For anyone out there given to last minute adventure, let me invite you to stay with me in Cambridge and play at the South End Fab Lab in Boston. A day, a weekend, a week, or more - show up and we’ll give you a place to sleep and possibly edible turkey.

Dear Ma’am,

It has been quite a long time I sent you a mail. Well Ma’am It just that did not want to worry you with my many mails all because I felt you may be very busy with work and some other things.

Anyway Ma’am, I hope you are doing well and that everything is going on well with you. Well I know you would like to know our condition here too, yes! I am doing well and everyone else is doing just fine.

Ma’am, there is something you should know, well I don’t know if Mr. Emmanuel already told you about it. That is to say we have formed a club we call the MSTSS / FAB club. The club was formed the teachers in the ICT (information and communication technology) department of T.T.I and the Fab-Lab.

The club is mainly made up of some students of T.T.I. The club was formed because we come to realize that the Fab-Lab (Ghana) with it plans of teaching and helping students with projects could not do that for the reason that, most of the students and members of the community walk in and out of the fab-lab at any time, This have made it difficult for as to know whom to teach what and whom to help with what.

What happens with the club is that, the ICT department takes the students through the basics of MS Office components, hardware and also how to handle Machines.

When they come to the FAB-LAB, they are taken through some CAD programs like Openoffice draw, CorelDraw, AutoCAD and the Eagle. They also took through the CAM machining process and how to use the machines in the lab.

Ma’am, What I have seen so far is quite impressive in the sense that some of the students have taken on their own projects and have gained success with little or no help at all.

Some of the projects they made are; Chess board (game), Money box (saving coins), Traffic Light, bill board for the school, key holders, bottle opener, and some other things.

One problem we have is that we do not have internet connectivity and for that reason we are not able to work on any programmable circuit yet. Due to the fact that the computers are not up-to date with the soft wares needed. Anyway I am still trying to figure out who to solve that manually so that we can start with the programmable circuits.

I have some attached pictures of the group that makes up the club and some of the things they were able to do as their projects.

I hope things work out well come December / January.

Thank you very much.

Abu.

Hi everyone,

Now at the top of a water tank almost 4 kilometers from the public health hospital tower [where there is a cluster of FabFi antennas].

We just set up a new connection for Hafiz successfully.

[...]

So Hafiz’s uplink reflector is that big antenna which will probably give signals to me and Rahmat because Hafiz’s house is on our direction. If i can get signals from Hafiz’s uplink, i’ll set up my uplink ( which is obviously redundant then) for Zahin, who wants a connection too.

It took us only 3 hours. pretty easy, huh.

Thanks Keith for your help on skype. That was a great help.

we learn new things as we work on more connections.

thanks,

–
~Hameed

I took leave from defense engineering to travel the world and bring a startling concept where I go. It is a crazy and premature idea that has potential to change the way the world thinks about technology consumers and producers, and even where the riches of the world lie. I ventured out to find the special places and people that share my passions and unending hope in people, finding applications for technology and learning about the social and community needs that go hand in hand with development. Several labs around the world now comprise a limited experiment including dry dusty rural India, a shipping port in Ghana, an Apartheid-­era township in South Africa, coffee­-growing high mountains of Costa Rica, Arctic sheep and reindeer valleys in Norway, and even inner city Boston. It is an exciting modern day version of trekking off into the jungle with crates and crates full of sensitive equipment in Dr. Livingstone style, and it’s very cool. (The multitudinous biting insects and heat are probably still the same.)

In the course of several itinerant years, my focus shifted from the engineering details of energy conversion and mechanisms to the social and individual implications of making complex, high precision devices in primitive places. My master thesis was a partial, mostly technical, description of my experiences building solar and wind energy conversion devices in primitive and remote places in the world. Early on, I mistakenly believed that I was embarking on an engineering project with some broader consideration for energy policies. I was genuinely surprised to discover my greatest impact is to address the crippling lack of world­wide application of technology for peaceful and humanitarian goals.

–
(reprinted and slightly edited from my masters thesis, in answer to a recent journo inquiry)

Everett dog is ready to go and impatiently awaits the humans. We assemble one FabFi antenna at the base of Mt. Wachussetts and Jonathan Ward straps it to his back. Jon and Kerry Lynn set off for the summit. Keith Berkoben and I drive to the first test site 6km from the summit but a ridge occludes the view of the mountain. We drive on to the Sterling Airport, a small airfield with a great, clear view of the Mt. Wachussetts. We assemble the second FabFi antenna and point by eye. By phone we give a bearing to the summit team and they point their antenna by compass. It was almost too easy, just like that both routers were talking to each other. We continue to make measurements after the sun set until the summit team’s battery runs out.

Technical details will be available at the FabFi blog sometime this week.

Full res photos available at (beta) Thalia site: http://fab.thalia.mit.edu/?type=album&id=d1c9624a-c7fe-11de-8bd4-3597f7dac090 (someone please let me know how this works for you!)

More info and pics to come (see http://fabfi.fablab.af/blog/)

So - what would you say are good features of a fab lab space (and bad ones?) What works really well in your lab that you would recommend to others? What do you hate about your lab?

Hi Everyone,

I hope you are all doing good.

Finally we were able to figure out the problem in Sayad’s connection- the ‘Transmission Power’ was 19 where as no other router in our network had any number in that part. ( I checked a few other routers for confirmation before I removed the 19 from those two routers- Sayad). When I brought the above mentioned change, then the two routers started to talk to each other. Now Sayad is up. His internet connection is working now. Another person ( close by) is also connected to Sayad’s router by a cable.

They were so happy ( felt screaming and jumping) when I screamed ‘Google’ at the top of a roof on a balcony.

We are going to start working on another connection after we get two routers from the person who wants to have connection from the Lab. ( Zahin, our basketball friend). That will be in three days.

Shembot - #3 is you. Yep, the triple nickel is now high speeeeed.