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1. Principles and practices

The goal for this introductory week was to plan and sketch a potential idea for my final project which will be developed using all the skills I learn in the coming weeks.

  • My responsibility was to communicate my project concept to my instructor and discuss how it would help me express the skills.
  • My instructor explained me to consider all the essential parameters involved in the process before finalizing the final project.

So this week I worked on defining my final project idea and started to getting used to the documentation process.

Problem Statement

“Key Objective for me to join Fab Lab is to find solution for eradicating homelessness issue from planet earth.”

“As a homeless person they have many challenges ranging from basic survival needs like food, shelter, water to more wider social problems and inclusion back into society. Not going into statistics but a simple wikipedia search tells the story Wiki Homeless. It’ not that people are not working on this so why is that we still have so many problems in this world. Check out World Economic Forum Sustainability Development Goals .Fundamentally if you ask me the very economy is eating up this planet. Most of the human energy is wasted in greed and making money. Not agreeing well read world wealth distribution report where mere 1% of people in this world hold 45% of world weatlh. global-inequality-facts. So clearly economy is more important than people well being. Their are many reasons for it but one of the root cause is our education system which is turning Genius of human potential to mere Intellect and finally into dumb idiots running around for survival (i have been their already, just trying to reverse that process). Research by Nasa not just my thoughts Education System Dumbs Us

“But why Fab Lab, because i see it as one of the key enabler for saving the planet future. Projects like Barcelona Fab city is a testament of one such initiative which is challenging the status quo and redefining 4th industrial revolution to create a sustainable city. So i wish to leverage Fab Lab network and smart people across the world to eradicate homeless issue”

Is Fab Lab the solution for everthing? to this i would say With Great Power Comes The Great Responsibility, and Alan Gershenfeld in our first session pointed out few of the cautions around Fab lab and i agree with it. From my prospective the technology is never has been a challenge in itself, problem is the state or consiousness of the person who is holding that technology. If you look around the top 3 industry on this planet are Arms and Ammunition, Pharmeceuticals and Liquor. 2nd biggest pollunt industry in this world is Fashion and textlines. This tells us where are we heading for our future. Why is that we have so much technology but we have not created well being for people but only misery in this world. Some insight which goes deeper to the root of the problem Will Technology Destroy Humanity?”

Getting Started - My focus area for Fab Lab project

Now clearly Fab lab is a 6 months diploma which has weekly assignment so its not possible to eradicate homelessness issue in these 6 months. So i have decided to divide this problem into various sub domains and build a working prototype for one sub domain using digital fabrication tools.

Key problems for a homeless person

  • Basic Survival needs like Food, Shelter, Basic Amenities like toilet
  • Job
  • Health
  • Education and skill Development
  • Identity
  • Financial Inclusion
  • Power source
  • Access to machines to build solutions

“I decided to work on Basic Survival needs i.e. Food , Coming from IT background i had no clue on Digital fabrication or even how to grow my own food. So to learn that i did lot of search on google, instructables and earlier year students projects to draw some inspiration. So came to know about Hydroponics, Aquaponics, Zero budget natural farming and tonns of material online. Clearly, i was not the first one to try! Googling led me to attend a workshop on Urban Farming on 19th and 20th Jan 2019 a 2 day intensive urban farming course (luckily in Delhi near my place, some cool snaps in Week1) where i learnt the basics of urban farming. Workshop taught me around composting,sapling process, pest control, seed selection, preparing soil, sowing seeds and saplings, Harvesting crop, weed management, Organic fertilisers with tonns of hand on demo. That’s why it was intense :). So backed with knowledge i am ready to “Grow My Own Food”.”

Project Drawing, Hydroponic Farm

Image credits from Instructables

Alexa enabled custom PCB for automatic water dripping system with sensors like Ph Level, Temperature etc.

Image credits from Instructables

How I will be leveraging Fab Lab Machines to Build the solution

  • CNC, Laser Cutting for creating the framework
  • Moulding and casting for various pots and frames
  • Electronics assignments for the PCB design and manufacturing
  • Various input , output devices for capturing sensors data
  • WiFi and bluetooth connectivity for Cloud IoT and Alexa
  • 3d Printing for desiging frame for electronics

So what key outcomes i am looking to get out of this project. At the end i should be able to showcase following things.

  • Design my own frames and pots for planting seeds, saplings on my rooftop
  • Fabricate some farming tools like plastic marking for plant name, compost bin (check snaps in gallery below)
  • Build an automatic water dripping system for irrigation using custom PCB
  • Build a smart irrigation IoT system based on sensors data like temperature, moisture etc.
  • Integration of voice enabled IoT device like Alexa to control my devices
  • Monitor and control my devices using mobile app
  • Add Machine learning and deep learning solution to manage weeds, pest (if time permits)

Hydroponic using Waste Plastic Bottles

In the farm i saw some great use of plastic waste for growing food.

Preparing Right Soil

Do you know characteristics of a good soil is that it should have 50% air. Also do you know the microbes and insects in forest do this job. But in your own garden you need to mix right type of material to prepare this type of soil by mixing various ingredients like vermipost, sand , compost and tonns of other things so that plants can grow in your garden.

Gettings my hand Dirty Hands on Preparing Soil

Unless you try yourself you wont know a damn thing. That’s why this course is How to design almost anything :)

Learning How to Compost

If people start doing this practice at home we don’t have to clean our rivers and seas.

Yeeeppppeee Graduation Ceremony!!! I had more Pictures but someone told me Gitlab space is limited

My Personal Progress

My priority is to learn each and every skill during the progressive weeks and implement the same on my final project concept.

  • I wish to consider all the essential parameters involved in terms of assembling the experiment and get a clear picture of the same.
  • Personally this week resulted in a lot of progress in terms of getting to know what i want at the end. It’s time to progress through weeks, learn new tools and apply for my project.

Learning Outcomes

  • I learned how important it is to communicate what I’d like to express during my time at fablab AKGEC.
  • Working with a group of like minded people, i learned a lot.
  • I also learn how important “i don’t know” means, i feel it’s better to be dumb for that moment and learn something new, rather than being dumb for the rest of the life !!!