This week we made the trek all the way past the South Quad to the Champaign Urbana Community Fab Lab. The Fab Lab, despite being home to lots of top of the line making equipment is housed in Art Annex 2, the second oldest building on campus. However, this is seen as a bonus in our eyes as it allows creativity to flow nicely in the highly customized space.

After a quick tour of the space including laser engravers, 3d Printers, electronic cutters, milling machines, textile and fabric machines and so much more, it was time to split the class into groups to begin our rotations. I was put in the electronics group this week, and Duncan and Andrea helped us through our project. We spent the day soldering together LED’s to an Arduino as part of the “blinky boxes” project. Soldering is an important skills in making if you are going to incorporate electronics, so it was good to get practice with it. The “blinky boxes” have a light sensor on them that responds to light intensity. The darker it gets, the faster the LED’s will flash. With the help of Duncan and Andrea as well as a schematic, we were able to finish the electronics phase. We did not program the Arduino ourselves, but it is a skill we will be learning later. Now that I am familiar with how we can incorporate electronics into our project, it has given me a better prospective as to how we can come up with a product design. I know that I want to practice soldering to get better at it and start learning how to set up the board by myself.

This Instructables article is a beginners guide to soldering. I think it is a really good resource to start familiarizing yourself with the equipment you will be using, as well as proper techniques to hopefully make the process a little easier for yourself. This Makeuseof article gives an introduction to Arduino’s. The article gives some background, describes capabilities, details the many parts found on or that can be used with Arduino’s, and stimulates creativity by showing what is possible with this small piece of technology. It also offers a tutorial on programming an Arduino, so after class I started going through this article in hopes of boosting my creativity for my project brainstorming.

Above all else, walking around the Fab Lab was an excellent way to stimulate our creative processes. The Maker Community is more than willing to help us with our projects and they are all very passionate with what they are working on for their personal projects. As you walk around the many rooms, you will find projects of all different types covering the tables, walls, and shelves. Certainly you can figure out a way to combine several different components of making into a unique project for yourself. Happy Making!