Day 1 - LinkMenu Fabrikas @ VilniusTech

Welcome to Vilnius, Lithuania!

You have left the scorching summer heat behind, and you’re currently enjoying much nicer and cooler temperatures than the ones you had back in Barcelona.

Welcome to VilniusTech - LinkMenų fabrikas

Most of the morning is spent meeting everyone and touring the facilities, which include digital and non-digital fabrication workshops (laser cutters, CNC machines, 3D printers, welding and woodworking workshops, etc…) as well as multimedia, advertising, recording studios and editing rooms.

The centerpiece of the space is a small-scale replica of the famous 2021 Portal, an itinerant project that is meant to prompt people to “rethink the idea of unity” by connecting two distant cities over a realtime 24x7 internet video feed.

The project

Out team’s project is around building a device that ensures the correct usage of alcohol disinfectants in highly critical environments.

Something like this, but smart and integrated with the building/environment to ensure enforcement of required safety protocols.

The device will help create guaranteed clean zones inside buildings, without requiring manual verification of everyone who enters/leaves the area.

Built on existing research

This concept is not new and has been researched in the past, particularly since the COVID-19 pandemic. Eg. (Design and Implementation of a Smart Hand Sanitizer Dispenser with Door Controller using ATMEGA328P) (Edozie et Al.) published IJEAIS - International journal of engineering and information systems 2643-640X

Project Management

Most of the afternoon is spent working in our respective groups, getting setup with minimalistic tools, equipment and rapid prototyping materials.

Our goal is to complete, at least, until Iteration 3 between Tue/Wed/Thur, since Friday will be used entirely for pitches, showcases and feedback.

Iteration 6 is purely for marketing purposes, and it involves creating a viral dance to promote the product. This is intentionally left as an exercise for the reader.

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NOTE for the savvy readers out there: “sprints where value is delivered in thin and vertical slices of functionality” is what we would have liked to do. In this case, we’re using the term very loosely, given the time constraints (less than around ~20h total hours of work inside the maker spaces).

We’re using terminology to loosely align a team of people who have just met, and we’re not strict on the definitions :)

But you and I will both know (secretly!) that this is not technically the best use of some of the terms 😉 Thanks for playing along without complaining!

A simple KanBan board on MIRO allows us to track done/doing/ready to start tasks.

Materials available

Using recycled materials

Part of the challenge for Makeademy 2023 was ideating and creating solutions that reuse material provided by EMP recycling.

The materials donated were varied in condition, functionality and overall health. Amongst other:

• Various motors (Steppers, DC, Servos) that were removed from larger equipment
• Power supplies extracted from desktop computers
• Large Speakers
• IP/USB cameras
• Fans
• Devices that could be disassembled for pieces or spare parts:
  • radios
  • electronic keyboards
  • music mixers
  • lamps
  • DVD drives
  • etc…
• and many others

Part of the challenge was determining which components/parts would be usable and which ones would require too much work to salvage (considering the tight deadlines we had to work with).

Using non-recycled materials

VilniusTech also provided brand-new components that we could use for our projects

• Programmable boards (Arduino/RaspbPi)
• Basic electronic wiring: Breadboards, jumpers, …
• Arduino kits with standard sensors and actuators (eg. ultrasonic and infrared sensors, motor drivers, etc…)

End of Day 1

By the end of Day 1, we:

• collected the recycled material we were hoping to use
• validated which ones could be salvaged and were in good enough “working condition” to include in our project
• had a basic definition of scope
• had a simple progress tracker
• had a working prototype of sprints 1 (detect hand, move a sample actuator)

Jump to day 2

Jump to Day 2 to join us in our visit to the EMP Recycling facilities