GOH QI ERN, ARIELLE

Throughout my 4-week attachment with the Digital Fabrication Space (DFS) in Science Centre Singapore, I embarked on 3 different projects, namely: a 5cm cube with 2 partitions [Day 1-2], prototypes of a bipedal robot [Day 2-10] and a land vehicle controlled by a micro:bit [Day 10-14]. Through doing these projects, I refreshed my LibreCAD (2D Designing Software) skills, learnt basic 3D designing skills (via the 3D designing software -- Onshape), refreshed my Python coding skills and learnt a lot about the prototyping process.

Previously, DFS built an underwater vehicle that was controlled by the movements of a micro:bit. For my third project, I was tasked to adapt this previously-built underwater vehicle into a land one, through redesigning certain parts and recoding. The commands given to the land vehicle was through tilting the hand-held micro:bit along the x and y axes.

I managed to revise by LibreCAD skills through designing and laser-cutting this cube. I was glad that there was only one further adjustment that was required, as one of the holes in the exterior of the box was off by 1mm.

The projects were quite different, and so I faced different challenges with varying levels of difficulty for the 3 projects. The first project was pretty straightforward, so I did not face much difficulty working on it. However, the next two projects were more challenging and so I needed to overcome more challenges before I could come up with a finalised version for the two projects. I'll be talking about some of the challenges faced when working on the second and third projects.

Throughout my attachment with DFS, I had to use both the laser-cutter and 3D-printer. As such, I learnt how to operate these, the safety precautions that I have to be aware of and in the case of the laser-cutter, the different settings that I have to key in, as well as the consequences of keying in the wrong settings (either cannot cut through or a mini fire will be started).

Even though we put in a lot of effort and tried very hard to think and see ahead, mistakes will still be made, and we have to learn from them and keep on improving our design. As such, it is very important that we continue to persevere even when the process may be tedious and difficult, in order to further improve our design and come out with the best design for our finished product.

When I was making the 3D-printed version of the bipedal robot, the precision of the pieces printed was very far off, and I had to resort to printing pieces of varying dimensions, in order to see which of them fits best. From this, I learnt that even when we go to great pains to enter all the correct dimensions of our design, things might still not go our way. When that happens, we have to work our way around that problem and come up with an appropriate solution to that.