The Fab Lab Documentation

This is the documentation for The Fab Lab, Texas A&M’s student-run makerspace. Every machine in the lab has a page here: what it makes, what it can do to you if you’re careless, and how to run it — written for someone who has never touched it before.

You are not expected to already know how any of this works. Nobody did the first time.

IMPORTANT

Read the Safety & Emergency Manual before you use anything in the lab. It covers the rules that apply everywhere — attire, PPE, and what to do when something goes wrong — and it applies to every user on every machine, whether or not staff are watching.

Start here

1. Read the Safety & Emergency Manual. Once, properly. It’s the lab-wide half of your safety information; the other half is on each machine’s own page.
2. Open your machine’s page from the sidebar and read the whole thing before you touch the machine. The hazards and the “how to stop it right now” instructions are at the top of the page, on purpose.
3. Check whether anything is required before you start. Most machines need no training and no checkout — read the page and go. The exception is the laser cutter, which needs TAMU laser safety certification before you operate it. If a machine’s page doesn’t say either way, ask a staff member rather than assuming.
4. Ask when you’re unsure. Not sure which machine suits your project, or something on a page doesn’t match what you see in front of you? Ask a staff member. The lab’s first rule is that stopping to ask always beats guessing at a machine.

What’s in here

• Which Machine? — a directory of every machine in the lab and what it’s good at. Start here if you know what you want to make but not what to make it on.
• Machine manuals — one page per machine, covering what it’s for, its hazards, how to set up a job, and how to run it. Safety lives in the manual itself, at the step where it matters, rather than in a separate document you’d have to remember to open.
• Activities — short guided projects that walk you through a machine end to end and leave you holding something you made. They’re practice, not exams: you don’t have to finish one to be allowed to use a machine. (Some are still filed under “Learning Assignments” in the sidebar — same thing, being renamed as each machine gets updated.)
• Contributing to These Docs — how to fix a page yourself when you find a step that’s wrong, unclear, or missing. It takes a browser and about five minutes, and you can’t break anything.

Finding your way around

• The sidebar groups pages by machine family. Where a machine has been rewritten to the current format, its manual sits first in the group; the rest are still being converted and may list an operations manual and a safety manual separately.
• The search bar at the top searches every page on the site.
• Ask your own AI hands your own AI assistant the entire documentation as one file, so it can answer questions grounded in these pages instead of guessing.

When the docs aren’t enough

Staff are on site during open hours and are happy to walk a machine through with you — first-timers especially. You can also reach the lab community on Discord.

If a page is wrong, out of date, or silent about something that bit you, tell staff or fix it yourself. These docs are only as good as the people using them make them.