Hello everyone and welcome to our Fab Academy experience slash how to be a maker course. I think that's how you would describe this. Yeah, so this video series is a hybrid of a crash course and how to be a maker. We'll also take a look at our experience and lessons learned in the 2024 Fab Academy course.

I'm Jared, I'm a mechatronics engineer and I've been making things for as long as I remember. Sometimes they're cool, sometimes they're helpful, but most of the time it's just silly little projects.

Hey, I'm Liam. I've been working at CORE for a while now. I'm also studying mechatronic engineering and I've been hooked on electronics since I got one of those little spring-loaded starter kits from my pop. Ever since I've been playing around with electronics and 3D printing, I've just been making little knickknacks around the house.

We're going to be your hosts for this series and we're both doing Fab Academy this year. And for those of you who don't know what Fab Academy is, it's just a really fast-paced, hands-on course based on MIT's How to Make Anything course. It just kind of covers all the essential maker skills.

Yeah, so we'll be building our own projects as part of Fab Academy. And we'll be showing you the ins and outs and the tools and processes along the way, teaching you the maker fundamental skills. We'll be covering topics such as 3D printing, laser cutting, coding, circuit design, all the skills you'll need to make your own projects.

Yeah, but remember though, this is only a crash course. But what that means is we will be only giving you the minimum amount of information you actually need to go out and start doing things on your own. We're just going to kind of hold your hand and step you through enough examples so that you can go out and get started and learn through doing your own projects. Spot on.

But another focus of this series is to pass on all of the wisdom that we and much of the team here at Core Electronics have gained over the many, many years of making. And all the helpful tips and hard lessons that we might have learned.

All right, let's just get into our project. So this was actually a part of our first week's assignment, which was to make a sketch of a potential project, which is what we're going to be building over the next 20 weeks or so.

So I've been working on this big project for a while. It's called Leo. It's basically a home assistant droid slash robot that can actually move around and interact with your house. And what we're going to be doing is we're going to be building the drivetrain for it to be able to move around. So here is a front view of that. We've got these two wheels on the sides, and these are going to be mecanum wheels. And these are really, really awesome things because they can drive forward normally, but then they can also move side to side and any direction around like that. They can rotate and they're just really darn cool things. So we've got the main body. We've got the housing for the wheels. We're going to have motors in here. And then we've got the suspension to hold this all together. And if we look at the top, it's just going to fit in there. We're going to have four wheels connected in like a big chassis. And this is probably going to be about 60 by 60 centimetres. And this is just a really crude sketch. I don't know how far we're going to get, but we might actually build kind of a body on top of this chassis, maybe a little touch screen there to be able to interact with, put a face on, things like that. But the main thing is we're going to be building this really cool drive chain, but we might get around to having a screen on it with a Raspberry Pi powering it or maybe some sensors. Who knows what we're going to get up to? But we've got mechanical systems, electrical...We've got 3D printing. There's going to be laser cutting. There's going to be microcontrollers needing to be coded. There's a lot of things here and a lot of systems that are going to make for good learning opportunities.

So my project is Plant Pulse. At its core, it's a way to manage and maintain your garden's water levels. The main purpose of the hub is to water each of the plants with pumps. It's also got a couple of little extra tidbits like checking up on a water tank to see if it's full and a camera so that we can track our plant's growing progress. And to access all of that information, we can use a dashboard. So we can just load this up from the internet and this will have different things like a photo from the hub or soil moisture, UV and light values or temperature and humidity values from the different nodes.

Here we've got a node. So a node will be placed between a few different plants and then we can put these soil moisture sensors close to the roots of each of those. This will just track how much moisture is left in the soil. A really interesting thing about the nodes is that we're using battery power. So we'll need to implement some systems to make sure we get the maximum amount of battery life. And we'll also be able to throw in little sensors like temperature and humidity and maybe even UV to see if that increases our plant's yield.

That's it. Automated plant watering. We've got a few different microcontrollers talking to each other and all that information is being sent up to the internet.

Alright, that's our project sketched up. We have an idea of what we're going to be making and I hope you all stick around because we've got some really cool things coming up in this series. We really can't wait to teach you all the little skills that we've learned along the way on how to be a maker. See ya.