Don’t miss out on your chance to take part in the Fab Car project: find the Fab Car space at Fab10 where you will be invited to add your touch and work on the project!

You will be helping create customizable, modular pods that can be slotted onto the chassis of our open source vehicle: the FabCar. In collaboration with HP, OpenSource Vehicle and 5 other FabLabs around the world (Garagem FabLab (SP. Brasil), FabLab San Diego, FabCafe Tokyo, FaLab Manchester and Vigyam Ashram in India) FabLab Barcelona is setting out to design a concept car based on the needs and desires of the FabLab and Maker communities.

The chassis of the FabCar is being built out of composite material developed by the team specifically for the project and composed of bamboo and burlap bonded with eco friendly Entropy Resins epoxy solution, donated by their European distributor, Ferrer-Dalmau.

For more information on this product please visit entropy resins.eu

The vehicle is based on OSV’s open source chassis, the Tabby (OSVehicle.com). Around this, we are designing and producing the entire body of the FabCar at FabLab Barcelona and we will present the vehicle at the Fab10 conference on July 2nd at Barcelona’s Design Museum, DHUB. The FabCar concept revolves around giving people the ability to modify, customise and adapt the vehicle to their specific needs at any given time. In order to do this, we need designs for a system of pods, which anyone can customise or download and make themselves at their local Lab.

Different pods would provide different functionalities, such as a bike rack, a food truck or an interactive installation at an event. So for this year’s FabJam, we invite you to work on one or more of these pods. Choose one of the many use cases the pods could enable (carrying a kayak, carrying more passengers, a mobile drone factory, anything!) and design both the pod, and help with how this would be anchored to the vehicle. The car will be all electric and feature drive by wire technology. It is designed for the short trips commonly taken in urban environments. Our goal is to get the maximum carrying capacity from a small vehicle.

Photos by Thiago Kunz

FAB FESTIVAL

Poppy project: open-source 3D printed humanoid robot and the FabLabs Lapeyre Matthieu

DEMO @ 10:00 – 20:00 SAT, 5 JUL

“The Poppy project (http://www.poppy-project.org) aims at building an Open-source humanoid platform based on robust, flexible, easy-to-use and reproduce hardware and software. In particular, the use of 3D printing and rapid prototyping technologies is a central aspect of this project, and makes it easy and fast not only the reproduction, but also the development of morphological variants.

Poppy responds first to the scientific objective to study the role of morphol- ogy in cognitive development, in particular for motor control and human-robot interaction. It appears today that a suitable design of a robot morphology can greatly simplify control problems, increase robustness, and open new modes of interaction with the physical and social world. Thus Poppy aims to enable and simplify the experimentation, the reproduction and the modification of the mor- phology in research laboratories. It also allows collaborative working, sharing and replication of the results on these issues between laboratories. The ambition is to become a reference platform for benchmarking and dissemination of scientific results.

Thanks to its properties, this platform also meets a growing societal need: education and training in technology combining computer science, electronics

and mechanics, as well as a training tool to the emergent revolutionary 3D printing process. With its openness, its design and its rather lower cost, Poppy provides an object and a unique context for experimentation and learning of these technologies in a Do-It-Yourself (DIY) approach. Several experiences with Poppy in colleges, high schools, Science museums and Fablabs in France and abroad are already underway and will be discussed in the incoming sections.”

All of these experimentation have been shown on the 22nd of May at the final presentations of the seminar “lightweight structures 1:1″ at IAAC.

The aim of the seminar, led by Silvia Brandi and Rodrigo Rubio, with the collaboration of Pepe Ballestero (ETSAM Prototipolab) and Maria Kupstova, was to build four lightweight structures using structural fabric, within the format of an intensive workshop.

For the development of the project the course counted on the partnership of Serge Ferrari company, which provided the high-performance fabric Stamisol FT 371-3048 and Stamisol FT 381-3128.

The seminar has been developed in two sessions of three days each: in the first one four groups have been formed around four research topics: tensegrity structures, tensile structures, pure tension structures and fibrous structures.

During the first phase each group developed a project proposal and went trough some material testing and prototyping. During the second phase the construction of the four pavilions has been carried out in IAAC.

At the final presentation the students presented their projects to the jury board, formed by Ramon Sastre, tensile structure expert by ETSAV-UPC, Carmelo Zappulla, IAAC Faculty and principal of External Reference, Areti Markopoulou, MAA Director, together with the IAAC Alumni and Staff Mathilde Marengo, Dori Sadan and Moe Beagle.

Friday 28th of February 2014
Massimo Banzi
Lecture: Open sourcing innovation.

@ 19.30, IAAC Auditorium
Open to the Public