>19.1.0

INTRODUCTION

Here we are. The final week of Fab Academy. Kind of made me emotional seeing all 19 weeks lit up on my home page. Seems like it was just yesterday that I was turning on the laser cutter for the first time in Peru. At the same time though, it's been a long 5 months abroad! I'm so happy to have experienced everything I did in my two new homes in Peru and Japan, but I'd be lying if I said I wasn't ready to come home! Nevertheless, we're in the home stretch and the PAK is finished! All that's left is finishing up my final presentation, tying up loose ends with previous assignments and group work, and hopefully if I have some extra time, I'm going to install Doom on the PAK.

This week's goalsWEEK 19
[x] Develop a plan for dissemination of your final project.
[x] Complete your final project, tracking your progress
>19.2.0

INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY

This week we were introduced to the many different ways we can protect and license our works. As an educator, I've always been in the mindset that the more resources there are available for people to learn from, the better off we are as a society. I can understand why people need to trademark and patent their ideas, to protect their livelihood, etc., but I'm not personally interested in making money off the things I make! I make because making is fun and I want to share that with my students and anyone else who is interested! I also am a firm believer that open source should remain open source - it's a bit selfish to take something that others have worked hard to share with the world and close it off from others.

For me, the PAK was created solely as a vector for learning about digital fabrication, electronics, and system integration, and it and it's journey are meant to be shared.

For these reasons, I've elected to chose release the work under a copyleft split-license. You are highly encouraged to study, remix, modify, and build upon this work! However, you may not take this work (or your modified version of it) and close-source it. If you build upon the PAK, you must share your contributions under the exact same open terms.

All code is licensed under the GNU General Public License v3.0, or GPLv3.
All physical designs, 3D models, PCB schematics, and instructional materials are licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International, or CC BY-SA 4.0.

>19.3.0

WHAT'S LEFT?

Well, at the time of writing this, I'm about finished up on the core deliverable spiral of the PAK. There are a few pieces of polish I would like to address before the final presentation date (I'm the first day!), but I could end here and will have still checked of all the boxes, this would just be the perfectionist in me that is grasping at straws. All that's really left to do is clean up documentation, fix up a few things in my assignments, and make things look super presentable. This week I took some time to reformat and add more content to my final project page. Although things look super clean and carefully thought out for the final project, I want my readers to know that it's precisely the opposite! Making is a very messy process! Throughout these 20 weeks I was constantly breaking things, trying things out and failing over and over again. I hope I did a good enough job getting that point across.

Specifically, I need to use my last 5 days before my presentation to:
- Finish collecting footage/pictures for my presentation video
- Create the 3D render of the explode view for my presentation video
- Edit my presentation video
- Complete the BOM from last week and link it on to my final project page
- Complete the slide for my final project page
- Tidy up and upload all of my project files and make them accessible on my final project page
- Get the license embeds (for style) on to the final project page
- Include links to my inspirations, and more code attributions
- Complete the little pieces left in my group assignment pages and the little things highlighted by Henk and Yuichi
- Party
- Go home and cuddle my cat

➔ DISSEMINATION

One of the core reasons I decided join Fab Academy this year, to take a leave of absence from my job, to travel to the other side of the world (twice), is that I have felt a need to validate my experience and expertise in the technology field. I've always been a hobbyist, a tinkerer, a maker - and it took me maybe ~25 years to finally figure that out and do something with it. Looking back on these last 20 weeks has confirmed just how much I've been grow my skills in fabrication. I feel so much more confident in my abilities, the tools I can work with, and I feel eager and ready to turn my own understanding into learning for my future students. Most notably, I'm so happy that I finally got the chance to learn Fusion and KiCAD. I feel like an intermediate user now in both tools, where I was starting at pretty much nothing prior to January (other than TinkerCAD, which I can finally say I'm ready to stop stubbornly using for complex projects!).

All of this leads to the real dissemination of my project. I didn't create the PAK to solve some kind of problem, or to create some new product that people would be eager to get their hands on. I'll admit I have some inspirational sources from others who have created cool things in the past, but at the end of the day I created the PAK to help me learn the way I do best, with projects, tinkering and making. I plan to share the PAK with my students, with my friends and family, with my colleagues, and used what I learned about documentation to completely revamp my website, to host more concrete step-by-step lessons and instructions on how to do something to give my students the tools they need to make something of their own.

>19.4.0

WHAT'S NEXT?

That's not to say I'm finished with the PAK after my final presentation date. I want to continue working on the PAK to help me develop my skills as a maker, which in turn give me more confidence to teach these skills as an educator. The PAK may change in shape and size and architecture down the line, heck it might even lose the cartridge slot - the very thing that defines it at this point, but the very core of why I chose to make it will remain the same.

I share my big takeaways on what I would do differently if I were to completely start this cycle over again in my final project page, but as for specifics things I would work on now without any huge changes to the current iteration?

  • Porting DOOM to the PAK
  • Getting more board house PCBs for the cartridges
  • Getting resin prints for the cartridge
  • Properly casting a new D-PAD button
  • Getting the red colouring on the buttons a little bit closer to the system red
  • Housing around the start and PAK buttons, and light pipe for better stability
  • UV printing or etching designs/text/greeble on to the PAK's case
  • Actual labels for the cartridges instead of just cut vinyl
  • MP3 player cartridge
  • Link cable cartridge
  • Camera cartridge
  • Tilt game cartridge

➔ RUNNING A MAKERSPACE

After Fab Academy, I return to my makerspace classroom in Toronto with bright eyes on what I can start working on. Anytime I've had a thought about how I could run my makerspace better over the past 20 weeks, I wrote it down in to Obsidian along with all of the other big pedagogical considerations and links to great work from our weekly lecture and review. Needless to say I have a lot of things to review and organize before September comes around!

➔ ON A PERSONAL NOTE

I had a lot of big ambitions and expectations for this 5 month trip abroad, lots of goals and side projects and things I wanted to learn about, but the biggest thing I learned in this short time is that you can't go at 100% all the time, even if you want to or it seems like you can. Working sustainably is just as important (if not more) than working efficiently. It's so important that you take breaks, let your brain rest, and return to baseline, especially when you're working on things that you can get sucked into easily. One thing I'll be taking back with me to Toronto is my new experience with a Pomodoro timer. As I shared earlier in Week 04, I had tried out pomodoro timers before, but they never quite stuck with me. The way they were pitched to me back in university was to help you get things done that you don't want to do, but for me at least, the hardest part was just getting started. Now, I don't have much of an issue getting started on things like that anymore; procrastination has stung me too many times in my student life - I'm well beyond that now. What I didn't consider, though, was using a Pomodoro to help me take breaks from things I was enjoying doing, like all of my work in the Fab Academy. Taking a 5 minute break every so often just to let my mind wander and sit without any extra stimulus really saved my sanity these 5 months. If anyone is feeling lost and uncomfortable in this age of constant stimulus and a necessity to be online all the time, try it out yourself. Oh, and stop using your phone as soon as you wake up!