Fab Lab UTEC is a digital fabrication and prototyping lab in UTEC University in Lima, Peru.
The lab is adscribed to the Industrial Engineering Department, however, it serves students and faculty from all the Departments.
Our main line of work deals with Project Based Learning, especially regarding the Engineering Projects Workshop (a cross-department course) and Product Design and Prototyping.
Our educational offer includes Courses for kids and teenagers.
If our Fab Lab was to be a person, it would Probably be a mix of a Ronin Samurai (looking for someone to serve and problems to solve) and a craftsman (since craftsmanship is more about the practice of making something original, but not necessarily unique)
It is because of this that we try to cover both the design and engineering aspects of the Product Development process, trying to stimulate our students to work together and create compelling and interesting solutions.
This is our second year in the Fab Academy Program and we have currently three students enrolled:
This week, our team (Carlos, Nicolas and Fabricio) built the CNC machine. The machine serves both as a Laser engraver and a router. Here’s a picture of the original design:
This week we also made the bed on the Y – axis. In this case the bed will support the material on which the machine will work. We used grips and nuts to hold the material to the bed. The nuts are located inside some grooves which were cut through the front side of the bed, the groove can be seen below:
Next, a way to secure the stock material to the machine bed was necessary, a grip was designed in Fusion 360 by Nicolas and 3d Printed
The grips take advantage of the groove design and help holding the material down and keeping it steady
The grip is completed with a 3d printed nut that secures the piece.
After printing the pieces, the grip assembly was completed
Afterwards, the stages were assembled for the machine frame.Each student is responsible for the construction of a stage:
We got the mechanical assembly, the wooden frames are milled in 19mm plywood using the MultiCAM Machine (ref. Fabricio's website):
The advantage of this model consists of the interchangeable two-head tool. The first tool is the laser engraver and the second tool is an end mill.
We tested the laser manually and engraved on paper:
Afterwards, the Electronic devices and motors were integrated into the frame, in order to accomodate the NEMA 23 stepper motors, a 3d printed house was designed by Carlos
in order to make the effectors interchangeable, the design assembly is dovetail shaped, fixed into the z-axis assembly via a M3X0.5 bolt.
The essential controller was a modified Satshakit, connected to three TB6550 driver and a 24V power supply, as it can be seen in the photos below:
For path planning and G-code Generation, Vectric Cut 2D was used:
In order to parse GCODE to the machine, we used GRBL
Finally, the first results for laser engraving and milling are shown below:
And we have a Video:
Feel free to contact us regarding any potential collaborations and projects
fablab_utec@utec.edu.pe
