starting the toy project we run a kind of mini Fab Academy to familiarize the students with some prototyping methods (we call it Job Rotation). Last semester we did it for the fist time in this course, along 5 workshops (2h each), exploring one skill per workshop (CNC milling, 3D printing, soldering, sewing and woodworking). The workshops were conducted by an instructor and offered to groups of 4 to 5 students. However, the products fabricated in these workshops were independent. Fab Academy Final Project was the perfect moment to improve the Job Rotation and design and build something interesting integrating these skills. The picture bellow illustrates the Job Rotation and project requirements are summarized in sequence.

Job Rotation "As-Is"

Project Requirements

To be a bioinspired project;

To explore a set o important skills like, 3D modeling, laser cutter, vinyl cutter, CNC milling, 3D printing, PCB fabrication, soldering and sewing, in an integrated way;

To be possible to fabricate each module by someone with no experience with the help of an instructor, in a 2h class

To cost less than R$ 150,00

To be fun for freshmen

Final Results

As result, I did a Giraffe Lamp, described in the picture bellow. It's possible to control the lamp intensity through buttons connected by I2C protocol to a dimmer module installed on a microcontroller board. The total cost of one Giraffe Lamp is estimated at R$ 75,00 (~US$ 23,00), just material.

My final project! Click in the picture to watch the video

The details about the design and build process is described in the exercises pages. The 3D modeling is in the Exercise 02 (for it, I used Fusion 360). The head fabrication is in the Exercise 03 (laser cutter). The body fabrication is in the Exercise 07 (CNC mill). The PCB holder is in the Exercise 05 (3D printing). The microcontroller and the dimmer shield design and fabrication are in the Exercise 10. The buttons board is described in the Exercise 13 and the wired communication is in the Exercise 15 (I2C). The files can be downloaded in the button bellow.

All the modules and components used in this project are presented on the BOM bellow.

Bill of Materials (the spreadsheet is available for download on Applications and Implications Zip folder)

What have I learned?

To do this project was very cool and challenger since I'd never worked with electronics before Fab Academy. For sure, I'm also much more proficient in 3D modeling and digital fabrication now. I had the opportunity to work with different materials and pass hours working with the machines. After this course, I'm also more familiar with html, git and English writing. A lot of learning, some stress and definitely fun! The pictures bellow illustrates this process.

Using an image as reference to design giraffe lamp body