Wow.
That 3-letter word does not even begin to describe the awesomeness that is Hack42. Located in a decommissioned German military base in Arnhem, Hack42 is one of the largest, and as far as we’ve seen, the most awesome hackerspace yet.
First, a little backstory into the location. Built in 1942, several of these buildings were put up in Arnhem (The Netherlands), close to the German border. They were disguised as farm houses so they wouldn’t be bombed during the war. Today the entire complex has been turned into a group business area, with studios, the hackerspace, and other businesses residing in the buildings. NATO razor wire still surrounds the facility, and you must enter through a gate.
In fact, despite it being decommissioned — it’s been blurred out on Google Maps! How cool is that!
We only had a few hours here, but still managed to take nearly 200 photos. Check out the fully captioned gallery below — otherwise you’ll be scrolling for days. Click any of the images to enter the slideshow mode. Let us know if you like this method of showing tour pictures in the comments.
They told us we would recognize them at the airport. Yep!
Even the car had our sign on it!
This is it. Our excitement was starting to build.
Apparently, some of the members were excited too! We received a royal lab coat welcome from almost a dozen of the key members of Hack42!
A handy fuse chart.
The place is covered in retro phones — and they all work.
What’s a hackerspace without a pinball machine?
They have one of the largest selections of beverages available at any hackerspace — something like 80+ drink varieties if my memory serves me right…
And a vending machine!
This is the Retro Space! Almost all video game consoles live here — hooked up to age appropriate TV sets no less!
They also have a CRT video wall!
We could spend some serious time in this room with all the nostalgia.
If you recognize this, you’ll be impressed.
Old papers!
So many cool relics.
The boiler room
Ladies Room.
Gentlemen’s Room
Club-Mate.
The biological fridge… Guess what they are brewing.
Warnings everywhere!
Full size kitchen for whatever they need!
More Club-Mate.
And more.
Main electrical room — all the sealed boxes are new and added by Hack42.
And more Club-Mate.
They have label makers.
One of the lounges with a projector screen.
Say what you want, but computer design in the 80’s was great. Why buy a desk AND a computer? Why not both together!?
3D printer #1
3D printer #8
3D printer #27… Okay just kidding, but they do have a lot of 3D printers.
They also have a computer museum.
We’re not even going to try and explain all these relics. Enjoy
It’s an impressive collection.
Our favorite: Pickled Mouseballs.
Nixe tube love.
Slick design!
Ribbon punch code to typewriter
Relay computer
Another view
Impressive.
Magnetic tapes anyone?
Classic.
This image is made up of more data than this hard disk can hold.
Portable! … kind of
Oh Pac-man.
Absolutely incredible collection!
480V 3-phase to garden hose adapter.
The storage room
One shelf is junk (anyone can use) other one is labeled. Member’s lockers in the back.
Uniform hard hats.
The “dirty” room!
Nice variety of tools for larger projects.
Soldering lab
Oscilloscopes. All the oscilloscopes!
Work station
This computer works.
Processors anyone?
Working 480V 3-Phase to USB power adapter. I’ve always needed one of those…
The 50kg axe of doom!
In case of zombies.
Not sure anymore…
Door switch
Hours Hack42 has been open.
The photography room!
A museum of it’s own sort.
Complete with a collection of film to use!
How’s this for a mini spy camera!
Check out that lense!
The flash is bigger than the camera.
Classic spy cameras
SLR’s
Film editor
THE BUG ZAPPER! Powered by a microwave.
This microwave. It has a 500W halogen lamp inside.
Some storage
Home built CNC
The specs for it
The controller.
We’re excited already!
Oh boy oh boy oh boy!
Modified chinese laser engraver
Upgraded electronics and cooling system
Ammeter for the laser
More professional but older laser engraver
Key copying machines
They’ve used these to copy keys from images off the internet. Managed to copy Amsterdam’s key once!
The Cookie-Laser
It laser engraves cookies.
Not sure what this is, but there’s a second.
They would be fun to race.
One of the member’s projects is building a display… out of CD-rom drives. We can’t wait to see this one complete!
It even came with a green screen room!
One of the lesser used rooms.
A tidy server rack.
All red outlets have UPS backup.
This one.
Another empty room upstairs.
The awesome stairs
Some burnt documents from an unknown location…
They also have a computer lab sponsored by FOX IT
Not bad! They hold classes here.
An “axed” server”
Still works!
One of their banners used at public events
More storage
Beamers. (Projectors)
Lots of them. They have been used in some pretty cool giant projection hacks.
Even old ones!
Bubblewrap showers!
The dark room!
Film enlargers
The outdoor spiral staircase
Wood to last them a cold winter!
The entrance
A sink-barbecue!
This phone also works. Or it did.
Nice view of the building
NATO razor wire still surrounds the complex
Trees have grown through it!
Another view of the building.
They also have a few ponds!
Entrance to the lounge area
They love their warning labels.
Hacker beer!
Thanks everyone!
Thank you Hack42! We had an amazing time visiting your space — your hospitality was incredible!
We were very sorry to hear you’ll have to move out in a year, but we wish you the best of luck finding a new (bigger) space! It’s going to be hard to top this place though!
The “bike” a Sinclair C5 from the maker of the ZX-81 (or Timex-Sinclair 1000 in the US).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinclair_C5
WOW :)
That looks awesome!
Dave from the EEVBlog did a teardown on the Sinclair C5 Electric Car:
http://www.eevblog.com/2013/07/31/eevblog-501-sinclair-c5-electric-car-teardown-test-drive/
The video leads me to believe that it should have been named “Sinclair C5 Shitty Motorized Tricycle”
Sir Clive is famous for cutting corners. Ever looked at the schematic for a ZX81 or a Spectrum? Corners being cut at every opportunity and with every available cutting instrument starting from an Xacto knife to pneumatic jackhammers.
You end up with something even cheaper than was thought possible. And shitty.
That wasn’t just PacMan, that was PacMan on a NeXT. And that was an axed Cisco switch, not an axed server.
how it’s done: http://www.flickr.com/photos/dvanzuijlekom/9204936548/
bb..bu…packets aren’t switched :(
Let me pick a new frame of mind.
yeaaaahhhhhhhhhh
Holy crap, that place is awesome. I will definitely be visiting when I go to the Netherlands.
Welcome :-)
It was great to have you here! Glad you enjoyed it. :-D
On a sidenote; I didn’t even know we have a mechanical counter of the hours we were open. Must check it out next time!
The alternative text on all the images are a bit bothering, but looks awesome!!!
Very nice space indeed! And it’s good to see that the LART has actually been used and survived the OHM2013 festival. :)
What shelves are you using for computer museum?
It’s Ivar, from Ikea.
90% of my nursery/room from age 8 to 17 :D
Holy moly WOW, love the van wijko liquid cooling system on one of the lasers :-).
Hey James Hobson,
have you decoded the punchtape we gave you? it contains a message.
I haven’t had a chance yet! I’ll take a look this week =)
See , I told you to go there ! It’s freakin’ awesome =)
Yep!!!
I was so impressed with the “messy” pictures that I dug down to my keyboard to write this comment!
The “messy” pictures show what skill sets they have and what they like to do.
I was also impressed with the collection of retro gear, some of which I was able to recognise but most impressive was how much of it they had working.
Damn, I wouldn’t like to be the one that had to correct the deflections on that old TV array. Perhaps that’s why it wasn’t running?
I liked the collection of fuses. I used to work in a place that had bus bars that were about 14 Inches by 3/4 inch thick. They were low voltage (48 Volts) but the missing fuse in our fuse collection was the wrist watch.
I have worked in many workshops some of which I set up for myself. There was one thing that I didn’t like and that is the safety standards kept with things like non-enclosed din rails.
This issue aside it’s an excellent hacker space.
The non-enclosed DIN rails are strictly low-voltage stuff, the one enclosure which is open in one of the photos was because we were in the process of replacing a wonky GFI
James: “Click any of the images to enter the slideshow mode. Let us know if you like this method of showing tour pictures in the comments”
I am using FireFox 24.0 and the image canvass is covering the scroll bar so I can’t scroll down to the other parts of the page.
I view a lot of images that need to be a specific size like schematics, too small and can’t be read, too large and can’t see the overall design, so I have a browser plugin that allows me to zoom and pan. For some of the images I had to open them as image only in another browser window so I could see more detail with the plug in.
Some of the images would have benefited from some gamma correction.
Overall I like the format. It would be nice to have some zoom though.
Another thing that would be nice is to invite the owners of the hacker space to write some comments on them so we know what they are about.
I have added some comments and links to photos with details to some of the pictures in the slideshow. I hope they’ll be approved soon.
Thanks for the feedback! We’ll take it into consideration in future galleries. Hopefully the next blog platform we switch to has a better system too!
Wow… just… wow. We really need an awesomer space.
An STU-III crypto phone. How did they get a hold of that?
The origin of the phone and how it ended up in Hack42 is above-top-secret Sensitive Compartmented Information and you need keyword clearance. We can tell you over the phone if you have a STU-III.
All it needs now is some decent metal-working tools, like a big mill, a bandsaw, a cnc lathe….