Near to Lake Victoria in the western part of Kenya, the ARO Fab Lab has a 1024k down, 512k up Linkstar satellite connection that they’d like to distribute to neighboring schools and business areas. Three intrepid labbers have been drinking from the firehose this week in Nairobi learning “everything” to install a network themselves. They’ve been part of the Lower Kebete deployment team all week during the day, and backfilling on theory and processes at night. Late into the night.

It’s just past midnight-thirty and I’ve just sent them off to bed, Tom, Lawrence, and Hansel, so they can return in the early AM and get started on planning then flashing and configuring devices and fabricating the reflector. Tom and Lawrence have been here the whole night figuring out the logistics and planning for the above network. Before they leave on Saturday they owe me a rough schedule of install and I’ve extracted a promise of emailed updates and photos so we can follow along.

Here’s the part that just blows me away. Based on their device count, the approximate total cost of this network is $1,580.

picostations 4@$80

nanostations 6@$50

dumb switches 3@$100 (we’ll use the Linksys head nodes but as just switches)

cache/head node 1@$100

Ah, <sigh>

Here are some photos of recent projects. I'm sure I'll get to full writeups for all of them... eventually.

Here is the start of the 3D printer Bruce and I are building. These pictures were from last fall (2009), before we put a Dremel tool on it. As of late June 2010, we still haven't finished the extruder, but it has seen a lot of use just with the Dremel as a mini-CNC router.










This is a PCB I made using the aforementioned router with the Dremel tool. It drives an 8x8 bi-color LED array, and displays the game of life cellular automata.




This is the "blinky" project. It is a circuit from an introduction to electronics set from Radio Shack. Réka and I worked together to convert it to a PCB, and then produced it on the router. This project was a lot of fun, even though it was simple.




This is the future extruder controller for the 3D printer/router thing. Bruce and I assembled it from a kit from MakerBot Industries. I was nervous at first, as I had very little experience with surface-mount components. It turned out well in the end.




This is a gear train that I designed using Inkscape and cut out of acrylic at the fablab. The other shots are spare parts and such for mounting the gears. It is sort of a gear construction kit!








This is a photosensor and encoder wheel for a motor. There is one infrared LED, and two phototransistors. The enclosure was designed using that old standby CAD tool vi, in gcode, and cut out on the Dremel router.




These are a couple of attempts at ball bearing joints. I bought bearing balls from McMaster-Carr. The first one is out of MDF, and actually works pretty well. It was also cut out using the Dremel router, with a python program to create the circles in gcode. The clear one was cut out on a laser cutter, and it turned out I cut it out wrong. But I'll make another version... someday.




This was a pain in the ass. It is a 12-sided figure made out of acrylic cut on the laser cutter. Everything is press-fit, no glue at all, and it holds together fine. The biggest issue was that I found out (the hard way) that cast acrylic can vary by up to 30% in thickness across a single piece (!!). Which means only about half of the support pieces I cut actually fit. It was a tedious, frustrating job to get it put together. I have some ideas for ways of making the holes springy, to get around this, if I ever make another one.








This was a project Réka did at the fablab. Over a two week period, she designed a box (using a neat Mathematica program done by another volunteer), and cut out a bunch of small pieces of acrylic to put in the box. This is the result.






This is a model from the book Orgami Architecture. It is cut with an x-acto knife out of a single piece of cardstock. It took a long time, but is pretty awesome.

The Lower Kebete campus has an enormous open central field about which the buildings are arranged in a ring. Tall trees line the road which separates the buildings from the field. This part of campus is on the same grade. To the north, the grade descends and on the downward slope additional buildings were added as student housing. Additionally a massive 6 story tall L-shaped building with lecture halls in one arm and housing in another is being built to the east.

The Admin Building is a two story building with an open air courtyard. Each hallway around the courtyard is approximately two rooms thick. It sits on the southeast corner of the campus’ central open field. It houses the internet uplink in the ICT room. A Linksys router/switch/AP/USBdrive is configured as a head node and local cache (FF7). An Ubiquity PicoStation is a local AP (FF10, ch1). Two Ubiquity NanoStations are 5GHz back hauls to the library (FF201, ch153) and student center (FF200, ch149).

The team at the admin building was Stan (team leader), Tom (from Kisumu) and Antoine. All the hardware was temporarily but stably mounted and as an intranet was tested to be fully functional. They were not able to connect the head node to the internet because the IP addresses provided by Joram (ICT at Lower Kebete) were probably not being VLAN tagged and passed through the firewall. The team did not test the coverage of the 2.4GHz “hotspot”.

The team will return tomorrow with a power cable, hardware to permanent mount the 2.4 GHz PicoStation, make a 12V DC distribution system, remove the 5 GHz NanoStation for the Student Center (see below), and configure the head node with the proper IP address.

---

The Student Center is 1.5 story H-shaped building with an open part of the H facing the central field of the campus. It is approximately 500 meters north of the admin building. A 5 GHz nanostation backhaul to the admin building (FF203, ch149) and a 2.4 GHz local AP PicoStation were to be mounted on an old, unused wooden telephone pole in front of the building at the edge of the central field. The AP would have a FabFi reflector guiding the signal to cover the building. The pole has no A/C power and was likely to need solar panels, charging circuit, and batteries.

The team at the Student Center were Patrick (team lead) and Hansel (from Kisumu). A 5GHz link was established through to the admin building but the signal strength was 2/4 solid lights = 60dB, in part because the link was through leafy trees. The team mounted the reflector but did not test the AP or coverage.

The Student Center houses a cafeteria, pool hall and other gaming venues. The larger team felt that the Amphitheater in the Modern Administration building would be a better, more used venue. The Amphitheater and surrounding area is often used by students to work and for group study. In the fullness of time, the entire campus might be covered with wireless access, however in the near term the working/studying areas should be a priority. During the evening debrief, it was agreed by all to replace the Student Center with the Amphitheater.

---

The Library is a large 4.5 story rectangular building to the east of the admin building. The interior of the building is hollow with a large 4+ story atrium.

Team lead was John who was assisted by Lawrence from Kisumu. The 5 GHz backhaul to the Admin building (FF202, ch153) was temporarily but stably mounted and established a connection. The team brought two 2.4 GHz picostation APs, (AP1 FF13, ch11; AP2 FF11, ch6) and a FabFi reflector because prior to the install the interior configuration of the library was unknown. The did not install any APs or test their converage.

Tomorrow the team will return with an additional 5GHz antenna to extend the backhaul to the Amphitheater.

---

The group debriefed upon return at approximately 1800h. Groups were assigned homework to make a new schematic of each location taking into account the changes from today. Tomorrow all groups return in the AM to Lower Kebete. The driving focus will be to test the 2.4GHz coverage, hopefully with the uplink.

---

Note: In my excitement to describe the technical schebang I didn’t carefully clarify that these “installations” are in situ testing of backhaul chaining distance and local AP building penetration, and later on, user authentications. I mean, I said “live” in quotes, wasn’t that enough? I guess we caused a little flap when the ICT department thought they had to scramble to deal with the entire campus coming online today. (Test) deploy at Lower Kebete campus (Univ. of Nairobi Business School). 9/1/2010.

Cross posted from Amy. I love it when she does all the writing for me...

For the past 3 weeks or so, Nipun, Nick and others have been running about Nairobi scouting and getting permissions to mount FabFi equipment on towers and roofs as well as connections into the internet. They’ve settled on some sites which broadly speaking are the Mountain View area (which includes some of Kangemi) and Loresho (and some of Kangemi).

We wanted to make the backhaul connections along schools and examined the communities near Nairobi School and Kangemi School. In both cases we could see different socioeconomic strata pressed up against each other and somewhat well mixed.

We had to choose one of the areas to build out first. Making the 5 GHz backhaul among the main repeater sites and the internet uplinks as well as making local omnidirectional 2.4 GHz wireless AP’s at each repeater site consumes approximately 1/3 of the devices we budgeted. We estimate that building out any one area will consume the remainder of the devices. So it seems we must chose one area to build first and use the profits from the first to buy the devices to build out the second.

For many reasons the Mountain View area wins. We’re now prioritizing building up expanded access around Kangemi school and Mountain View areas. The technical team now mostly turns to getting equipment up and working.

Nipun has a homework assignment to work the numbers to figure out what the price(s) should be for the paid “Premium Service Level” – that’s how we make our nut. Here’s his assignment, I’m sure you b-school folks will get all kinds of excited.

The analysis has two components:

1) Determine long-term “sustainable” pricing for the system based on going tier1 bandwidth rates. This is for the conservative case where we’re collecting no revenue other than from selling bandwidth.

2) Assuming free bandwidth, what do we have to price at in order to finance duplicating our current deployment in three months? (see hardware cost below)

Here are the inputs:

- Residential market price for bandwidth @1Mbps (assuming 1/3 of operator cost is bandwidth this is about a 20:1 contention ratio) = 4,999KES/mo (zuku)

- Going rate for backhaul (tier 1) = 32,730KES/(Mbit*mo)


- We should have a contention ratio the same or better than other providers

- Deployment to Kabete / Mountain View with backhaul will consume ~810,250KES worth of hardware (attached is a potential coverage map).

- We assume about 10% of the bandwidth will be consumed by “free” customers (but we don’t know. Maybe your analysis will dictate QoS rules…)

Assume the average device must be replaced once every three years

Required outputs are prices for access-cards of the following duration:

- 1 day

- 1 week

- 1 month

In long-term case fees will have to cover:


- Bandwidth costs

- Staff (150,000KES/mo)

- Local Transport (black van with no windows…)

- Overhead (legal, g&a, etc)

- Maintain physical system

- Expand physical footprint on a reasonable timescale

Short term, we’re only concerned with making 810,250 KES above our costs, after staff in 3mo.

Our model is that you can always connect for free using the unused part of the bandwidth. Wikipedia and some domains such as .edu, .edu.ke, .gov, some locally mirrored content such as MIT’s Open Course Ware, and similar resource information type sites are exceptions – they aren’t ever limited. You can also pay for Premium service which is faster since you are guaranteed some level of service. If that sounds impossible, the intrepid folks at Afrimesh showed that given free, slower service, people would pay for the faster service in an earlier implementation in Scarborough, Cape Town, South Africa, reaching profitability about a year ago!

Tomorrow we’ll be doing a three-point backhaul deployment at the UoN Lower Kebete School of Business tomorrow (connecting their Admin building, library, and student center). It’s mostly a training and deployment preparedness shakedown and each 5 GHz backhaul site will require something unique, for example a solar panel at the student center, hacking a Linksys to provide POE to the Ubiquiti devices at the admin building, and some challenging penetration at the library. And if we still have the energy, we’ll haul a large FabFi up the 12 story radio tower which will ultimately point to Nairobi school and a site in Mountain View.

Yeay! Now back to my long, long to do list…

For the past 3 weeks or so, Nipun, Nick and others have been running about Nairobi scouting and getting permissions to mount FabFi equipment on towers and roofs as well as connections into the internet. They’ve settled on some sites which broadly speaking are the Mountain View area (which includes some of Kigemi) and Loresho (and some of Kigemi).

We wanted to make the backhaul connections along schools and examined the communities near Nairobi School and Kigemi School. In both cases we could see different socioeconomic strata pressed up against each other and somewhat well mixed.

We had to choose one of the areas to build out first. Making the 5 GHz backhaul among the main repeater sites and the internet uplinks as well as making local omnidirectional 2.4 GHz wireless AP’s at each repeater site consumes approximately 1/3 of the devices we budgeted. We estimate that building out any one area will consume the remainder of the devices. So it seems we must chose one area to build first and use the profits from the first to buy the devices to build out the second.

For many reasons the Mountain View area wins. We’re now prioritizing building up expanded access around Kigemi school and Mountain View areas. The technical team now mostly turns to getting equipment up and working.

Nipun has a homework assignment to work the numbers to figure out what the price(s) should be for the paid “Premium Service Level” – that’s how we make our nut. Here’s his assignment, I’m sure you b-school folks will get all kinds of excited.

The analysis has two components:

1) Determine long-term “sustainable” pricing for the system based on going tier1 bandwidth rates. This is for the conservative case where we’re collecting no revenue other than from selling bandwidth.

2) Assuming free bandwidth, what do we have to price at in order to finance duplicating our current deployment in three months? (see hardware cost below)

Here are the inputs:
- Residential market price for bandwidth @1Mbps (assuming 1/3 of operator cost is bandwidth this is about a 20:1 contention ratio) = 4,999KES/mo (zuku)
- Going rate for backhaul (tier 1) = 32,730KES/(Mbit*mo)
- We should have a contention ratio the same or better than other providers
- Deployment to Kabete / Mountain View with backhaul will consume ~810,250KES worth of hardware (attached is a potential coverage map).
- We assume about 10% of the bandwidth will be consumed by “free” customers (but we don’t know. Maybe your analysis will dictate QoS rules…)

Assume the average device must be replaced once every three years

Required outputs are prices for access-cards of the following duration:
- 1 day
- 1 week
- 1 month

In long-term case fees will have to cover:
- Bandwidth costs
- Staff (150,000KES/mo)
- Local Transport (black van with no windows…)
- Overhead (legal, g&a, etc)
- Maintain physical system
- Expand physical footprint on a reasonable timescale

Short term, we’re only concerned with making 810,250 KES above our costs, after staff in 3mo.

Our model is that you can always connect for free using the unused part of the bandwidth. Wikipedia and some domains such as .edu, .edu.ke, .gov, some locally mirrored content such as MIT’s Open Course Ware, and similar resource information type sites are exceptions – they aren’t ever limited. You can also pay for Premium service which is faster since you are guaranteed some level of service. If that sounds impossible, the intrepid folks at Afrimesh showed that given free, slower service, people would pay for the faster service in an earlier implementation in Scarborough, Cape Town, South Africa, reaching profitability about a year ago!

Tomorrow we’ll be doing a three-point backhaul deployment at the UoN Lower Kebete School of Business tomorrow (connecting their Admin building, library, and student center). It’s mostly a training and deployment preparedness shakedown and each 5 GHz backhaul site will require something unique, for example a solar panel at the student center, hacking a Linksys to provide POE to the Ubiquiti devices at the admin building, and some challenging penetration at the library. And if we still have the energy, we’ll haul a large FabFi up the 12 story radio tower which will ultimately point to Nairobi school and a site in Mountain View.

Yeay! Now back to my long, long to do list…

Ok, look, what can I say, I’m impossibly behind on the blog thing. There’s just too much… a million things from Fab 6 and then immediately after a million more things from Maker Faire Nairobi, plus another million from the Join Africa deploy. By my math that makes a “bajillion” and I’ve been only collapsing into bed without the willpower to tell you about it.

But tonight we’re pushing some documentation on to the wiki and I want you to see. This is an image that was made by Tom Okite, Hansel Omondi and Laurence Ombuki from ARO FabLab Kenya West in Kisumu. They’re in Nairobi this week to help deploy the Nairobi networks in anticipation of doing the same in Kisumu.

You can find the (in work) gallery at: http://www.fablab.is/w/index.php/Power-over-ethernet_diagrams. And go here a little more on the FabFi and Afrimesh project we’re calling Join Africa.

Maker Faire came to Rhode Island this saturday, and filled downtown providence with all sorts of creative makers and hackers. Maker Faire is a family friendly festival to celebrate makers, creators, engineers, artists, science, technology, and all things related. The festival featured hands on building workshops, beer brewing, creative innovations, robots, and lots of maker bots.

I was there on behalf of the AS220 labs, accompanied by AS220 Cottage Industries Coordinator, Krystal Grow, and celebrity hacker, Jimmie Rodgers. Our station featured soldering workshops, where people came to assemble various electronics kits. TV-B-Gone, Mintyboost, Open Heart, Atari Punk Console, and Drawdio were among some of the kits available to the public.

There were quite a few makerbots hanging out on saturday. The one below is a makerbot that maker, Forest Crossman, assembled.

John Sarik displayed his Nixie Sudoku, which used 81 retro Nixie Tubes to create a electronic sudoku game that people can use and solve. Really cool!

Check out a complete list of all the makers that attended - here.

A huge thanks to Kipp Bradford and Brain Jepson, and all the Maker Faire crew that helped put of the festivities. It was a very exciting and interesting day.

Fabfi, the open source platform for building large-scale mesh wireless network infrastructure, and Afrimesh, the platform-agnostic, open dashboard for network management, have joined forces to build a turnkey platform for deploying, managing and monetising high-speed data networks under the codename JoinAfrica.
Over the last few weeks, we have completely overhauled the Fabfi platform in anticipation of a pilot project near Nairobi Kenya. After some feverish last-minute work, we're also providing wireless at Maker Faire (it's beta, so please use it and tell us if you notice anything that's not working right)

SSID Makernet by Fabfi
User: pamoja
Password: JoinAfrica Note: no proxy is required


For those of you reading from afar, this page is being used as our info page at MakerFaire Africa, so it might seem strangely like an advert... because it is.

Every now and then I spend a day in a FabLab just to see what people are doing. What I notice is how all visitors tend to leave with a big smile on their face, after having used the capabilities of the FabLab. Somehow making things appeals to us all on an emotional level.

During Fab6 I asked a few people to share one anecdote from their FabLab about something that caught their eye. I only recorded three of them. But I think the format worked, so I will try and start collecting some more stories from the FabTables we have every six weeks.

How holding an object in your hand changes your idea

For kids FabLab is the ‘new normal’

Seeing a FabLab is getting curious about a FabLab

(See all 40+ videos about Fab6)

Fab6, the 6th global conference of the world wide FabLab network was a blast last week.

We, the FabLabs in the Netherlands loved to be your host! Bye bye for now ….... see you in Lima in 2011.

Fab6 crowd waving good bye (photo by Frosti)

Meanwhile don’t be a stranger on-line. Stay in touch. (And here’s a PDF on how to stay in touch)

The FabLab Foundation Netherlands would like to thank everybody who helped make Fab6 happen!

• Paulien, Fiona, Peter, Nicole, Sherry for getting the show on the road.
• Jaap, Harmen, Xander, Gertjan, Alex, Bart, Peter, Thuur, Petra, Siert, Joris, Anu for being great hosts in the FabLabs of Amsterdam, Utrecht, The Hague, Amersfoort, and Groningen. I’ve heard nothing but great reactions from participants about the spaces you have created.
• Our kind sponsors and supporters
• All participants, who shaped the sessions and strengthened the FabLab spirit by coming to Fab6
• The courageous boat builders that gave us a spectacular and hilarious closing activity

Thank you all!

Can’t get enough? There’s heaps of photos and video’s on-line.

See 30+ videos at FabLab’s own video channel.

Pictures are available from:
Anu
Matt Cottam
Fing
Mount Elliott Makerspace
Fabulous St. Pauli
QuadShop
Us Media
Jean Baptiste Paris
FabLab Vestmannareyja
Ton Zijlstra

Some of the session notes can be found on the front page of the FabLab wiki, under Fab6. Also feel free to join and continue the discussion on the FabFolk forum.

Thank you to all who shared photos, videos and session notes on-line.

The first week of the Keyna deploy was, in a word, intense. The Nairobi lab has a great group of talented [super] users, and it was easy to fill the roles of linux geek, project manager, and JOAT (jack of all trades) in the first couple days. It was a good thing as well, because we might have bitten off a little more than we could do for a first week. After very positive meetings with the Permanent Secretary for ICT and university officials, it became clear, that "just getting something up" would not be enough to fully capture the opportunities available. The network not only had to work, but it had to be "hish-performance" in a way that fabfi had never really considered before.


The demand for reliable, high-speed connectivity to end users very high, and in the university/Education environment the desire for locally hosted content is strong enough that sitting behind the uplink speed as an upper requirement for network performance is effectively a cop-out. It turns out, however, that adhoc networks don't support N-speeds, so we spent the week reworking fabfi to support AP/STA operation, debugging the new devices, and upgrading to WPA. It was a great experience in understanding the software, but as of Friday the number of nodes deployed in the field by the crew was exactly 4 -- enough to learn cable making, battery power and basic pointing, but leaving a little too much to the imagination for my comfort. Only time will tell how the list of "needs done" will fare in my absence, but in the meantime off to fab6 for a couple days of much-needed geek R&R.

http://fabfotos.fabfolk.com

14 labs from around the globe are going home from the Fab6 conference with wifi enabled digital cameras that automagically upload photos to a single site.

Christine from Manchester Fab Lab organized the bunch. You can see her configuration write up here, http://www.fablabmanchester.org/p59/Fab-Lab-Fotos.html, and join the stream so that your lab’s photos are interleaved as well!

Collaborative Fab Fotos Stream at Picasa from Wifi enabled cameras. Take a photo and it automagically gets uploaded to the web!

I arrived in Amsterdam yesterday for the FAB6 conference. The conference started last night with a dinner in the Tolhuistuin garden, just across the IJ waterway from Centraal Station.



The idea of the instructables restaurant was to make a do-it-yourself restaurant based on recipes from instructables.com. The recipes and raw materials were provided, and the participants had to cook their own dinner.

I was initially kind of skeptical - there were lots of "obvious" reasons why this "wouldn't work". But in true fablab fashion the bugs were worked out by the participants, and in the end it was a fantastic evening all around.

It appears that my hotel is metering/throttling the wifi access, so I can't upload the pictures quite yet. But here is the commentary, and I'll add the pictures later today if I can find better network connectivity.

It seems that if there is a climbable tree, people flock to it. This is how the evening started, with a couple of fablabbers perched on top of this tree/staircase.



This tree turned out to be a central location for cooking later on because of the many convenient-height surfaces made by the steps.

The restaurant had lots of raw materials for cooking. Refrigerators with veggies and meat:



Tables with vegetables, spices, and supplies for making marinade:




Recipes from instructables:



And of course, there has to be a way of cooking the food once it is prepared. They supplied personal-sized mini-barbeques for this purpose:




We received information about how to start from the organizers:


The first step was to get the barbeques lit, since the coals take a while to heat up. We were lucky in this whole process in that Gary Watson is a boy scout leader, and had done this type of thing before.







Some people had a bit more trouble getting things going. The sight of people fanning their cooking fires was a common one at first:



One group looked like they were planning to smelt the aluminum rather than cook with the foil:






There were all kinds of configurations of fires. I think this one was my favorite:



Fires started, it was time to start preparing the food:


















Food all ready, time to cook!

(I got tired of linking the pictures - lots more on my page on Flickr)
327, 331, 332, 333, 338, 339, 344, 353, 354, 355, 356, 357, 358, 359, 365, 366, 367, 368,

By this time we were all pretty hungry. But it turned out pretty well in the end:

360, 361, 362, 363, 364, 369, 370

There were a few bugs in the program. Like using wooden tables to cook with personal barbequeues:



All in all it was a great evening!

After months of preparation volunteers, the Waag Society production team and MIT are ready to welcome you to

The yearly global conference about digital fabrication and FabLab community meet-up, August 16th-20th

The ‘Stichting FabLab Nederland’, the Dutch FabLab Foundation thanks all those involved in making this event happen! Dank jullie wel!

Program
All relevant information on the program can be found at the Fab6 website of course, but we’ll highlight a few things here.

• Sunday August 15th: early bird party with the Instructables Restaurant. All the furniture, as well as the food is based on designs and recipes found at Instructables.com.
• Monday will see the official opening and a series of workshops in Amsterdam.
• Tuesday activities take place in the FabLab in Utrecht, Groningen as well as Amersfoort, where the Dutch mobile FabLab has set up camp.
• Wednesday activities take place in the FabLabs in Amsterdam, Utrecht, The Hague, Groningen and Amersfoort (mobile FabLab)
• Thursday symposium day at the Dutch Royal Academy of Sciences (KNAW) in Amsterdam. You can still join us there.
• Friday, closing sessions in Amsterdam

This year we explore the implications and consequences of personal digital fabrication for art, business, industry, culture and education. We are poised on the threshold of a new era, like that of the Industrial Revolution, emerging from access to low- cost, high-precision fabrication tools and powerful Internet-based communication capabilities which are changing the ways we think about and approach innovation, invention, intellectual property, creative processes, manufacturing and distribution, business models, and social and cultural networks. In a world where anyone can access the tools to make or create almost anything, the possibilities are limitless. This is the Industrial®Evolution, a socioeconomic and technical evolution from mechanical means of production to digital means of production and communication.

You can follow Fab6 on-line with @Fab6nl, streaming video through the Polycom video conferencing system, through the tag #fab6 and at 23Video.

We welcome you to the Netherlands and to Fab6!

(English version below)

Woensdag 25 augustus is er weer een FabTafel. Na een week vol Fab6, treffen we elkaar in het gloednieuwe FabLab Arnhem! Je bent vanaf 15:00 van harte welkom.

De vorige FabTafel bezochten we ook al een nieuw FabLab, dat in Leuven, om Marc Lambaerts eindelijk eens een tegenbezoek te kunnen brengen na al zijn ritjes naar het noorden om ons te ontmoeten. Dit keer dus wederom een nieuw FabLab als gastheer. Het FabLab Arnhem gaat met het nieuwe collegejaar echt van start aan de Hogeschool Arnhem. Vorige maand werd het officieel geopend.

Bij de FabTafel is er uitgebreid gelegenheid kennis te maken met FabLab Arnhem, na te praten over Fab6 en nieuwe plannen te smeden voor het FabLab netwerk in de komende jaren. Laat even weten of je komt (mail ton@fablab.nl), zodat we daar in catering rekening mee kunnen houden.

FabLab Arnhem is gevestigd in de D-vleugel (ruimte D0.05) van het gebouw van de Faculteit Techniek van de Hogeschool van Arnhem en Nijmegen, Ruitenberglaan 26, 6826 CC Arnhem

FabTafels vinden elke zes weken plaats bij een van de FabLabs in Nederland. FabTafels beginnen om 15:00 en gaan altijd door ongeacht het aantal deelnemers. De volgende data, na 25 augustus, zijn 6 oktober, 17 november, 5 januari (2011). Telkens vanaf 15:00 uur.

English version

Wednesday August 25th the next FabTable will take place. In the week after Fab6, we’ll meet at the newly opened FabLab Arnhem.

During the last FabTable we also visited a new FabLab, in Leuven. Finally we could make a return visit to Marc Lambaerts, after the many trips north he made to join us at FabTables. This time another new FabLab is host to the FabTable. Having been opened officially last month, the FabLab Arnhem will really get started now with the start of the new university year.

At the FabTable we will have ample time to get to know FabLab Arnhem better, reflect on our experiences at Fab6, and to make new plans for the coming months.

Let me know if you will attend the FabTable (mail ton@fablab.nl), so we can make sure we have enough drinks and snacks.

FabLab Arnhem is located in the D-wing (room D0.05) of the building for the technology faculty at Hogeschool van Arnhem en Nijmegen, address Ruitenberglaan 26, 6826 CC Arnhem

FabTables take place every six weeks, regardless of who is or isn’t coming. We start at 15:00hrs. The next FabTables will take place, besides August 25th, on October 6th, November 17th and January 5th (2011).

So, I built my first PCB completely in the fablab (see thread here). And I got it to work to the design. Unfortunately, it isn't working quite how I wanted it to, for a number of reasons.

1) The ICSP programming header doesn't have two pins hooked up in the original design. Neither the VCC or RESET pins were connected to *anything*. This made it, well... kind of hard to program the device. So I soldered a couple of wire-wrap wires to the pins in question. I could then program the device using my STK500 on my Windows PC using AVR Studio.
2) I haven't been able to get the Arduino bootloader to work on the board. I think this is because the device I used was an ATmega88PA, rather than the ATmega168 used in the Fabio. The chips are functionally identical, except for the amount of flash memory. It may be that is the problem, I don't know.
3) The programming instructions for the Fabio are... well, a little light. That's a nice way to put it. The correct way to say it is "they are incomplete". They don't actually talk about programming the bootloader using the ICSP headers at all. So I've been trying to figure out from what they do have there how to program it. And I've been unsuccessful (so far).
4) I like using a Mac laptop when I'm doing stuff at home. I don't actually like sitting at my Windows PC, since it kind of removes me from the activities going on in the house. Until tonight, I couldn't use my mac to program via the ICSP port because I didn't know how to make the programmer I have work with my Mac laptop.

Anyway, #1 is fixed. #2 and #3 are things I'll work on later (hopefully successfully...). I got #4 done tonight, and this is how I did it.

My Mac doesn't have a serial port. The STK500 programmer I have interfaces to the computer via a serial port. So I need a USB to serial adapter. I bought one from Sparkfun (I believe), and it worked fine on my PC. But no drivers on the disk for my Mac. Also, I couldn't figure out what the thing was, either from markings on the cable or from the driver disk that came with it (I'm sure I *could* have somehow extracted it from the content of the disk, but I didn't do that).

I plugged the USB serial device into my Mac, and using the system profiler, was able to determine that the device was product ID 0x2303 from Prolific Technology Inc. A short google search later had me downloading the mac adapter from this page. After a reboot, the Mac prompted me to set up a new network device. I didn't really know what to enter, so I just hit apply, and closed the window. After that, the device /dev/cu.usbserial showed up.

I installed the AVR Crosspack next. This gives me the whole package of various command line tools to deal with AVR development on the Mac. Using avrdude (and some experimentation), did the following:

sudo avrdude -p m88 -c stk500v2 -P /dev/cu.usbserial -n -v

I ended up with an error about a bad signature, but it worked!

After a quick Google search, I found out that the ATmega88 device has a different signature than the ATmega88P device. I don't know what the difference in the chip is, but I found this bug report, and copied the file attached to it into my avrdude.conf file. After that, the following worked just fine (only difference is in the device name - m88p instead of m88):

sudo avrdude -p m88p -c stk500v2 -P /dev/cu.usbserial -n -v

Sorry Nipun, you're sleepin' on the floor--cuz if it doesn't all fit in the picture, it certainly doesn't fit in the hallway. Let's go build a series of tubes...

Unrelated travel note, courtesy of the WC at Amsterdam Centraal:

Pay toilets are a disservice to humanity. The idea is noble enough: You want to have a nice bathroom so you charge people some to use it and use the money to keep it from getting crapped up (pun fully intended). The problem with this logic is that when people gotta go, they gotta go. After walking the hundred yards to the WC at the end of the Amsterdam Central train station platform to be thwarted by an electro-mechanical gate that ONLY TAKES EXACT CHANGE, the last thing you're inclined to do is feel respect for city ordinances against public urination. By the smell outside from 30yds away more people have let go on wall of the WC building than inside. Surprised the gate isn't shorted out now.

The moral of the story here is that everyone benefits when certain things are free. Keeping the whazz of the train platform is a pretty clear example, but I don't think certain types of internet access aren't that far behind in today's world. That's sort of why we're here...

Keith’s on his way today to Kenya. See Kenya Ho! on the FabFi Blog. I follow on Friday, first stopping in Amsterdam.

The house is a disaster. (I’ve done three loads in the dishwasher, and filled a couple of garbage bags with wireless boxes and related accumulated on the dining table).

The problem with all your housemates sharing your crazy and playing with you is there’s no one left at home to take care of the house and dog. Dog, I’m really looking to you to step up here.

In recent world of technology every one has the mobile phones with them.we called  them as Cell phone.But why to call them as a Cell Phone we must know the answer of this.Following information will explain the fact behind the CELL PHONE technology-

CELL PHONE TECHNOLOGY:

One of the most interesting things about a cell phone is that it is really a radio. Before cell phones, people who needed mobile communications ability installed radio telephones in their cars. In the radio telephone system, there was one central antenna tower per city, and perhaps 25 channels available on that tower. The cellular phone system divides the area of a city into small cells of hexagonal shape(see fig).Each hexagonal cell is installed with a Base Station Tower.

This allows extensive frequency reuse across a city, so that millions of people can use cell phones simultaneously.

Here’s how it works: The carrier chops up an area, such as a city, into cells. Each cell is typically sized at about 10 square miles (perhaps 3 miles x 3 miles). Cells are normally thought of as hexagons on a big hexagonal grid. Each cell has a base station that consists of a tower and a small building containing the radio equipment. Cell phones have low-power transmitters in them and the base station is also transmitting at low power. Low-power transmitters have two advantages:

• The power consumption of the cell phone, which is normally battery-operated, is relatively low. Low power means small batteries, and this is what has made handheld cellular phones possible.
• The transmissions of a base station and the phones within its cell do not make it very far outside that cell. Therefore, cells can use the same 56 frequencies. The same frequencies can be reused extensively across the city.

The cellular approach requires a large number of base stations in a city of any size. A typical large city can have hundreds of towers. But because so many people are using cell phones, costs remain fairly low per user. Each carrier in each city also runs one central office called the Mobile Telephone Switching Office (MTSO). This office handles all of the phone connections to the normal land-based phone system, and controls all of the base stations in the region.
­ As you move toward the edge of your cell, your cell’s base station will note that your signal strength is diminishing. Meanwhile, the base station in the cell you are moving toward (which is listening and measuring signal strength on all frequencies, not just its own one-seventh) will be able to see your phone’s signal stre­ngth increasing. The two base stations coordinate themselves through the MTSO, and at some point, your phone gets a signal on a control channel telling it to change frequencies. This hand off switches your phone to the new cell.

On the plane to the Kenya Fablabs with 275lb of wireless gear (most of which can be found in Kenya, for future expansion). Fabfi v4 is gettin' coded in country! Let's just hope Kenyan customs doesn't follow this blog. [Edit: it's all perfectly legal, but it's an easy target for the odd entrepreneurial airport security guy...]

If you think a FabLab is cool, then you probably think a mobile FabLab is doubly cool. It not only does what a FabLab does, but you can invite it to come to you.

That’s exactly what the people behind the Hamburg FabLab initiative have done. To demonstrate to interested people what a FabLab can be, they arranged for a visit of Jaap Vermaas’s FabLab Truck.

From August 4th until August 6th you can find the FabLab Truck parked in Hamburg, and you can take part in different workshops from 14:00-21:00.

They made a little video introducing both the truck and the FabLab.

The FabLab Truck comes with one Makerbot 3D printer, a laser cutter, a vinyl cutter, and the FabLab video conferencing system. A RepRap 3D printer and a CNC milling machine are still in the process of being built.

For more pictures of the FabLab Truck and the FabLab Hamburg initiative see their Flickr photoset.

A common reaction we get when people hear about a fab lab for the first time is something along the lines of “why don’t you do that here, at home, where I live?!” There are already over a dozen fab labs in America and there are about to be a whole lot more.

Representative Bill Foster (D-IL14) has just introduced a bill before congress:

H.R.6003

Title: To provide for the establishment of the National Fab Lab Network to build out a network of community based, networked Fabrication Laboratories across the United States to foster a new generation with scientific and engineering skills and to provide a work force capable of producing world class individualized and traditional manufactured goods.

Sponsor: Rep Foster, Bill [IL-14] (introduced 7/30/2010) Cosponsors (None)

Latest Major Action: 7/30/2010 Referred to House committee.

Status: Referred to the Committee on Energy and Commerce, and in addition to the Committee on Science and Technology, for a period to be subsequently determined by the Speaker, in each case for consideration of such provisions as fall within the jurisdiction of the committee concerned.

A bill before congress! Super cool, eh?! And look,

[...] to seek to establish at least one Fab Lab per every 700,000 individuals in the United States in the first ten years of its operation.

That’s about 443 fab labs throughout the USA. The population number is kind of interesting, it is related to the number of congressional districts in America (435; approximately 1 per 600,000 individuals). To think about it in more concrete terms, some of the places where there are currently Fab Labs would barely qualify for one.

Cleveland population (2009) : 443,000

Boston population (2009) : 645,000

Providence population (2009) : 175,600

Appleton population (2009) : 70,000

Loraine County population (2009) : 284,600

But the whole point of congressional representation districts is there are representatives proportional to population so an easy one-to-one mapping of labs per representative would be a great start. We’ve been watching the effects of labs ooze sideways, spawning and soon making new labs.

You can track the status of this bill as it moves through Congress.

I just heard that none of the Afghans got funding to go to Fab 6 in Amsterdam this year. I guess it was expected; it’s so unlikely that they’d get a visa and there are lots and lots and lots of people asking for funding. But still it’s a little sad to hear because these guys could sure use the training.

I’m sure it’s far too late for our Afghans to get a visa even if money came through now, but if you can help get other lab users there, please visit Fab 6 paydro page. Some users don’t need as much money as the Afghans did (it was about $5k per traveller from Afghanistan) and may only need a little more help.