It’s been quite a long while since I wrote last. Things have been moving rather fast and far since the last post, so I thought I’d come up with a more comprehensive posting of the Lab and our new capabilities.
You may remember that the Haaga-Helia University of Applied Sciences was given a grant of 100,000 € by the Finnish finance giant, OP Finance. Of that, I requested a slice of 30,000 € and was given it, much to my surprise. I can’t express my joy of having such a stack of money to go shopping with since it’s not possible to get that much hardware via regular channels in one year.
So, what did we get?
- an Artec EVA handheld 3D Scanner
- a Formlabs Form 3 resin printer with automated washer and curing units
- a BCN3D Sigmax large bed, two extruder filament printer
- 5 units of Oculus Quest 128GB wireless virtual glasses
- around 50 packages of Freenove Arduino Ultimate Starter packs for basic instruction
- around 40 ESP32 System on a Chip (SoC) devices for advanced robotics with both Bluetooth and WLAN connectivity
- five Raspberry Pi 3+ devices
- a cartful of hardware store tools and useful items
With these tools and devices, our capabilities in robotics, 3D printing, VR / AR / MR, and IoT just went up rather a lot. That’s fine, since our course portfolio is expanding in just these directions. Haaga-Helia UAS is part of an EU wide project called IoT Proto Labs, and with the new tools, we can get things moving a lot faster than if we had to wait a fiscal decision on every new thing we wanted for the lab and the courses.
Here are a few videos on how the Lab looks today:
and the IoT Experimental Research Project course
So in a nutshell, it’s been a hectic Fall semester getting all that purchased, installed, and taken into course use, but yes, it’s been so much fun getting a lab capable of doing practically anything.
I still have some of the grant left, so I will go and get sensors and LORA long range WLAN chips by the busload so we can keep on creating.
