Sebastiaan FabAcademy
Week 1 principles and practices, project management
website version2.0
Short introduction Jan 27 / The FabAcademy has kicked off! I following the FabAcademy in De Waag in Amsterdam. That means having to travel a lot from my home village in Enter the Netherlands to Amsterdam with takes about 3 hours of travel time. 6 hours each week I have also a daily job in the FabLabEnschede, which will limit the time somehow I can spend on the FabAcademy during the week. This means that I have manage my time well and efficient and therefor I started making a weekly schedule. Since there is always work around my farm I also will include that in my weekly schedule to plan my time efficient.
I decided to start each week to indicate the level of knowledge on the subject I think I have. The knowledge level starts with: 0 which is no knowledge and 10 is very experience
Knowledge:Making websites: 0
I have never made websites and programming is new to me. I do understand that websites are being made out of programming codes. But I am also totally not aware of the programming codes and website structures. My focus will therefore be learning the structure of making a website. From Sander van Vliet I got a link to follow the CodeCademy. This website trains you through the website structures.
Version control: 8/0
From my previous job a work 14 years with version control software systems, like Profile and Siemens. But these software programs where integrated with the 3D CAD software like Solid Edge and NX (UniGraphics). So I am used to work with versions systems. But the way of working like Git is totally new for me.
Blogs, wikis, content management systems: 5/0
I read several blogs but I have no experience making them. I use sometimes Dropbox.
Project management programs: 8/2
I work in my previous job with planned projects. So I am used to work with a planning, all through the project where I worked on where planned by a project leader.
Project management principles: 2
I do not have a lot of experience with management principles, do I do like to be organsised and have overview. For this week I started to get an overview of the work.
Lets get startet
Since I have no knownlegde about HTML and building up a website, I had to learn this fast. Sander van Vliet advised me to go to website CodeCademy to learn how to build a website with HTML code. I spend all weekend on CodeCademy to understand the basics of HTML programming and to start building my website. It was in the beginning not easy to understand. It felt really: How to start? What first and what next? I decided to begin building the website very simpel. Step for step trying to understand how it is been done I have not used things like wordpress, because I tried first to understand how a website is build, instead of having a fancy looking website without knowing how it been done.
I created this website page layout and I will use this for every page.
I created an CSS file to give my website an more fancy style. But the design of my website is more functional then nice looking. The main style feature I added is on the leftside where the different webpages of my website are positioned in an green area.
For the FabLabEnschede I like to use more often youtube movies, to support the trainings I give. That is why I also startet learning how to make a interresting movie and put it on youtube I already made a mistake by making the movie in portait position. The next movie wil be shot in Landschape mode. I plan to use the youtube chanel more often to support my explanations over the weekly assigments. Next thing is to learn how to edit short movies.
Read and learn Git
To upload the website in to Git I work in the following steps.
First I save all the pictures in a weekly folder. In this way I can find the pictures fast and I can work more structured. The big files are saved in my Google drive folder. The weekly website pages are saved in this fablabamsterdam folder 58.
Next is to upload the folder with the pictures in to git. Right mouse click in the folder and open Git Bash Here. Type the command: Git pull
In this case Git is up to date.
Type the command: git add .
Type the command: git commit -am 'discription'
Type the command: git push origin master
Check if the result shows master -> Master.
Next is to upload the website page itself. Open Git Bash Here in this folder with the right mouse click. Type the command: git pull
Type the command: git commit -am 'discription' The discription is in this case: website week added. I upload the website page of this week.
In this case the website is already online and nothing had to be update. Next type command: git push origin master. Check for master -> master as result.
Now the website is online.
Final Project
Leaf collection robots: Leafbot
My home is located in the countryside with a lot of oak trees surrounding my home. Every year during the autumn season enormous amount of leaves falling down to the ground, covering my garden which has a size of 3400m2.
The rot process of the oak leaves takes very long. Therefor the leaves has to be removed. In average every year it takes about 2 months every Saturday blowing and raking the leaves together. Every year it is a big task to grab the leafs and removing in total of 1200 -1500 kg of leaves from my garden.
With a leaf blower and a special rake I collecting leaves together to several big hills. This takes hours and a lot of energy to do so. When the leaves are raked together I take my forklift and a Bigbag (h*w*d: 110*120*120 cm). The Bigbag is hanged on the forklift spoons, so the Bigbag hangs stable and the leaves can easily been thrown in to the bag. I am using big plastic grips to grab big amounts of leafs at ones. When the Bigbag is fully filled, a Bigbag has the weight of about 100kg. When a Bigbag is filled, I lift the Bigbag on to my pickup truck and bring the loaded Bigbags to the waste collection point of my local authority.
So since I like to spend my time more efficient I came up with the leaf collection robots. Something like the Husqvarna Automover, but then a device that picks up leaves instead of cutting the leaves in smaller fragments, due to the fact that amount of leaves is too much.
I started to sketch several options. The first options are big machines capable of storing big amounts of leaves. With an big suction unit equipped, the machine is driving autonomously over my garden. I sketched and considered
the pro’s and cons. The big size makes the machine not so flexible. Especially when the space in some parts of the garden is getting limited, the size of the robot then can be a problem. Also the power consumption can get high, due to the fact the robot gets heavy when it is packed with the leaves. A robot that can carry a Bigbag would be
much prevert because when a Bigbag is filled with leaves I only have to lift it up with my forklift on to the pickup truck. Thinking over these problems I suddenly thought about ants and anthills. Why not making several small leaf picking robots that manage themselves (the ants) and bring the leaves to a base station, the Bigbag, with is equipped with a blower and electric robot charging system, that can suck the leafs out of the robots into the Bigbag.
The ant robots are small vehicles that can run over a lawn, but should also be capable to drive underneath bushes. Because they are light and compact the should be able to run efficient and not consume a lot of energy. The base station can be connected to the standard 230V power supply so a bigger blower can be equipped without the need for heavy and bigger batteries. The base station can relocated to different spots on my property, making the running distances for the robot short.