From the course: Design Foundations: Prototyping and Manufacturing

Touring the labs at a prototyping facility

From the course: Design Foundations: Prototyping and Manufacturing

Start my 1-month free trial

Touring the labs at a prototyping facility

- We're at L-A-C-I, I'm here with Kay and she's going to show us some of the other labs. Earlier we were in the machine shop and she's going to show us some of the other labs that L-A-C-I has to offer. Thank you, Kay for joining us. There is one thing I did when I kind of clear up and didn't' understand. I notice there's two types of customers you have. You have portfolio customers and then you have a subscription model for the public. Is it the same throughout or how do you differentiate that? - We do have two models. First, L-A-C-I stands for Los Angeles Cleantech Incubator. The companies that were foil companies are incubated within the incubator are called our portfolio companies. Then, we have advanced prototyping center where we accept members and you don't have to be in the cleantech community, you can come in as a start-up, as a entrepreneur with any type of hardware product. - They get access to the whole facility or just parts of it? - Just parts of it. We actually have three levels of membership. We have a basic level, the idea behind basic level is that you come in with a concept and you're able to build it out in a CAD design and then you can 3D print it. It also gives you access to our cut and sew lab. Sewing and electronics. Then we have the intermediate level. This is where you start caring about your materials. Are you going to use a special plastic or are you going to use metal? Then you have access to our machine shop equipment. The saws, the drill press, the mill. Then when you start talking about precision, then you do advanced. Then you have access to your two CNCs and also your water jet. - That's fantastic. I'm really excited to see the labs. What do you want to show us next? I'll start off, we're actually in our training center. A lot of our entrepreneurs come in and they really don't know how to use the tools. That's why we have a training center. We have classrooms here, so we could actually have lectures. But we also have training in the facility, on the machines themselves. The first one I'm going to show you is our digital prototyping lab. It's where we actually design our CADs. - Great, let's go. What do we have here? - This is our digital prototyping lab. This is where we have all of our computers. We have lots of software. We have SolidWorks, we have Autodesk, the full Autodesk suite, we also have simulation software like ProSim and An-cess. The idea is you can come here, build out your prototypes digitally, and go to our other lab and actually print it. You could print it or then you can go to the machine shop and machine it. We have a lot of prototypes here, all printed in the advanced prototyping center. - That's cool. A little bit of everything. - Little bit of everything. - I love it. Where are we going to go next? - After this, we're going to actually go to our 3D printers. - Let's do it. - This is the print shop. - Cool, what do you have in there? - On the right we have a normal Xerox printer and we have our rolling large format printer for posters, and we have our two 3D printers, a dual press, and then all the way around the other side we have our cut and sew lab. We have an industrial sewing machine and an industrial over lock machine. - Wow, that's a lot of stuff in one rom. I couldn't help but notice you have a welding and cutting shop over there. What do you have going on over there? - Just like the title, it's welding and finishing. In there we have sanders, grinders, finishers and polishers. In addition, we have a TIG welder and a MIG welder. - That sounds fun. - Lots of fun. - I notice down there you have two other labs. What do those do? - The lab on the left is a wet lab. It's a biochemistry lab. In there we have pipettes, centrifuges, fume hoods, autoclaves, thermocyclers and a spectrometer. - What the other one on the other side? - The one on the right is an electronics lab. We have a slew of scopes, function generators, voltage generators, we also have labview on computers available for our members. We also have the corresponding hardware for them to build out there prototypes with. - Wow, that's amazing. You have everything we'd ever need to make anything we ever wanted to do. What a great place! Kay, thanks for spending time with us. Big shout to L-A-C-I. Thank you so much and a great place to be.

Contents