Week 1. Principles and practices. Project Management

Last Wednesday 29th of January we started our adventure in the FabAcademy. After a introduction by Neil about digital fabrication, FabLabs and the FabAcademy, we received the two first assignments of this semester.

Build a personal site in the class archive

To build my personal site I decided to use raw html coding from all the different alternatives proposed during the lesson. In the past I had some experiences with Dreamweaver and similar software, but that experience was quite frustrating to me: although it was very easy and fast to create your page, the displaying of it in different formats, resolutions and so on was not very successful.

Although I never did anything with html before, I had some experience with many programming languages, so the learning process was very fast. To make easier the coding of the web, I used Notepad ++, a free source code editor that supports several programming languages.

Snapshot of my html web code in Notepad++ while I was creating this page

Plan and sketch a potential semester project

The second assignment for this week is to plan and sketch a potential semester projects. The idea is to include in this project as many abilities learned as possible.

I am a sports enthusiastic, so I wanted to do something related with it. After thinking a bit about it, I finally arrive to an idea: IntelliGoal, the intelligent football goal to help the football players to improve their shoot accuracy. The goal will include a game which will make you to shoot to different positions. Depending on your shooting accuracy it will give you points.

There currently exist some similar solutions in the market (as in the image below), but none of them is interactive. They always give you the same amount of points for the same positions and you don't have an automatic system to sum these points. The idea I have in mind is that it not always to give you the same amount of points for the same goal positions, but that these positions will move along the goal with some indicators to indicate where you need to aim at.

It will include some interactive indicators (maybe leds) in the goalposts to tell you where you have to shoot, and sensors to detect your accuracy. Finally, a LCD screen will give you your final scoring depending on your accuracy. The order of the different positions to shoot at will be random.

In the image below there is a sketch of the IntelliGoal I want to make, with two indicators active in the goalposts telling you where you need to aim with the ball at.

Sketch of the IntelliGoal