Skip to content

1. Principles and practices

This week I worked on defining my final project idea and started to getting used to the documentation process.

Week Topics

Learning outcomes

  • Communicate an initial project proposal

Have you?

  • Read the Fab Charter
  • Sketched your final project idea/s
  • Described what it will do and who will use it

Project Research

RC Car

I always had an interest in RC cars and bots. It’s something that puts my curiosity up when it’s mixed with the use of artificial intelligence to drive these small scale wheels in an autonomous way.

There are projects like FormulaPi and DIY Robocars that have already put this into practice and created communities to develop their skills and compete by racing the autonomous vehicles agains each other. This also provides space for learning and sharing about DIY, making, programming with electronics, sensors and artificial intelligence (a subject that today is more important than ever!).

My project proposal is to prototype, develop and create a RC car that any maker could build in a Fab Lab, controlled via wifi or bluetooth (by using mobile phone or tablet). This platform could then be extended to have infrared sensors, accelerometer, cameras and be used as a base for a DIY autonomous racing car.

Sketching Prototype nº 1

Sketching Prototype nº 2

Sand table / Zen garden with light

Another project idea is to make a table that could be used to decorate some place in the house. This table would be composed of sand and light. The table would resenble a Japanese “dry landscape” or Zen Garden, by being able to have multiple sand drawing made on it.

How it works? The table has a comparment with sand and a metalic sphere that is driven by a arm with a magnetic tip. By moving the sphere on top of sand, it can move the sand and draw on it.

  • http://www.taomc.com/sisyphus
  • https://hackaday.com/2018/12/25/achieving-zen-the-arduino-way/

Documentation Research

After checking some of the previous students pages, projects and Fab Academy website, i get to know a bit more of the options available to document and build project websites.

For this year there is a Git repository created on Fab Academy Gitlab for each student, to help to manage documentation for the project. This repository was created based on MkDocs, so it’s written in Markdown language and any change/commit on the repository will trigger automatic mkdocs build task (built in gitlab) to generate html page from the markdown language.

This method offers a very good and easy way to create a documentation website for the project and also allows to be customized when needed, via theme or theme customization, plus adding extra css and/or javascript libraries.

To write the documentation i’m using Visual Studio Code editor. It’s an open source editor that as already support for Git version control, syntax highlighting, supports markdown preview and a lot of other features to help on documentation and code development. It works on Windows, Linux and macOS.

Whats next? Project Management page.