FAB labs, INDIA

Supper for soul! 🙂 

Fab labs is an amazing initiative by Prof. Neil Gershenfeld at Center for Bits & Atoms, MIT.

In brief,

• Fab labs is a chain of labs set up in 21 countries at around 85 centers.

• A fab lab provides tools which people can use to invent something… almost anything! 🙂 They provide personal fabrication tools.

• Tools include vinyl cutters, laser cutters,  Shopbot CNC mill, advanced ones like 3d printers & scanners…  And many other design tools + software…

The video below shows what a Fab Lab does and what it ll do in the future!   \m/

• So if you want to hack the world around you, you can get the tools at a Fab lab..  You can listen to this amazing talk by Prof. Neil on the possibilities of creations by a common man.. Truly, rise of the amateur! 🙂   http://www.ted.com/talks/neil_gershenfeld_on_fab_labs.html

There are currently 5 Fab labs in India and I visited 3 of them in  last week.. 🙂 

The very first Fab lab I visited is the  first FAB lab that was set up in India, around a decade ago. It is at Vigyan Ashram, Pune.

the first FAB lab in India at Vigyan Ashram.
#Been-there-luvd-it

The fab lab here works on projects like Led lighting solutions which are low cost and can be widely developed for rural areas.  Also a distributed irrigation project is going on, wherein  the sensors for measuring moisture, temperature etc in the soil are being developed in the lab.   Not many advanced tools are available at this fab lab, as its main focus still is on the rural problems taken up at the school. Still a few tools are there like  vinyl cutter, laser cutter,milling machine..

Vinyl cutter

Fab Fi project

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The next fab lab I visited is at COEP (College of Engineering, Pune). This lab is doing some pretty good work as a lot of engineering students from the campus use the tools at the lab for various projects..

😀

This lab has a Shopbot, which is a CNC router for precision cutting is 3 axis, from which the lab has made some furniture like a chair, a podium, a table etc.

 Other tools like the vinyl cutter, the laser cutter, MDX-20 milling machine are there apart from other tools for fabrication, moulding, pcb printing, etc.

here is a picture tour of some of the nice things I saw at the lab.

a 3d structure built out of 2d parts cut from cardboard using the shopbot

some gears & other shapes cut using shopbot

a jigsaw puzzle of the map of the country carved out of Shopbot. 🙂

precision engraving on cardboard!

pcb engraving using MDX-20 milling m/c

Models of a human face (R) & fan made using milling m/c

Overall, it was fun visiting the lab! 🙂

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The next lab I visited was Fablab at Ahmedabad when I was returning home from Pune. The lab here is under the aegis of National Innovation Foundation which promotes & nurtures grassroot innovations. Thus the tools of fab lab aid in the value addition and design improvisation of  innovations  incubated by the NIF.

The team of the lab had just returned from Delhi after the week long exhibition of Innovations at the President’s Estate. So a lot of models were still in the boxes and were yet to be unpacked, yet I got to see a few of the models including an adjustable walker for the elderly for climbing stairs, a modified cooker to brew coffee, tool for tree climbing, efficient chulha design and many many more projects…

Hacking the world around is our nature.. We just need to dust off some inertia.. 😉

Overall, the last week was fun.. Visited the toy lab, Vigyan Ashram, FAB labs, SRISTI lab ( will write about in some other post.. It is a super initiative as well!) .. Met friends n sis at Pune, ate,travelled, shopped..  and travelled back in the newly inaugurated Duronto Express train (Nice train it is I tell you.. ) ..

Have fun folks!

Adios for now.. 🙂