Guatemala School Project

Recently, Framingham MakerSpace members provided tools and labor to establish a woodworking shop and taught Scratch computer programming at Bendición de Dios, a non-profit private school in Alotenango, Guatemala.  While there, we visited some homes and were appalled at the living conditions.  Rusted corrugated steel walls and roof, dirt floors, chickens and dogs roaming throughout, a single 6′ x 8′ bedroom for the entire family, an outdoor “kitchen” with a wood fired stove creating smoke that made breathing extraordinarily difficult. 

Asociación Bendición de Dios has upgraded more than a hundred of these hovels with a concrete bedroom and bathroom over the years, but the process has been necessarily piecemeal.  The founder/director, Julio Garcia Gonzalez, explained to us that land ownership was necessary in order to build a house, and few of their families have access to the required money.  We asked what it would take to buy a piece of land for many houses to be built from scratch.  He said he could get land for 15-20 homes for about $30,000, and if he could get the land, he has donors and other means to build the houses.  An anonymous donor committed to providing the initial payment of $10,000 to establish the fund.  We still need to raise $20,000 within six months.

MassDevelopment Grant

FRAMINGHAM MAKERSPACE RECEIVES $99,781 MASSDEVELOPMENT GRANT

Framingham MakerSpace is excited to announce its second grant from MassDevelopment, the state’s finance and development agency.  We would like to thank MassDevelopment for their continued generous support which will enable further expansion to 7000 square feet.  In 2017 they gave the Space $101,000 in matching funds to double our physical space and buy new equipment.

Framingham MakerSpace is an all volunteer, member run non-profit located in the Saxonville Mills.  We are a community of and workspace for creative people in the Metrowest area.  Our mission is to explore art and technology in a welcoming, respectful space while also being a resource to the community at large.

The Space includes wood, metal and welding shops; 3D printing stations; embroidery, fabric and leather sewing machines; an electronics lab and more. We also offer private studios which currently host a quilter, a soap maker and an electronic musical instrument creator.  The grant will allow us to upgrade our existing wood shop machinery with a panel sander, wood lathe and band saw and to create a new, separate, clean space for an expanded fiber arts lab. 

The expansion space will include:

  • a Kniterate, a revolutionary computer controlled knitting machine 
  • a long arm quilting machine for sewing large fabric items
  • CAD/CAM workstations with Solidworks donated software.
  • a dedicated space for our existing sewing machines
  • four studios 

Framingham Makerspace TwitterPoof

Framingham Makerspace live TwitterPoof project on 7 May 2020 as part of ArtWeekAtHome Massachusetts.

The project consists of a propane “poofer” actuated by tweeting a number from 0-9 to a particular hashtag.  The number indicates how long the “poof” will be.  The poofer was on a Facebook live video feed so people could watch their poof happen.

Hardware was an ESP-8266 WiFi development board connected to the internet and attached to a solid state relay which actuated the solenoid valve on the poofer.