Build Anything™: Recycled Lighting

tl;dr We will build a portable headlight that uses recycled materials that can fight poverty in rural areas

The beloved course on building stuff is making a comeback, this year focused on less design and more build. This time, under the guise of recycling old materials!

In this course, we will doing a walkthrough of building a from scratch. We will go over:
1. Basics of how to design stuff and what makes good design, and possibly how to measure electrical signal
2. Testing a prototype on a breadboard
3. Designing and ordering a printed circuit board
4. Soldering and assembling our board
5. Programming software to run on a microcontroller
6. 3D printing a model and final assembly
(7.) (extra bonus free time session) – presenting work to others

This course is information heavy, and will be including a lot of new skills to learn. You will be encouraged to do some pre-reading, but it is not detrimental if you can’t. It requires no prior knowledge whatsoever.

This course is for you if:
1. you want to become an engineer
2. you want go into arts and be ahead of everyone else
3. want to learn how to actually build stuff this summer

Course is capped at 8 people. Early applications will be preferred.

Please note: in case that the original project will exceed the budget during preparation, or if we choose so in a vote, we might change the project to something else. In any case, you will be leaving the course with a physical object and the knowledge how to build it.

Jakub Zálešák

Jakub is known for building stuff, whatever it might be. He studied Physics with Medical Physics at University College London, where he also turned the first ever Discover workshop on making digital synths into a full-fledged masterclass for the Institute of Making. He returned to his beloved Czech Republic after a brief but exciting career in paid research (you can ask him more at your session), and went to study a second degree, while working part-time for Discover. He hopes that in 2025, he will finally get to publish the paper on imaging cancer cells with IR light that has been sitting on his and his colleagues desks for some time. In his free time, he likes to go to extra lectures on urban planning and take care of his 18 year old cacti. He would like to inspire you to join him on a journey to build the world around him.