Fab Academy is a course from the Fab Foundation which spun out of MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms. This class is a survey of digital fabrication and design. The course is taught in a distributed model where each student signs up with a node or Fab Lab local to them. Each week for 20 weeks a new topic is introduced in a global online lecture and then students meet their local instructors for hands on practice in their lab. The first subject in the course is website development. Each student has 1 week to customize a portfolio they will use for the rest of the class and each subsequent week they must document their work on their site.
2021 Student Experience
I took the course in 2021 and my portfolio is here. My favorite projects were CNC machining, Moulding and Casting, and Wild Card Week.
The course is a lot of work and with a new subject each week that could easily become a lifetime of experimentation you have to carefully pick and choose how far you dig into any single subject. They say that anyone can pick the course up from nothing and do fine but they also say it is like drinking from a firehose. I had touched most of the subjects at least slightly before the class so I felt I had a pretty solid background. That said I took a that as an opportunity to be ambitious with some projects I was more excited about. Sometimes this worked out and others I got in over my head.
Another quirk about when I took the class is because we were still at the height of the pandemic and didn’t have vaccines yet as a measure to reduce potential exposure each student at my node got a set of tools and components to work from home on as many projects as possible. We still needed to go to the lab for things like the laser cutter and CNC router, but I was given a small milling machine for making my own circuit boards and a soldering station and electronics components. This has allowed me to continue my exploration into PCB design and improved my electronics prototyping capabilities significantly. This was the biggest leap forward in my maker skill set. I also dug into the CNC router and have created the QuickBox based on a project I started during the course.
Setting up my mill for the first time:
The circuit board for my final project in a 3d printed and laser cut enclosure:
You can read more about my final project, an automated pine wood derby track here.