Part 1: Make a press-fit construction kit

Since October of 2009, a handful of small groups of students have been taking part in an educational experiment called the Fab Academy. The Fab Academy is a distance learning collaborative that's built on the infrastructure of the Fab Lab network. Labs in Spain, Iceland, Kenya, Amsterdam, India, and Rhode Island participate in Wednesday morning lectures by videoconference...

Read the whole article at the Make Magazine blog.

Part 2: Making and programming circuit boards

Our assignment this time around was to design a circuit board, mill it, and program it in Assembly language. Each student had to become acquainted with the following work flow:

Designing the board
Machining
Stuffing components
Programming

Read the whole article at the Make Magazine blog.

Part 3: Molding and Casting

This week's topic, mold making and casting, came as a welcome change from the previous two-week session (embedded programming), which was creating a bit of anxiety here at the Fab Academy. The materials and processes for molding and casting are easy to learn and yield satisfying results; programming microcontrollers can be satisfying in its own way, but is a more intractable topic to learn in two weeks...

Read the whole article at the Make Magazine blog.