About me¶
Hello everyone, I am Sylvain Robert. I have a degree in mechatronics engineering, but I prefer craftsmanship. Around 5 years ago, I became a fabmanager as a volunteer in a modest rural fablab and I really like it. So now, I want to take the next step and be a professional fabmanager and be able to make a living out of this passion of mine. This is why I am here following the Fabacademy classes.
I invite you to visit this website to see my work.
My background¶
Like I said above, I studied engineering with a dominant in mechatronics and passed my degree at the end of 2015. In France, this is a 5 years course after highschool. But I was disappointed by it, or more likely it wasn’t what I expected. I wanted to build things, create, manufacture, develop new innovative design. However, it wasn’t the case, in reality we only did theoretical work, analysing already existing systems using complex calculus.
On the other hand, I really found what I was looking for with the maker community after acquiring a 3D printer in 2014. I’ll give more details in a moment.
After my studies, I returned to the family home to help my parents renovate an old farm to this day. This was the dream of my father to buy an old house and repair it following his own inspiration. At the beginning, we didn’t have any knowledge in construction but we learned it task after task and now we are proud to say that we did everything by ourselves.
On the pictures below, you can see the farm in 1970 before it was abandoned. Then this is when my parents bought in 2005 after nature had reclaimed its rights. And the last one was 2020 summer with countless hours of work.
So this is how I occupied my weeks for the past years, but I never give up on my initial line of work, keeping track of news on new technology especially 3d printing. In fact, I bought a 3d printer back in 2014 when I was still a student, which made me discover the maker community. After that it was only natural for me to join this community and volunteer as a fabmanager in a little fablab not far from my home.
At first, I was really surprised to find something like that lost in our countryside. They had just created their association, meeting in a small room with only 3 computers and one 3d printer they didn’t even know how to use. So I gave them a hand and I have been there almost every week-end since then. Nowadays, we grow in size, have several printers, a laser cutter, a cnc milling machine and many tools for creative hobbies.
For my part, I am mostly teaching CAD, 3d printing and electronics to anyone willing to learn. The project that I prefer is the robot-sumo because we need everything listed before to build one. The teenagers really appreciate it, they are learning and having fun at the same time, and even big kids want to compete.
But I don’t only have an interest in technical projects, I also really like to make artistic creation. For example, two years ago I designed a necklace for the birthday of my mother with the date hidden in it. Some months ago, bored of staying at home due to the covid, I took some time and did a collection of necklaces. I used the services of I.Materialise to print them in silver.