Fab Lab – The Machines | Hacker News Reader

Fab Lab – The Machines

janka102.github.io

62 pointsjanka10230 comments

I made this mainly the summer after my junior year in high school. I kinda consider it one of my very first "real" projects I've done.

We got handouts of every machine we had in the shop and had to take a test on the parts and what they did, so from those handouts I made this site hoping it would make it easier for people to study.

This is very very nice. If it doesn't hit the front page, you should consider resubmitting as a "Show HN", which typically gets more votes. This is great work, and kudos to you...both for making a polished, professional website and for doing so in the service of education.

Hey, thanks! That means a lot and it's cool to know other people like it

I agree with danso, this is really good work, and it's really cool too.

Thanks! Glad you like it

How long ago did you make this? The design style is fairly current (in my opinion), you may have designing on the cutting edge.

Great work, you should develop this into a Clever app.

I started summer of 2013 and was using Bootstrap 2.3. And I've never seen Clever before, do schools have to sign up to it or how does it work?

So maybe not so cutting edge, but that's ok.

Yes, schools have to sign up to Clever. I'm sure many people develop math, science and english applications, but probably very few develop wood shop applications.

Really well done! I actually worked in a shop similar to this (we were more focused on CNC machines but we had all the fab equipment too) during my freshmen year in college. Not only do I think the site is nice in general but it would have actually been useful to have a place people could quickly look on their phones to see which buttons to press and which levers to pull to operate the machines.

Yeah I thought it was a neat idea, but unfortunately I'm pretty sure not many people in my class used it

I still think that the teacher should have paid for the site. Or at the very least started using it (which, as far as I'm aware, he still doesn't even tell students it exists).

Unfortunatly most people don't understand the level of effort it takes to make this look so nice and have great functionality.

Well done janka, it's really a great site

Honestly, I would pay for a website like this but with even more stuff. English is my second language, but I currently reside in an English speaking country, and sometimes when I need something specific for some machine, car, dryer etc. I have to spend just too much time trying to learn names of parts needed to fix stuff.

That sounds like a cool idea where people could collaboratively add and edit pictures of things and add the names of parts

CAPTCHA?

Now we're on to something...

I made a (free) site pretty similar to what you describe:

https://www.takeitapart.com

TakeItApart lets anyone can see or share annotated photo-based disassembly guides, to find part numbers, names, and required tools. We're tying to make the website the community-contributed disassembly encyclopedia of the web--so anyone can take things apart, virtually, without picking up a screwdriver. It's also super easy to add a new guide--just bulk upload a set of photos and click "next" a few times.

It's a way to share engineering and industrial design know-how. For example, I've learned to consider in-board strain relief[1] for cables and spray-on ground shielding[2] from taking things apart.

1. https://www.takeitapart.com/guide/51#step-4

2. https://www.takeitapart.com/guide/25#step-11

That's really cool! Bookmarked.

Cute.

For the 19th century version, see "Catechism of the Locomotive", from 1877.

https://archive.org/details/cu31924031173549

kek

That's a great book, thankyou for telling me about it - these links, to interesting knowledge that I wouldn't discover on my own, are the best part of hn.

So when are you going to start charging workshops for training their employees? Seems like it could be a profitable niche for safety training.

Nicely done, OP! Have you considered making an app so it is simple to create new tests?

The interactive nature of this is great, and it's widely applicable. Beyond being wonderful for students, adaptations of this would be great for employee training on the factory floor. Every hackerspace would benefit from a system like this to qualify members for access to capital equipment.

I haven't before, but I just might now. It was a real pain for me to add those machines that are there now, I did it all manually by checking how far parts were from the top left of the image. I probably could have came up with a way to add parts to an image by clicking on it... oh well.

I love this. Can I show it to a college prof who may need something similar for engineering freshmen?

Yeah, go for it

Love it. Would be great if you included cutting speeds and lubricants for different materials. Great (and low-conflict) way to quickly qualify new people for machines at Makerspaces.

This is insane for a high school web project. Kudos and props to the author. Be sure to put this on your resume!

Thanks! For some reason I never thought of putting it on a resume, but I will now.

Put everything interesting you do on your resume! Every opportunity I've been offered has been due to my side projects or non-programming experiences. Your formal education is still important, but, in my experience in the software world, people value the results of your work more than they value your education.

This app you've made is an amazing demonstration of your skills and understanding of web development. It's worth so much more than your GPA.

You should do this for techshop

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