About

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This is the Fab Academy class page of Anu Määttä. I’m part of the Amsterdam class, but actually reside in Helsinki, Finland, where Aalto Fablab is currently under construction.

I used work at Fablab Utrecht (ProtoSpace) so am not all new to world of fabbing. But by the looks of things, there are plenty of things to learn still (and that’s very welcome). I’m  really looking forward to learning more about what can be done & made at Fablabs and hoping to make lessons learned part of our lab as we go along developing it.

I studied computer science, with side twist of bioinformatics and genetics, and have mostly worked with software before stumbling across Fablabs. Looking forward to getting physical with code!

Weekly assignments list:

 

Final Project presentation

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My final project is a personal fitness tracker that has both bike computer and pedometer (step counter on it) – able to output the data collected to a computer for further processing for all your Quantified Self needs.  Continue reading →

Final project: further considerations

I didn’t have time for more than initial feasibility study and defining the scope just yet due to our lab building plans being at a critical final review stage this week (the good news is we do have most of the machines, computers, software and people with experience with Fablabs, despite missing a few more structures to accommodate them better – and that the building will actually start tomorrow)

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2: Build a personal site

I set out for the Fab Academy with an additional goal in mind: to see how documentation of Fab Academy efforts could work in other ways. despite being a software person by training, I’m not not totally convinced of Mercurial being the end-all for Fablab project documentation.

Turns out, with all the construction going on, even pulling off the exercises themselves has not been a walk in the park – so many of the goals past coping with my OWN documentation have been left for a later time (but read further on some philosophizing on documentation)

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4: Press fit construction kit

Press fit pen stand

Press fit pen stand

Assignment

Design and fabricate a press-fit construction kit. This was advised to be done with the lasercutter – unfortunately we didn’t have ours running just yet by this point, to had to use another one available at the university (with far more limited access policies). Throughout the course I ended up fabricating a few more press fit structures – all with different lasercutters – so decided to include those here too.  Continue reading →

5: Electronics production

Assignment

Assignment this week was to mill and solder the FabISP in-circuit programmer that would be used in the following weeks’ assignments to program PCBs.

For us, this served mostly as Modela troubleshooting before finally being able to make a functional FabISP board in Amsterdam.

FabISP

FabISP

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6: Make something big (Amsterdam)

Assignment

This week’s assignment was to make something big with the Shopbot. Unfortunately our lab is still in the process of thinking of getting one, so we had to wait until visiting Amsterdam end of May to make this exercise.

Making Something BIG

Making Something BIG - a present for a parent-to-be friend living in Amsterdam. Still missing the sides as we didn't have time to cut more wood (left for my friend to do at the lab later on)

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7: Electronics design (Amsterdam)

Hello World -board

Hello World -board

Assignment

The assignment this week was to modify the hello.FTDI (link) board by adding at least a button and a LED to it.

This required re-drawing the base hello.FTDI board in a PCB design software before being able to mill it again with the added components. We used Eagle for this – another option might have been using cad.py where (after briefly inspecting the hello.ftdi.cad code) it seems logically more straighforward to add a couple of basic components to a board.

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8: Molding and casting

(picture)

Assignment

This week’s assignment was to design and 3D mold and cast an object with it. I chose to keep it simple: only one piece mold. I will make a mold of our newly designed lab logo, use food-safe molding materials and cast the logo in chocolate Continue reading →

11: Input Devices (Amsterdam)

Hall effect

Hall effect

Assignment

This week‘s assignment was to read a sensor.

Since we only got to prototype electronics at all in Amsterdam end of May, I had little time to make more boards than absolutely necessary. So after advise from Bas, I made use of some “leftover” pins of the ISP programming header on my Hello LCD board for reading output from the Hall effect breakout board. Continue reading →

12: Interface and application programming

Hall effect sensor outputting via FTDI

Assignment

This week’s assignment was to write an application that interacts with input and/or output device.

I had already made the input and output boards: Hall sensor breakout board as input and LCD as output, and connected these together – displaying values out of the Hall sensor with the LCD (as I would need this in my final project). This was all done without a computer in the loop at all, so I would have to do this now.

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13: Output devices (Amsterdam)

Hello LCD

Hello LCD

Assignment

This week’s assignment was to connect with an output device. Since my modified final project would use an LCD to display information, I chose to produce the hello LCD board. (this board ended up being my first “Hello” board after the FabISP, since we only got our electronics initiation during the final project crunch week in Amsterdam – so I was quite happy to get it running and programmed without too much hassle)

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16: Machine design

Assignment

We need to design and make a machine. For us this was a little troublesome: lacking both the electronics components and the knowhow before end of May, it would have been difficult to build something. Then we intended to join in on the Amsterdam effort: making something that moves when the doorbell downstairs in rang. Unfortunately we didn’t have time to get into this either in Amsterdam.

Based on an idea we got when discussing my make something big assignment with Alex, I’m making something on my own. My Make Something Big assignment is a cradle – gift for a friend living in Amsterdam who will soon have someone sleeping in it. I would like to automate the rocking – add microphone as an input and a motor as an output.

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17: Planning the final project (Amsterdam)

Somewhere along the line of building up a lab and making it to Amsterdam to learn about electronics production (mainly) I decided to switch the project to something more manageable.

As personal wellbeing has been, at times, put to a test this spring, I decided to make something that could help with this goal in the future.

Personal fitness tracker will keep track of movement (cycling and walking/running) throughout the day, and lets you download the information from the device to a computer to keep track of as part of your Quantified Self efforts.

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