Fab Academy 2019

Context

Fab Academy is a 19-week digital fabrication programme run out of MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms. It runs simultaneously across 70+ labs worldwide, with Neil Gershenfeld teaching the main classes live each week and local instructors running things on the ground. I did the 2019 cycle at Fab Lab CEPT in Ahmedabad, India, partly because I wanted to bring the programme back to Fab Lab IUB. My local instructor was Ohad Meyuhas (Stratasys); my global instructor was Francisco Sanchez (TECSUP).

What it covers

Each week is a topic with a new build at the end: laser cutting, vinyl cutting, 3D scanning, 3D printing, CNC machining, PCB design, PCB fabrication, embedded programming, networking, mechanical design, machine design, molding and casting, composites, electronics production, input/output devices, interface programming, applications and implications. Everything has to be documented to pass.

The full week-by-week archive lives at the Fab Academy site — there’s no way to reproduce 19 weeks of build logs on this page and there’s no point trying. Go to the archive if you want the depth.

Machine Design week

Group project, five of us from very different backgrounds. We built a Victorian-era marble maze with a motorised ball-lift mechanism. I was notionally on electronics and embedded — that escalated to CAD for the mechanism as the week went on. Everyone ended up doing everyone’s job. The result was, against my expectations, beautiful.

Final project — PixelFace

A wearable pixel display mounted on the front of a mask. The full documentation, schematics, video, and project files are on the PixelFace page.

Outcome

Graduated 2019. The intention was to bring Fab Academy back to IUB and run it there. Bureaucratic issues blocked that. I left IUB shortly after.