the stage is yours. Thank you. I'm here for a quite short time. My head may not have
switched completely to English, so if that happens, maybe someone of the audience can
help me out. So, my talk is about FedExcess, and in the last time I held a talk, after
the talk, people said to me, you need to tell more about FedExcess, so that's what I'll
be doing, and first thing first, wake up, some color. What is FedExcess? For FedExcess,
I'm a manager of a workshop in Berlin, in a university, and some people call me the
product owner or the father of FedExcess, it's not really the case, I'll tell later why.
Switching machines in a workshop sounds easy. You'll switch one bit on, the machine is on,
switch one bit off, reset the bit, and the machine is off, but it's not that easy. First
thing, why do we need to switch off machines? In a workshop, you have two kinds of machines,
the one who tear off parts of the body of the users, if they do not know how to use
the machine, and the not so interesting ones who are not hurting people, and there are
two kinds of people in your workshop. There are the ones who know how to clean up their
place after they leave the workshop, and there are the ones who leave the mess to you, and
if you need to get along with this combination of people and machines, you need to get some
structure in the workshop, and I'm the only one working aesthetically in that workshop,
so I'm not enough people to get structure, and 30 people are using the workshop, so I
need support, and I need the wonder of digitalization. So, I do not like good luck, have fun, that's
why we began to work in FabExSys in 2019. I won't read all of that. There are requirements
which are coming into software if you want to switch on machines and off machines. That's
why it wasn't that easy, and next thing is we saw a lot of projects who began working
in that area, but when we realized there are a lot of these projects, I think most of you
know that XKCD, we tried to avoid that by becoming modular and getting more than works
for me, technology readiness level nine, maybe some of you know what that means, and that's
one more thing we wanted to reach, we wanted to reach the technical ground for federation
in the future, not right now, we'll get there in September this year maybe. That's what
it is FabExSys, in the last talk they said talk about what is FabExSys, that's it. We
have machines, we have users, and the machines can be switched on by the user, not by the
manager of the FabLab, but the manager of the FabLab has the user database and the machine
database and can say who was allowed to switch on which machine, and in the next step here
they can see which one of the users switched on which machine in the last time, and that's
it, we do not follow our users or make surveillance of what they are doing, we want to know who
left that mess, and that's it. There are some perspectives which need to be
implemented in such software, first is the workspace manager, I won't read because time
is running, for the workspace manager the software we are implementing should fit into
his workspace, and not press his workspace into our software, that's one of the most
important things for us, and for the user it should be easy to use, and that's it fast
and clear as, English words missing, so that's how we approached to berücksichtigen, well
you know what I mean, sorry, how to consider the wishes of the FabLab manager, yes of me,
I think it's too much text for nine minutes, are there some questions for that slide, I
think the most important is the last one, attaching new machines is easy for Python and
bash, because we are not able to implement as a project in each and every workshop, so
we need to enable the workshop users and managers to work as a community project, in the middle
there is GUI would be great, if there is anyone in the audience who is willing and able to
build a GUI which takes machines and throws out all files, feel free, that's some things
in the back end that are important, it's written in Rust, so the language and the compiler
guarantees some sort of stability, and in between the back end and Rust there is the
captain proto API which enables the guys who are not working in the back end and in the
core of the server to get a stable API where they can throw against with Python or I think
easier languages which are, there are more people who can write code in these languages,
we have two to three core developers who are having an eye on a very stable API, and this
is also important because the FabLab manager doesn't want to take care of software updates,
they should happen without any effort. Accessibility is for the users, the app which we have showed
in the slides before should be really accessible for the users because if you have a workshop
it doesn't help you if a third of your users say sorry I can't access the app, I can't
use your workshop machines. The last line there is one more step to accessibility because
not everyone has a mobile phone and not everyone wants to take his mobile phone and get the
app and when he just wants to use a machine so NFC is a thing in that case. Well, supported
hardware devices out of the box, this is what the core developers have been working at right
now and the extensibility, it are not only the core developers developing modules for
FabXS, that's where the community comes in. I think the list on the top will grow with
time but the developers have an eye on stability so it's not growing that fast as the community
wishes so it gives community unrights, I don't know the English words, sorry. That's where
we are right now, we are in the beta and I think the beginning of March there is a deadline
for 1.0 which will be the first release which can be used by a workspace without having
software engineering guys in the background. These are targets which will be addressed
in 1.0, open ID connectors which by a lot of guys in the community as most of the German
work spaces in the Verbunte of Newerkstetten switched to key cloak in the background. I'm
good in time. The federation, I already talked to the people of Matrix and I think there
will be some interfaces between FabXS and Matrix to realize federation. Coming to the
end of the presentation, we are a team, the most important are the community members.
We have 64 number growing, we have a community manager, thank you. We have four people in
Berlin, the first is the core developers than me, sorry, and one guy in Boholt who is doing
a really good job in alpha testing and documentation because if developers create documentation,
it's better when there is someone outside of the developer circle. Nobody in the team
does anything with blockchain, sorry. These are organizations who supported us and are
carrying the project and yes, the lower even spent some amounts of money, thank you. These
are the URLs you'll need to get involved and give it a try. I think we have three minutes.
Are there questions? Yeah.
Did you guys think about interoperating with already existing authorization schemes like
free IDA for example? Yes, of course. Right now they are implementing
a summer and there will be many, many more. It's part of the modular design of FabXS
because we do not want to press you into what we are using. If there are authentication
systems which are in the market, we will implement them one after the other, but if you are
interested, feel free to talk to us. Very good question. Thank you. You are not able
to solve social problems with technology. Unplugging plugs which switch on and off the
machines, I think for me it's a part of a social problem, but there is a technical aspect.
Of course the Shelleys say, I am here, I am here, I am here. They have heartbeat and
if that heartbeat is away, so the core of FabXS realizes all that Shelleys is unplugged.
It's a technical and social problem. Inside the kernel, yes, inside the backend, yes.
It throws out in the normal configuration into the memory, so it's gone in the time
it's thrown out a log file. If you need to follow what your users are doing, then you
may take that log file and configure FabXS, give me the log file and push that log file
to ERP systems or whatever you want, but that's not in the scope of FabXS. Any more questions?
One and a half minutes or? Yeah. Do you have the possibility to also get a signal from
the machine to say it's working or it's voicing? Next good question. Thank you. It depends.
Sorry. Sometimes if the information from the machine is important for FabXS to switch
on and off machines, then we're taking the data into FabXS. Normally when there are data
from the machine which are not needed to switch on and off machines, because the core point
of FabXS is switching on and off machines and that's what we're doing good. If there
are any other data in our package, there is a MQTT server and it may be far-bited by the
MQTT server and FabXS does not need that data. 37 seconds. This is something you can
do with the log file which is coming out of FabXS and your own software. You writing
or maybe a dual or any other ERP system which needs to be filled with structured data from
that log file. No. We are not an ERP system. We are not gaining money from people using
our machines. That's in the scope of different software packages.