Instructables classes

I have been a big fan of DIY culture and Instructables since the time I got into maker culture or be able to call myself a maker.

Since the very first time I was introduced to Jaaga and the co-learning environment that is there at the farm,  my belief of opening up a hackerfarm, inspired from maker communities, makerspaces ( Well I have visited most of them), and especially taking special inspiration from hackerfarm in Japan by Akiba, I have always dreamt day and night on how I can open something like this in India. Since the inception of the idea, I started talking about it in festivals like makerfest and Fab3 conferences. The idea was loose, without thinking about the infrastructure, the funding, the collaborators, I was just spreading the word, though few people became interested in the idea but then I didn’t have a team to facilitate this idea, I myself became lazy.

But this time I am giving another shot.

To start with I am preparing myself to all styles of making, being at the farm for last three weeks I have realised, in order to achieve something I have to have a set timeline.

For this I am starting with instructable classes– giving myself 8 days to just go through these, make a list of stuff that you actually require in making, try to match it with the inventory at the farm, make an excel sheet for same and jot down daily progress on what I lacked, in terms of knowledge, in terms of equipment to achieve one task.

HAPPY MAKING 🙂

My instructable id  – https://www.instructables.com/member/bishops1101/

Art of evangelism

According to google, an evangelist is a customer who believes in a product so much that he convinces others to buy it.

Same thing happened to me when I came for a Bootcamp at Jaaga Study

It took some time for me to adjust, living on a farm, sleeping in a tent every night, being far far away from city distraction, ooh boy, it took serious time for me to adjust being myself coming from a metropolitan city environment.

But after a month, my experience of staying at this surreal place got deeper and deeper, be it being part of the overall community, or volunteering in several activities at a farm, gave me such deep sense of pleasure. I know my initial aim was to learn to code better than before, but the vibe at the place was such that it was helping me excel at all the activities that I was trying to do.

I spent two and half months at this place, and there was not a single day where I feel bored or restless of what I am doing with my life. Even after returning home, the effect of the place was so that I kept on evangelizing about the whole organization and what they are offering, that I was certain that I had to return to this place again.

So right now I am working part time with this organization to help them reach more people in India, targeting those people in India particularly self-learners who are looking for a career shift in technology and are looking for a place to study in a collaborative environment. Also, people who have done engineering and have not been able to get jobs, we also offer them an intensive Web development boot camp at a very competitive price

Sewing el wire’s

Since I ‘m conducting a workshop on Intro to e-textiles and Soft Circuits Wearable Tech Workshop for the preparation of the workshop, I have started by learning different techniques of sewing and stitching (running and basting). Luckily I found someone (Mr. Dharmesh) at the farm who know how to sew stuff ( Most of the people in his family are professional tailors), himself being a top notch ios and Android developer. It was a great experience learning how to stitch and getting acquainted with various terminologies used in the world of sewing and stitching. You may be wondering why am I using the term sewing a and stitching again and again because there is a big difference between the two (well I didn’t know that!!)

According to net Sewing is the craft of joining objects together with stitches using thread or yarn and a needle while stitching is the process of looping yarn or thread to join two objects together.

Since I ‘ll be using a bobbin of the conductive thread which is either 2 or 3 ply, to ensure it gets easily into the eye of the needle, we can use a needle threader.

Here the results achieved after hours of hardwok.

My Dharmesh’s work

My Work

Introduction to soft circuits

Woah, there is so much to learn, ever since my friend has asked me to conduct a workshop in Bangalore city on introduction to soft circuits, I have been researching about it, and have come to the conclusion there so much going on in this industry, that I who is an electronics engineer by profession, didn’t have exposure to that. Though I have a prior exposure to el wire and el sequencer circuits this whole domain of conductive threads, fabrics, Arduino lily is worth exploring.

I have started wearable electronics class posted on Instructables, further exploring I found out more about the instructor and discovered her personal portfolio website, she also runs a course in an American university.

Some more links worth sharing on the same topic are http://www.kobakant.at/DIY/  http://fashioningtech.com/ http://openmaterials.org/category/materials-101/ https://www.instructables.com/id/Soft-Circuits/

As far as Autodesk fusion is concerned, I have posted the issue on the forum, waiting for them to reply, and also waiting for my friend to reply when he tries to upload the file through his computer.

One more this before I finish writing today’s blog, yesterday I tried to uninstall fusion and again install fusion 360, some strange things I noticed while installing and uninstalling the software on my windows laptop, i.e. when you click on uninstall, it takes you to add/remove programs window, but there you’re not able to see the listed software, there to manually uninstall the software, I had to do three things, delete Autodesk folder from program files, clear all file in this folder C:\Users\***windows user name***\AppData\Local\Autodesk and also installed a manual Autodesk cleaner software from this site

 

Zero to One – most important lesson

Apart from learning Autodesk Fusion 360, I have started reading books back and will soon be creating some videos on electric unicycles that we use at the farm.

Today I finally finished a book called zero to one by Peter Thiel, one of the founders of Paypal, I am not going to share what it is about in detail, one thing that I would like to quote from the big in exact same words, which can be helpful for people looking forward to starting a new company.

The 7 questions you should be able to answer before starting any company –

1. The Engineering question – Can you create breakthrough technology instead of incremental one?
2. The Timing question – Is now the right time to start your particular business?
3. The Monopoly question – Are you starting with a big share of a small market?
4. the People question – Do you have the right team?
5. the Distribution question – Do you have a way to not just create buy deliver your product?
6. The Durability question – Well your market position be defensible 10 and 20 years into the future?
7. The Secret question – have you identified a unique opportunity that others can’t see?

Other than that to be able to sustain myself in a city like Bangalore I ‘ll be conducting workshops on the skillset that I have already have. The next workshop will be on soft circuits- wearables, conductive thread, el wire etc. Let’s see how the response goes.

As far as fusion 360 is concerned, I have still not been able to merge the two designs, so I have emailed my design files to one of my friends, and he is trying from his laptop.

Start of a new journey

Well as promised I got started with Autodesk Fusion 360, had already installed and signed in as an educator (it’s free for students and educators). went through the design academy site, a lot of courses are there and a separate youtube series of 43 tutorials consist on youtube.

The learning path that I have in my mind is to take up course series one by one on the site which starts with beginner level and is pretty organized.

Today I started with a course series which consisted of 3 courses of a work load of 4 hours 11 mins, the first course is Introduction to Fusion 360: Design a Lamp in an Hour, its states that you can design a lamp in an hour but it took a lot of time for me to figure out may be because I didn’t have a separate screen, had to again and again switch tabs, pause play the video, I was able to design the lamp completely and wanted to share the rendered image but one feature of Autodesk didn’t let me merge all my designs, by merging all my designs I mean that I had created the lampshade and the arm in one file and the base in another, in the end, had to merge the 2 files to get a complete lamp, but due to one limitation that this software has stopped me from achieving it today.

Let me explain the limitation- so the fusion 360 works best when connected to the internet, it has an inbuilt cloud platform that keeps on saving your design files on the cloud, with a limit of 25GB ( that’s great right!!) but it comes with a limitation, if you have to merge one file on which you are working with a previously worked file, both should be on the cloud before. But what didn’t worked for me was the automatic upload feature which uploads all your saved design files onto cloud, in my case they were simply not uploading, that means you can use it together until the time they merge, at that I didn’t lose hope, searched the web many had complained about this feature. Since the complaints were not recent, I wanted to check with someone who uses fusion 360 regularly, so I contacted one of my friends, he gave me an alternate solution to upload using this link To be able to solve this problem, through this separate drive link connected to my account I was able to upload the design, but when it again when I wanted to merge, it was not able to do it when the design was uploaded in .f3d format and then he suggested me to upload it using .step, this time the Autodesk crashed. So I am going to try this tomorrow, else going to send a bug report to Autodesk people, let’s see what is their response on that

Mastering one thing at a time

After a lot of thought and seeing pro’s and con’s of everything from the exposure I have till now, I have embarked on a new journey to master a software – Autodesk Fusion 360.

This blog post will account for the daily progress that I make in terms of learning this software

Why the name hacker-farm blog- Right now I am working from an actual farm( I ‘ll talk about the farm in my later posts), hacking my brain to master this skill of computer aided design

Why I chose this software to learn- I have been following Autodesk for quite some time, one of my very good friend is working as an evangelist over there and Autodesk is very much into promoting maker culture, instructable site as one of the favorites.

Also, I came across this link of how you can get a job using Autodesk software which seems promising to me, though getting a job is not my no. 1 priority, I am able to make a living by doing different things here and there ( I ‘ll talk about that later also).

I didn’t choose to learn a particular programming language, coz I have been trying to that for a very long time, somehow I forcefully learn and don’t care about it further after some time.

A brief background about myself
I am an electronics engineer by profession who has completely lost faith in the current education system, and still at the age of 23 where my friends are pursuing jobs, I am still on the verge of deciding what exactly I want to do next.