Summer School Planning
Intro
We design and build open source industrial machines, and publish the plans on the internet for free.
This summer, we are offering a one month immersion into hands on skills that take you from your laptop into the world of physical hardware. We will be building of real infrastructure: tractors, houses, and other machines.
Over the years, we've been developing open source, community-based building techniques that bring tangible skills back to people. See the OSE founder's TED Talk:
Then we discovered how to build a tractor, or 3D printer - in one day. Or a house - in 5 days. This is what we call Extreme Manufacturing.
Schedule
In this summer school, we will take students through an immersion of skills necessary for collaborative design and builds of significant products. This is an opportunity for hands-on experience with efficient productivity - on a small scale - unlike that offered anywhere else. The schedule is packed with 8 hour days of classroom and hands-on experience, where we do swarm builds of large and impressive things.
The typical schedule includes 3 hours of classroom and design time in the morning from 9 AM to Noon, with 4 hours of hands-on build time in the afternoon from 1 PM to 5 PM. Students will work on a collaborative project on Saturday. We have just secured a 1 GB internet connection at our facility, which means that we will be able to work effectively with remote collaborators.
Week 1: Design, Collaboration, and Prototyping using FreeCAD and a 3D Printer
In the first week, we will learn the basic workflows for open source design collaboration, and how to turn ideas into real objects. We will start with building a 3D printer, which we will then use to produce a cordless drill. We will design parts for this cordless drill, and learn how to modify these parts in FreeCAD to make different versions of the cordless drill. Thus, we will cover the whole process from ideation to build to usage of a real and practical product - the cordless drill - using a machine - the 3D printer - that we have built ourselves. This week includes gaining basic literacy in microcontrollers (Arduino) and using a small computer (Raspberry Pi) to build a 3D printed tablet with touch screen - from scratch. The week culminates with a Project Day on Saturday - where students begin work on the 3D Printed Cordless Drill over the 4 week Summer School duration. The goal of the first week is to show that advanced creativity can be achieved on a small scale - to produce practical products - and how that applies to designing one's own life.
- Monday: Introduction
- Morning: Introduction: OSE Introduction and Introduction to Collaborative Literacy. Design with a Purpose. Learning how to work in large and distributed teams on complex design problems by breaking them down into small chunks, and documenting everything as we go. Basic product development process, stages of development, and taxonomy for open hardware. Keeping Work Logs and using a Template for documentation.
- Afternoon: Building a 3D printer.: Build beginning: 3D printer. We will build OSE's 3D printer, starting with the frame, axes, heated bed, controller, and extruder.
- Tuesday: 3D Printing
- Morning: Open Design with FreeCAD. We will learn to use the open source Computer Aided Design software - FreeCAD - as a powerful tool that allows teams to work together to create complex design. Basic workflow for design with many people working in distributed teams. Construction Set Collaboration. Part libraries. Merging files. Using the 3D Printer Part Library to design different versions of the 3D printer.
- Afternoon: Finishing 3D Printer Build Assembly of modules + wiring. Printing.
- Seminar, 6-8 PM - Integrated Humans. What does it mean to achieve self-determination, happiness, and freedom? Growth and Learning Mindset. How to Learn. The Mature Personality. Resilience Mechanisms. Learning how to integrate technology with humanity.
- Wednesday
- Morning: Designing 3D Printable Parts with FreeCAD Design Exercise - how to design useful parts that can be printed. How to find parts for 3D printing online. Exercises in desiigning gears, belts, pulleys, battery packs for a cordless drill.
- Afternoon: 3D Printing Experiments. 3D Printer Configuration - Learn how to adjust the on-board settings of the 3D printer such as homing, first layer tweaking, and optimizing print quality. We will print the designs that we produced in FreeCAD. Learn how to prepare models for printing by arranging them on the print bed, resizing them and slicing using Lulzbot Cura. Learning about such factors as print speed, bed adhesion, support structures and print resolution.
- Thursday: Arduino Microcontrollers
- Morning: Understanding Microcontrollers. Arduino is the quintessential device that brought us into the age of Open Source Hardware. What is it and how is it used to power various devices from sensors to brick presses. Learn about using microcontrollers and Arduino for automation and control tasks. Basic programming in Arduino. Visual programming in Arduino.
- Afternoon: Arduino Exercises We will make several devices using Arduino: a circuit for measuring temperature, measuring voltage and current, an Arduino Oscilloscope, and a charger for a battery which will be applied to the cordless drill.
- Friday: Raspberry Pi Mini Computer
- Morning: Understanding the Raspberry Pi Computer A computer the size of a pack of cards - compact and powerful. Perfect for robotics and other projects. Adding peripherals such as screen, keyboard, phone module.
- Afternoon: Building a Practical Raspberry Pi Tablet We will take Raspberry Pi, a touch screen, 3D print our own case, and make a usable and practical touch screen tablet for $100.
- Saturday: Project Day. This will be the first of 4 days dedicated to a collaborative design and build of a professional grade, 3D printed, cordless drill. We will start with individual 18650 battery cells and design a battery pack. We will design and 3D print the body. We will use our learnings of Arduino to build a charger for the battery pack. We will use an off-the-shelf motor and chuck for the cordless drill, or 3D print our own motor if the skill and time of the students allows. We will create all CAD in FreeCAD, and add that to the Cordless Drill Construction Set part library so that different versions of the cordless drill could be made. We will experiment with 3D printed chucks as well as a stand for using the cordless drill as a drill press. We will then enter an online Design Challenge where we post our creation as the OSE STEM Camp Team entry in the last week of the Camp. The Project Day focuses on the application of collaboration, 3D design, documentation, 3D printing, Arduino, and electronics towards the design of a useful tool. Moreover, we will use our Raspberry Pi tablets for picture and video documentation - showing how we can create our own infrastructure for learning and teaching others.
- Morning Introduction to the 3D printed cordless drill design. Modular breakdown of the drill into parts. Includes battery pack, charger, chuck, and drill press attachment. We divide into teams to tackle the different modules. The rest of the day - students work on the project and document their work on their Work Logs while collaborating with Remote Participants.
Week 2: Tractor Build
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Week 3: CEB Press and Soil Conditioner Build
This week we continue the heavy machines - for construction. The CEB press uses a common building material - earth - as robust building material that constitutes most of the housing on this planet. If time allows, we will bake limestone to make our own cement. We will build a soil mixer - which mixes cement and soil - loaded with our newly build tractor - to produce stabilized block.
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Week 4: Housing
buid of walls or sample seed eco-home.
- Monday
- Morning: Introduction to Open Building Institute Design:
- Afternoon: Building Scale Models of the Seed Eco-Home: We will use the 3D printers that we build to print scale models of the panels used to make realistic scale models of the Seed Eco-Home. This is useful both for play and for real design of buildable structures.
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