As said: the miniFabLab explores affordable desk-top fabbing machines. The focus is on their potential for home, artists, smaller schools, makerspaces, libraries and mobile. We look at their possibilities, limitations and ease of use.

Of course they are no match at all for the $100k MIT standard fablab machines, but for a more modest ambition they can be quite useful. Programming tools for electronics are omitted at as they do not scale. And we help people setting up a FabLab or a Makerspace.

At the FAB9 Conference in Yokohama we got the request to explore a Small Fablab Suite of machines for ‘the $10k fablab’, which is a nickname for a small fablab/makerspace in the range between 10 and 15k.

We hardly look at FDM 3D printers any more, only DLP developments.
More interesting are small lasercutters, like the gamechanging Glowforge (announced Oct 2015 shipping is delayed till March 2018], desktop CNC machines and hybrid developments, like the Makerarm Kickstarter.

My goal was to develop the MAKERKAR around the Glowforge. A complete minifablab on wheels for indoor use that can be rolled into libaries, schools etc. As the Glowforge kept delaying I developed a MAKERKAR around the Full Spectrum. I have built nine and the Makerkar is open source now. It is 70 cms wide, 112 long and 128 high.

Before that, as proof of concept, we built in November 2016  the FABSLADDA FABLAB2GO, a full mobile fablab on a bike trailer, with a lasercutter on board, that passes through any door of 78 cms or more. And towable by bike.

This simple site is updated frequently, as we consider ourselves at the wheel amidst technology … to see: click Pont

 

Bart Bakker at museum ‘de Pont’, Tilburg – Rosemarie Trockel, Kinderspielplatz, 1999

 

 

The miniFabLab originated when at PROTOSPACE we noticed that most people wanted to use the lasercutter. There is always a queue on front of the Epilog.We also noticed that most folks do not want “to make almost anything” (MIT’s adagium), but want to make almost any small thing. So we looked for additional capacity by small laser cutters and that was the start of the miniFabLab as a makerspace.