Week 1 - Monday 17th

Today in class we were introduced to the Massey University class of Foundation Fabricate, also known as the Fab lab.

The first order of business for the first class of the semester, was a general greeting and a code of conduct for the class. We were told as a class unit that, in a nutshell, that any discriminant behaviour wouldn't be tolerated and that we should all be as nice and as welcoming to each other as possible. 

[Insert an excerpt from the code of conduct here]

Moving on with the class as there were only two hours of allotted time to spare, we moved straight into a tour of the Fab lab space, going past the main "hang out spot" as I like to call it at least, into the second of the three rooms. 

The blue room, jokingly referred to as the green room as half the walls are painted yellow; was filled with 3D printers of small and large variety, a laser cutter and couple other bits floating around. 8 printers were evenly spread out over the expanse of two shelves and on the bottom of the shelf were multitudes of PLA filament for the actual printing. According to Eva (our tutor person), they made mystery colours with the left over filament, which is a fun way to reduce waste.

After becoming acquainted with the printers and the cutters, we moved on to the pink room. The pink room was also affectionately called something by the staff but I have since forgotten what it was so we leave it at that :D. The Pink room had some more interesting items, some of which were the giant knitting machine, a couple industrial sewing machines and a not-so-inconspicuous pile of soft drink which was apparently bought on purpose as a stockpile, not that I'm judging. The thing that caught my eye the most in the pink room was the bio lab. I saw many colours and an orchestrated chaos if you will. I was told that I could make bio plastics over in that section and it has given me many ideas on what to make at home going forwards. 

With the tour taking up about an hour or so, we had another hour to spare for the computer section of the class. Upon setting up and logging in we were instructed to look at a website called Thingiverse. The website shows different things that other people on the internet have made, uploaded and 3D printed, allowing others like me to use the files and either, improve upon the current design or print the current upload. These uploads also came with different licensing agreements that future users need to adhere to. 

With this knowledge in mind, I was tasked to find 3 different licensing agreements and see what they meant. I ended up finding:

                 - Share Alike: Allows others to re-use, re-mix and modify works but any shared works                                          require the same licensing

                  - No Derivatives: The original work may be redistributed commercially or not, but one                                                cannot make alternate changes to the original design

                  - Non Commercial: Allows redistribution of original material and the remix/transformation                                                     of material, but you must give appropriate credit to the original licenser                                                     and you cannot use the material for any commercial purposes at all.

So yeah, that was basically it for the rest of that class :3

Next class I was told, that I would be 3D printing for the first time so that's fun.