For my first day, I had the chance to be welcomed by the team, they presented the premises, the MACO and the projects on which I will be working.
The first project I had the chance to work on was the construction of a food 3D printer. I used a kit with some parts to put on a standard 3D printer to transform it. I started by printing the support that has to be done with a 3D printer. After the printing of the part, I assembled everything together and tried to print something in chocolate. Unfortunately, it wasn’t working so I was trying to adjust the different parts to correct the mistake. But by mishandling during the test, I burned off some components on the motherboard. I was looking for a replacement part but nothing could arrive before the end of the exchange so I had to give up this project. I took time to write all the things I had done to have a documentation about the procedure I followed to build the food 3D printer on Onl’fait’s Wiki.
One of my goals for this exchange was to learn how to use a CNC milling machine. They tought me how to use the software, the safety way to manipulate the CNC and how to work with wood.
The second project I worked on was the construction of an arcade game DIY. I Started by assembling a kit to do a portable arcade game console that has to be plugged on a TV to work. But this console was designed just for one player, so I assemble a 2nd arcade terminal, to add the possibility of playing with 2 players. I was feeling it was missing something and it wasn’t in the arcade game spirit, so we started to cut a bartop prototype to create a complete arcade machine. After cutting the first part with a laser cutter and a saw for the largest part, we assembled everything together. When all the bigger parts were assembling we plugged everything to have a trial. This bartop is just a prototype to see the parts that can be improve and how to design an activity with kids for the end of February. All the work was documented on Onl’fait’s wiki.
During the last few days, I had the chance to help with an animation where we taught kids to build their own robots from scratch. When the robots are working and ready, we put them on a big sheet of paper to make them draw on it. All the documentation was redacted by my tutor on Onl’fait’s wiki.
For my last day, we organized a video game tournament on the arcade game we built with all the team. They also offered me a blouse embroidered with my name and offered me a farewell drink. I completed all the things we were planning to do during this exchange and a few more. I really enjoyed this experience. It helped me to improve my competence and stimulated my creativity. Now I have a lot of ideas for new projects.
