fablab

Is it a Hackerspace, Makerspace, TechShop, or FabLab?

Is it a Hackerspace, Makerspace, TechShop, or FabLab?

The past decade has seen the sudden, dramatic appearance of community spaces offering public, shared access to high-end manufacturing equipment. These spaces are interchangeably referred to as hackerspaces, makerspaces, TechShops, and FabLabs. This can lead the intended audience to become incredibly confused as to why there might be so many names for a single concept. I’d like to take some time to untangle the mess, explain the concepts behind each title, and talk about why I now make significant distinctions between all of these types of spaces.

Continue Reading Gui Cavalcanti47
Visiting Fab Lab Manchester

Visiting Fab Lab Manchester

On a recent visit to Manchester to attend the Future Everything summit, I couldn’t pass up the chance to visit the UK’s first fab lab, housed in a striking, slab-like building in the waterside district of one of Britain’s great industrial cities. I spoke to Eddie Kirkby (of the Manufacturing Institute) and Haydn Insley (fab lab manager) to find out how the fab lab movement is spreading into the UK.

Continue Reading Andrew Sleigh2
Fab Lab Boombox

Fab Lab Boombox

MIT student Matthew Keeter designed and built this sweet little portable music player for his final project in Neil Gershenfeld’s famous How to Make (almost) Anything class. The case, a union of three octagonal prisms, is laser-cut from 5.2mm plywood, and features a five-“button” capacitive touch-sensing control panel. The music is stored on an SD card, loaded in the back of the player. The PCB is two-sided, and was cut with a robot PCB mill. All source files are provided.

Continue Reading Sean Michael Ragan
LasercutChristmas classroom project in development

LasercutChristmas classroom project in development

The original idea came from the work of several of my students in the Fashioning Tech class. Sam and Brooke were cutting images that they found online, and saw that the heavy black lines made image contours, which cut as a continuous line. What they saw as a horrible mistake, I thought looked really neat, and suggested they carefully glue the image outline to a backing sheet. They were hand cutting the background sheet, but it looks much more polished if they use the laser to cut the outline shape on the laser

Continue Reading Chris Connors
A popup Fab Lab at the DMY International Design Festival Berlin

A popup Fab Lab at the DMY International Design Festival Berlin

The annual DMY Festival exhibits the work of more than 400 designers and is extended by over 40 satellite events around Berlin. This year the event hosted an international group of designer-hackers who brought in a factory’s worth of machinery to set up a Maker Lab. CNC milling, laser cutting, thermal forming, bioplastic molding, physical computing with Arduino, custom circuit board design and etching with Fritzing, RepRap and MakerBot 3-d printing, stop-motion animation and just about every other means of prototyping was in house

Continue Reading Brian Jepson