Project Blog MH

PROJECT BLOG

Mealworm Grow Unit made to scale up

Welcome

Something about me

My name is Michael Heinz, I am 28 years old and joined the Fablab here in Barcelona. I am originally from germany but lived abroad most of the time. I have a business background and Fablab is my first time practicing digital fabrication.

I currently have a mealworm cologny at home and plan to eat my own mealworms as soon as my breed is at the right size. Within this programm I will develop an optimized mealworm staion made up of single colony units that is designed to scale up to any size.


Putting a life cycle into a box



Week 1

Introduction to Fablab and the team

GitLab set up = I downloaded git from https://git-scm.com/downloads and it installed the necesarry documents on my computer. I use my Terminal application, which is already on my macbook and generated my SSH key to connect to Gitlab. To set up this connection I used the following steps and commands on Terminal circled in red:

I made a simple mistake when trying to connect my SSH key to gitlab. The problem was one quotation mark my email address was inside of. “ The instead of ". The system was not able to read my data correctly and the connection was unsuccesfull. With the help of Xavi the instructor I managed to find the mistake and set it up properly.

My prefered way to do it is within Atom = Git Push inside Atom = Open the view dropdown menu in the menu bar when atom is open. Select toggle Git tab a side menu will appear on the right and help you. As you can see in the following screenshots index will appear on the upper right and you will have to type a comment and press commit. Once you done that it will show a notification at the bottom right and you will be able to update via push.

Html 5 = After our introduction at the fablab I downloaded the markdown editor Atom and started my own Project website. I copied most of the lines from the instructors presenation, set up one stylesheet and downloaded the font from google fonts and was ready to document connected to the Git Hub. Here you see the code my website runs on:

I kept my site very simple and created an html one-pager with one stylesheet. I am going to add a drop down menu for orientation and that is going to be most of my web design right there. I then uploaded my index.html file to GitLab.


Week 2

computer aided design CAD = After trying Onshape and fusion on my mac I quickly realized that my Ipad and pen would be of good use. After trying both for a little, I find it easier and more intuitive to design with. It has limitations compared to the computer versions in terms of processor capacity and application but I am nowhere close to that at the moment. I have done modeling of Legos that worked well and I am planning to use both mac and ipad, trying to take advantage of the benefits of both. I believe that this will be sufficient to create my mealworm solution.


This simple model was quite easy on the pad. I will try and start my first digital 3D version of my grow unit on there.

The Final Project

Early stages

simple Breeding Box

Prototype 1 - "green box"



Ideas

"All in one unit"



"Ferris Wheel"