Hello! If you've landed here, it's likely that you're getting ready to design and build some equipment. This guide is part of the [MIT Center for Bits and Atoms'](http://cba.mit.edu/) ongoing machines-making-machines effort, wherein we seek to turn the universe into a deeply recursive heirarchy of robots building one another.
Just kidding, it's our best practices for how we believe automation equipment should be done.
Most machines are monolithic and static: they live their lives for one process, and are hard to modify for anything else. They tend to miss a lot of learning opportunities (i.e. they feed forward what might be fed back). They each communicate to the outside world in different ways, they hide their secrets, etc, etc.
Machines described here are *parametric configurations of object-oriented hardware* that can be assembled into *instances* of equipment, whose constitutent parts are free for future addition and modification. Machine controllers are *networked collections of input and output devices* that contain bare minimum state - high level planning and interface takes place within *virtual machine controllers* that are similarly easy to assemble, configure, and tune.
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# BOM
## Hardware ! per Axis ! For HDPE !
This is a general BOM. For How to Make Almost Anything coordinators, CBA will coordinate ordering material. Section Heads should order HDPE sheets (below, in Material section) to be delivered to their labs, and if shopbots are not 4x8' size, change for 4x4' sheets. You should also make sure you have the right tools in your shops; I've included a list of useful or rare items here as well.
Assuming you're controlling this thing with [automatakit](https://gitlab.cba.mit.edu/jakeread/automatakit), these are the parts you'll want when you're wiring it up.
