February 2020
Letter from the Editor
Making an ECE Makerspace
By Badri Roysam, University of Houston
Dear ECEDHA family and friends,
Makerspaces have a way of transforming ECE undergraduate students into a thoughtful, collaborative, playful, engaged, organized, and creative community of happy future alumni. They are proud and happy to show the makerspace to future students in a welcoming peer-to-peer manner. They can also help advance cross-disciplinary undergraduate projects, provide a welcoming environment for female students, and help foster an entrepreneurial and/or service mindset. I know, because I have seen all of this firsthand.
At first blush, setting up a makerspace may seem like an expensive, and tricky endeavor, with an unclear payoff. It can even seem like a potential distraction to a busy Chair. Beyond the initiation, keeping a makerspace alive over time seems harder. However, with a little creativity and a little understanding of the student “makerspace culture”, these trepidations can be driven away. It is easier than it seems at first, especially in the ECE context.
We look forward to seeing you at the 2020 ECEDHA Annual Conference and ECExpo in Orlando. This conference has an active makerspaces working group, and on March 22, the Annual ECEDHA conference hosts an exciting all-day session on makerspaces led by Shawn Jordan (ASU), Alan Cheville (Bucknell University), and Casey Smith (UIUC). Hope to see you there.
FIRST OF ALL WHAT IS A MAKERSPACE?
“I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand.” Confucius.
A makerspace consists of two basic components:
- An accessible and appropriately equipped space for hands-on building of inventive objects and devices by students, whether or not there is a curricular connection; and
- A friendly social culture of ideation, collaboration, knowledge and material sharing, and cross-disciplinary collaboration.
Equipment and Supplies: In the ECE context, the first item is easier than it would be for other departments. As background, makerspaces have historically emphasized mechanical fabrication – for example, machining, and 3-D printing. Electronics have been a minor supportive player in the traditional makerspace. However, in the ECE context, it is easier, and perhaps more meaningful, to take a different route. An ECE makerspace can focus on low-power electronic devices, Arduino kits with processors and input/output cards (“shields”), embedded computing, wearable devices, kits for making small robots drones, and the Internet of Things (IoT). This makes sense – we live in the digital age, surrounded by electronics and computers. These devices pervade, and increasingly, drive our world, and represent a fertile playground for student inventors. From a pragmatic perspective, these devices are low-cost, and do not entail any electrical, mechanical, or thermal hazards to students (unless you allow soldering stations). The infrastructure is minimal - basically, a few power supplies, oscilloscopes, multimeters, wireless networking, and a cabinet for storing small parts.
Physical Space: From an administrative standpoint, allocating the physical space may be the biggest hurdle. Even this can be overcome with a little creativity, as I learned. First of all, campus libraries across the world are going through a period of digital transformation. They no longer need to allocate large rooms for holding paper copies of archival journals since they are able to obtain digital copies for their clients quite easily. Librarians are quite motivated to find fresh new uses for these newly freed-up spaces, and in fact, increasingly view the hosting of a makerspace as a natural activity for a library.
A makerspace provides an ideal opportunity for a library to re-invent itself in ways that provide compelling value to students in the digital age and supports the Libraries’ strategic planning goal to transform library spaces to reflect evolving modes of research, learning, and scholarship. Think of the makerspace as a collection of electronic parts, modules, instruments, and the related (electronic and print) books that describe them. The library already has a finely tuned capability to circulate books and kits to students, and provide deep information search and retrieval services. We can use these well-established capabilities for a maker space in a natural manner. It is easy to assemble a set of kits consisting of electronic and small mechanical parts, cables, books, and electronic learning materials that work together to help students build meaningful projects. The ingredients for such kits are readily available from several companies. Students are able to experiment with these kits in the library makerspace facility itself, or take them home and return them to the library after they are done. The makerspace provides a set of basic electronics test and measurement tools, for example, oscilloscopes, digital multi-testers, function generators, logic analyzers, controlled power supply, along with instruction manuals. In addition, the library possesses a collection of laptops that students can borrow for their projects.
As a concrete example, an Arduino-based kit containing processors and a selection of shields and associated accessories like wires and breadboards and instructions can be packaged into a box, catalogued, and lent out to students just like any book. Students can return the kit after their experimentation is done. Library staff (usually hourly-paid students) can be trained to check the kits and restore them before they are lent out to the next student. Libraries are also adept at pointing students to paper/digital books that describe the related topics. In fact, libraries routinely lend non-book kits for students in other colleges, notably architecture. Libraries are also increasingly the home of 3-D printing services alongside their other services like poster printing.
A library-based makerspace can lend kits to students regardless of their college or department. This has the beneficial effect of increasing the visibility of ECE subjects across campus. For example, we routinely see art majors collaborating with engineers, and education majors collaborating with computer science majors, with help from faculty and industry mentors from different colleges.
A library is usually a central facility on campus that serves the entire campus and is inherently interdisciplinary. It is open year-round and is accessible at late hours. All of the activities we describe can be carried out safely and comfortably in a library setting.
Manpower: Hiring a full-time technician to manage the makerspace is an expensive proposition for any department. Asking our existing lab technicians to take on this additional responsibility is also not practical. However, this problem is easily solved with student manpower. I found that members of our IEEE student chapter were eager to help. Some of the students are willing to volunteer time, and others need a modest hourly stipend. Incredibly, I learned that the students organized themselves by electing officers with specific responsibilities, just as they do with student organizations. They were quite proud of their titles, and even displayed them on their IEEE student chapter business cards. I found them to be surprisingly careful, and thoughtful about how to run the makerspace. Their requests for equipment and supplies have been modest, and most items are available online.
Networking: It is helpful to envision an ECE makerspace as part of a broader network across campus, and across a city. For example, it is not uncommon for a student to think up a project that requires some mechanical fabrication or a part that is not in the ECE makerspace. Having working relationships with regional makerspaces is a powerful way to share infrastructure, knowledge, and best practices to the benefit of students. Another idea is to encourage the makerspace to host a seminar series that attracts industry vendors and academic speakers.
More broadly, a human social network linking students, faculty, and industry mentors is an important ingredient for a practically effective makerspace. Such a network can foster an exuberant community spirit, a creative culture, and a knowledge-sharing social network that empowers students to research, tinker, invent, build, and experiment freely, while learning from each other. The emergence of low-cost and open source hardware, and usable open-source software allows communities of researchers to develop surprisingly sophisticated things by leveraging each other’s freely shared contributions (hardware designs, code, etc.). This type of open source culture is surprisingly powerful, and has yielded major societal benefits, for example, the Linux operating system that drives much of our digital world, and widely used languages like Python. Once dismissed as the pastime du jour for teenagers, social networks, ranging from LinkedIn to Facebook have had a surprising lasting impact on humanity. In hindsight, this is not surprising, since humans are innately social beings, and our social context has an overarching influence on our overall learning experience. Unlike administratively assembled research teams, social networks are organic self-assembled entities with entirely different engagement dynamics that are capable of fostering new ways of learning. It is natural and possible to harness the power of student social networks to establish a vibrant culture of research, innovation, and entrepreneurship.
Funding: The funding needed to initiate the makerspace need not be borne entirely by the ECE department, and can be raised from multiple sources across campus. In my case, I found that the College Deans, the Provost Office, and the Division of Research were all happy to chip in. The most expensive part of the endeavor was the furniture. I also found that many companies were happy to contribute parts and kits. Companies like ARM, Texas Instruments, Intel, Keysight, Rohde and Schwartz, Digilent, and National Instruments either donated items outright or provided significant discounts. Interestingly, most of the companies were interested in conducting workshops and seminars for our students, in collaboration with interested student interest groups and society chapters. Of course, just make sure that the facility prominently acknowledges the sponsors.
Have more questions? You may wish to attend the all-day session on makerspaces at the 2020 ECEDHA Annual Conference and ECExpo led by Shawn Jordan (ASU), Alan Cheville (Bucknell University), and Casey Smith (UIUC). Hope to see you there.
Badri Roysam, D.Sc., Fellow IEEE, Fellow AIMBE
Hugh Roy and Lillie Cranz Cullen University Professor
Chair, Electrical & Computer Engineering
University of Houston
Houston, Texas 77204-4005
Phone: 713-743-1773
Email: broysam@uh.edu