“THE car you see on the picture was not drawn by a human! No! It was drawn using a pen by a robotic machine I made,” says Thapelo Moeti, a National University of Lesotho (NUL) BEng in Electronics student.

He calls his machine a CNC Plotter.

“Now that this machine can draw,” Moeti says, “I am already developing a bigger machine, 10 times faster than humans, that will have the capacity to cut clothes, steel, and wood based on computer drawings.”

Goodbye saws and scissors! Welcome the 4th Industrial Revolution!

Although he is a BEng in Electronics student, he has a diverse background. Let him surprise you a little bit, “I also have a background in clothing, woodwork, steelwork, and structural design.”

According to recent research findings, the most innovative souls among us are, usually, the often insulted “Jacks of all Trades.” It turns out they are the “Masters of All” when it comes to innovation.

“Fortunately, I have a very skilful and talented brother, Teboho Moeti, who is an artisan. So I have learned a lot about steelworks from him.”

Moeti says he takes woodwork as a hobby, adding he has also taken a short course in clothe-making.

As he navigated these several trades, he saw serious problems that made him decide to tackle them using his Electronics Engineering skills.

For instance, cutting such things as small nice square holes on a metal sheet is a pain. Some people even use hand-held tools and the results are always less than desired.

The same thing can be said about woodwork. Working wood is usually a manual process in Lesotho. The result is that when you see a really good piece of work, you know there is a skilled woodworker behind it. The problem is, skilled woodworkers, die, so do their skills.

“Hee motho o ne a ja lepolanka eo!”

Woodworkers may die but if their designs remain, Moeti’s CNC Plotter will live to reproduce their work.

Now comes clothes-making.

Well, Moeti knows a thing or two about clothing as well.

While he was attending a clothing school, he realised something that took him by surprise. A lot of work in clothing was spent on pattern drafting and cutting. In fact, most students spent hours and some a few days to properly draft and cut a single design.

“This drafting and cutting was a mess,” Moeti recalls. “I then imagined how hard it might be, for someone already in the market, having to bring up large quantities of clothing designs in a limited time frame.”

All these experiences got him thinking.

What if the idea of cutting is not as difficult as it is at the moment?

That thought put him on a journey to do something that almost no one believed he was capable of doing. He was going to design and build a CNC machine. It would just be told how to cut by a computer and it would do the rest of the job.

It was an unbelievable idea!