Last week, during the 8th, 9th and 10th of September, the Refitting Machine project consortium organised online training sessions for the future trainers who will implement all the training material of the project. The participants also had the opportunity to put their skills and knowledge into practice in order to replicate and improve the results of the project.
The main objective of this event was to prepare trainers to contribute to improving the knowledge for the staff belonging to the organisations. In addition to theoretical sessions, the working methodology consisted of working in small teams, visualising good practices in the field of Arduino, exchanging and brainstorming ideas and putting theoretical knowledge into practice through interactive activities with design programmes.
In the first sessions, participants had the opportunity to test the project’s gamified platform for the first time and see the exclusive content that has been in development for the last year. Some of the topics covered in the first session were the design and engineering of the parts needed for machinery revamping and 3D printing. Participants were able to see images of the latest innovations and discovered that the current uses of 3D printers go far beyond the imagination: pizzas, chairs, articulated arms or outdated parts that nobody can make anymore. Isn’t it fascinating?
In addition, the second day was very interesting and was highly welcomed by the participants in their final evaluation comments. The day’s sessions dealt with the economic, social and environmental benefits of machinery revamping and looked at practical applications. Can you think of any other reasons that could lead and motivate someone to go into this sector besides the economic benefits? Modernisation and accelerated optimisation could be one of these benefits. Innovation and development can benefit from open processes because there are more actors working in these areas and knowledge management is greater. This, among other things, contributes to development and continuous improvement.
In fact, one of the partners of Refitting Machine, Doru Cantemir an Arduino expert, mentioned that “open source is a very good way to accelerate the improvement of knowledge applied to a product” because it enables many minds and profiles of skilled people to easily work towards the same goal of open innovation. In terms of environmental consequences and benefits, participants were impressed with how machinery revamping can help sustainable development through better use of resources, responsible water management or applied uses of energy sources. If previously mentioned, 3D printing can be used to manufacture parts that are difficult to find in today’s large production lines, imagine the benefits in the fight against planned obsolescence!One of the main conclusions drawn by the participants is that, despite being very technical and complex content, the materials that have been created are very attractive, have been well structured in detail and are understandable and easy to handle for the target audience. It was, without any doubt, a very valuable experience that will serve to make the most of all the work done by the Refitting Machine partne