Welcome to Void Warranties in Antwerp, Belgium!
I think this quote from their site really sums up the space nicely:
Whatever code we hack, be it programming language, poetic language, art, math or music, curves or colourings, nuons or electrons we create the possibility of new things entering our world.
That’s a cool way of putting it!
Immediately inside is a patch panel key rack — we first saw it done like this at ACKspace, and it’s definitely a nice way to organize keys! Now what if they added some AI to the rack…
They also have a nice food and beverage tracking system, first one we’ve seen with a touch screen! But wait, isn’t that a CRT monitor? Hacked. The happy little guy is the pull cord to open the cash drawer. Again, its an honor system, but it works.
When we arrived, one of the members was working on his Nixie tube system – pretty cool setup!
This is the main lounge, kitchen, and hackspace. Void Warranties is in the basement of a youth home in a nice quiet neighborhood. If our memory serves us right, the house is well over 100 years old.
Past the main area is one of the tool closets, fully equipped with pretty much any hand tool you could want…
This is looking back towards the main lounge space — notice the Club-Mates on the left?
The next series of rooms are dedicated to more electronics hacking. The building itself has a really nice old basement feel to it, nice and clean though!
The other side has 3D printers, more work benches, and some structural supports keeping the ceiling in place…
These are the garden gnomes. Just this summer Void Warranties participated at OHM2013 a Dutch hacker camp that brought out over 3000 hackers to a field in the middle of no where for nearly a week of hacking! Anyway, they needed something to decorate their camp area with — they chose garden gnomes. Add a few red LEDs and you have a creepy guardian to put outside in the dark. The cool thing was, other hackerspaces borrowed the gnomes and some of them even hacked them to add motion. Most of the gnomes made it back to Void Warranties — some with extra creepy functionality!
Here is their small server room in the back of the hackerspace…
And a small administration and testing bench opposite the servers.
They have a big box of ancient tech magazines that were fascinated to look through! The shelf seen behind is the last place a project sees — to conserve space and not become a dump, items end up on this shelf and must either be claimed by members, or thrown out. They are hoping to empty it completely so they can put a new work bench in, but you know how stuff piles up.
Closer to the main entrance is one of the member storage areas — they use big black boxes to keep things packed up nicely.
While we were at Void Warranties, [Deepak] stopped by with his 3Doodler and we all had a go — it’s a lot harder than it looks.
Finally we have an excellent piece of artwork framed above the stairs — they added the space invaders in the same color tones as the original portrait and it looks awesome.
All in all, Void Warranties is a really cool space with a nice home feel to it. If you’re ever in the area, definitely check it out and meet some amazing people!
Reminds me a bit of Labitat in Copenhagen Denmark. :)
“…and some structural supports keeping the ceiling in place…”
Eh? Cool looking space, but this statement isn’t very comforting. (c:
We had some construction engineers check it out, and they signed off on it. It should be fine now.
I must say, Belgian hackerspaces have the best names. First 0x20 (“whitespace”) and now “void warranties”. Creative naming is creative!
Cool space, I should visit you folks some time! All the best from Hack42.
The storage boxes seem to come from IKEA called SAMLA in Germany …
I really like them – available in different sizes and in black or transparent. Before I used random cardboard boxes – these boxes look much cleaner! At 1-2 Euros / box the cheapest solution I could find so far.