Makerspace continuing service delivery and optimising solutions throughout lockdown

The COVID-19 pandemic has altered global activities, including our daily lives here on campus! The MakerSpace environment specialises in face-to-face consultations, 3D printing, electronic device training and fun and creativity through collaborations, so the way we offered these deliverables needed to change. We started doing this by creating Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) for our nation’s health care workers. This was a lot of fun and it felt good to address real-world issues using novel technologies. However, we did this partly to ensure that manufacturers could catch up and when they did, we needed to re-focus our efforts on our clients – the staff and students.

We have enhanced some of our internal activities, and to make them better than before we have improved our project and printing management by using Trello, an AGILE Kanban board. Trello updates and automates some of our activities to help ensure that engineering and research needs are met.

We have also expanded our 3D printing capacity. Where there used to be five functioning units with varying capacities we now we have seven, with more advanced capability and reliability. This includes using only the materials and re-design wastage as far as possible. To test out these fancy new machines, we have been working on supporting some really interesting research pursuits, from acoustic protection devices (which can track sound and will not break in the field), to enhanced methods to feed mosquitos for malaria testing, to trendy mask designs.

Those who do not have access to campus are welcome to contact us via the library website or our email address [email protected] for a virtual consultation on research projects or to receive a quote for 3D designs. Those who do have access to the campus are invited to make a booking with us to use the hardware and electronics within the space.