FabDeck Simplifies Hardware Tinkering at Conventions

While it may not compare to hobbies like woodworking or metalworking, electronics work does still require quite a bit of space. Most of us dedicate significant portions of our homes to benches and shelving, because doing so is necessary if you want to get anything done. But what about while traveling? If you’re attending a convention that incorporates tasks likes soldering, it isn’t like you can haul your entire workbench with you. Alan Han’s solution is FabDeck, which is a portable and self-contained toolkit perfect for hacking and tinkering at conventions.

Every year, Han goes to the Hackaday Supercon in Pasadena, California. That is a convention dedicated to hardware hacking and it always has multiple workshops that involve hands-on work. Attendees often spend a good chunk of the conference with soldering irons in their hands, which is a lot of the fun. But staying organized is difficult when you’re sitting at a big table with 20 other people and that’s where Han’s FabDeck shines. Partially inspired by cyberdecks, it combines storage for parts and tools, an area for doing work like soldering, some common lab equipment, and even onboard hardware for testing.

While constructing FabDeck, Han seems to have been on a quest to use as many different fabrication methods as possible. There are parts made with FFF (fused filament fabrication) 3D printing, SLA (Stereolithography) 3D printing, CO2 laser cutting, fiber laser cutting, CNC milling, and even waterjet cutting for steel. Han took advantage of all of those to create the folding box structure, which has several compartments.

Critically, FabDeck also contains some testing equipment. There is room for a few devices, including things like portable oscilloscopes and logical analyzers. Han also added his own testing hardware consisting of a Seeed Studio XIAO RP2040 development board, a 2×4 keypad, and a small SSD1306-based OLED screen. Those give Han the ability to program functionality specific to the project at hand. When not in use, the whole thing folds up into a small package that Han can slip into a backpack.

Of course, Han designed this to suit his own requirements and it might not be ideal for others. But it is versatile enough that people can adapt it to their needs — if they happen to have access to all of the fabrication tools that Han used.