Hi Asmbly Makerspace!
The Intro
I’m Andrew (LlamBit); I recently joined at the suggestion of a colleague and am very excited about the space already.
The Question
I wanted to get a pulse on a couple of areas that I might be able to offer some instruction on, depending on interest.
The Pitch
Generative AI and LLMs:
Do you want to prevent FAANG (and Tesla, and OpenAI, and on and on…) from doing to Generative AI what they did to the Internet? Do you want to wrangle your own, locally hosted LLMs for the greater good? Do you want to get Python savvy? Then I have a proposition for you…
The Multiverse School, based in San Francisco, is an online educational cooperative looking to put generative AI in the hands of the people. Hosted by Liz Howard and a bunch of other tech smarty pants, The Multiverse School empowers the maker, the entrepreneur, and the social activist to leverage this rapidly developing technology for people and not for profit (thanks KOOP). I recently stumbled across this GitHub (shoot me a message and I’d be happy to provide the link, it’s called HuggingFace - Lerobot) while attending the Prompt Engineering course with TMS. The project enables you to 3d print, assemble, and leverage LLM APIs to train your very own robot arm. Unfortunately, I do not have access to a 3D printer, nor know anyone that does.
Enter: Asmbly Makerspace. I signed up originally to get printer access, and had the thought that there may be more nerds out there that want to learn this stuff. I’m unsure if any folks in Austin are attending this course (or the School at large), but I thought it would be really great if there were. Attend classes, meet in person, build stuff, and generally nerd out.
Industrial Automation
By trade, I am an industrial automation and controls engineer. I’ve worked on a number of applications (from heavy industrial manufacturing, AI-based robotics, flexible circuit manufacture and more) and would love to start giving back to the community. I wanted to gauge if folks in this area wanted to learn the industrial side of microcontrollers (less Arduino-y, more Allen Bradley-y) and develop some industry-hardened skills. Which provides an excellent segue into…
The Robots
I got started in the industrial automation space with KUKA Robotics as a corporate trainer, and have been wanting to teach people interested in the space how accessible these tools really are. Maybe with the right kind of networking, Asmbly could even get its very own robot… Wouldn’t that be cool??
The latter two would require some hardware that I don’t currently possess (beyond a couple PLCs I could provide to the cause), but first I wanted to see if anyone would actually be interested in any of these topics.
So drop me a line!