If you’re looking for a hackerspace while on your travels, there is more than one website which shows them on a map, and even tells you whether or not they are open. This last feature is powered by SpaceAPI, a standard way for hackerspaces to publish information about themselves, including whether or not they are closed.
The lights are a set of addressable LEDs and the brain is an ESP32, making this an accessible project for most hackers with the time to assemble it. Unsurprisingly then it’s not the first such map we’ve seen, though it’s considerably more ambitious than the last one. Meanwhile if your hackerspace doesn’t have SpaceAPI yet or you’re simply curious about the whole thing, we took a look at it back in 2021.
If I could name one thing which has been the most transformative for our community over the last couple of decades, it would have to be the proliferation of hackerspaces. Ostensibly a place which provides access to tools and machinery, these organisations have become so much more. They bring together like-minded people, and from such a meeting of minds have come a plethora of high quality projects, events, and other good things.
Just What Is A Hackerspace?
A Hacky Racer takes shape in the MK Makerspace workshop
Hackerspaces loosely come in many forms, from co-working spaces or libraries who have invested in a 3D printer and imagine themselves to be a hackerspace, through to anarchist collectives in abandoned warehouses who support their city’s alternative communities with technology. For me, hackerspaces must be community organisations rather than for-profit ones, so for the purposes of this article I’m not referring to closely-allied commercial spaces such as FabLabs.
So a good hackerspace for me is a group of tech enthusiasts who’ve come together, probably formed a non-profit association, and rented a dilapidated basement or industrial unit somewhere. The tools and machines inside aren’t shiny and new but they mostly work, and round that fridge stocked with Club-Mate you’ll find a community of friends, people who don’t think it’s odd to always want to know how things work. In a good hackerspace you’ll have found your place, and you can be much more than you would have been alone.
I visit plenty of hackerspaces across Europe as I wander the continent on an Interrail pass. I’m a member of three of them at the moment, though my main home in the UK is at Milton Keynes Makerspace. I’ve sat on recycled sofas drinking caffeinated beverages in more cities than I can count, and along the way I’ve seen close-up the many different ways a hackerspace can be run. I’ve seen spaces falling apart at the seams, I’ve seen ones a little too regimented for my taste, and others with too much of an emphasis on radical ideology, but mostly I’ve seen spaces that get it about right and I feel at home in. So perhaps it’s time to sit down and talk about what I think makes a good hackerspace. What is my space?
It’s always good to welcome a new hackerspace to the fold, and thus we’re pleased to hear about the upcoming opening of Hackerspace Drenthe, on the north-eastern edge of the Netherlands. Starting a new space during a global pandemic is something of a feat. As part of their opening something is required to demonstrate a robot for the curious public, and what could be more accessible than a robot arm playing tic-tac-toe!
It would be correct to say that a robot moving blocks with precision is not necessarily a ground-breaking achievement, but in its purpose of providing eye-candy for a hackerspace opening while also serving as an experiment for some of the students from the school adjacent to the space it is a success. The interface is a pleasingly retro War Games style terminal, and the software is written in Python. For the curious all can be found on a GitHub repository, and should you be in that region of Europe you can find Hackerspace Drenthe in the Netherlands border town of Coevorden and attend their opening on the 2nd of April.
[Vaibhav Chhabra], the co-founder of Maker’s Asylum hackerspace in Mumbai, India, starts his Remoticon talk by telling a short story about how the hackerspace rose to its current status. Born out of frustration with a collapsed office ceiling, having gone through eight years of moving and reorganizations, it accumulated a loyal participant base – not unusual with hackerspaces that are managed well. This setting provided a perfect breeding ground for the M19 effort when COVID-19 reached India, mixing “what can we do” and “what should we do” inquiries into a perfect storm and starting the 49 day work session that swiftly outgrew the hackerspace, both physically and organizationally.
When the very first two weeks of the Infinite Two Week Quarantine Of 2020 were announced in India, a group of people decided to wait it out at the hackerspace instead of confining themselves to their homes. As various aspects of our society started crashing after the direct impact of COVID-19, news came through – that of a personal protective equipment shortage, especially important for frontline workers. Countries generally were not prepared when it came to PPE, and India was no different. Thus, folks in Maker’s Asylum stepped up, finding themselves in a perfect position to manufacture protective equipment when nobody else was prepared to help.
Here at Hackaday we’re privileged to be part of a global community of hackers, makers, technology enthusiasts and creative people whose collective works make our daily news feeds such a fascinating read. We encounter you all directly in the physical world rather the virtual one at the many events across the community, or at the various hackerspaces we visit on our travels. But how can we keep track of the world of hackerspaces when there are so many? Maybe SpaceAPI might hold the answer.
Every hacker gathering needs as many pixels as its hackers can get their hands on. Get a group together and you’ll be blinded by the amount of light on display. (We propose “a blinkenlights” as the taxonomic name for such a group.) At a large gathering, what better way to show of your elite hacking ability than a “competition” over who can paint an LED canvas the best? Enter Pixelflut, the multiplayer drawing canvas.
Pixelflut has been around since at least 2012, but it came to this author’s attention after editor [Jenny List] noted it in her review of SHA 2017. What was that beguiling display behind the central bar? It turns out it was a display driven by a server running Pixelflut. A Pixelflut server exposes a display which can be drawn on by sending commands over the network in an extremely simple protocol. There are just four ASCII commands supported by every server — essentially get pixel, set pixel, screen size, and help — so implementing either a client or server is a snap, and that’s sort of the point.
While the original implementations appear to be written by [defnull] at the link at the top, in some sense Pixelflut is more of a common protocol than an implementation. In a sense, one “plays” one of a variety of Pixelflut minigames. When there is a display in a shared space the game is who can control the most area by drawing the fastest, either by being clever or by consuming as much bandwidth as possible.
Then there is the game of who can write the fastest more battle-hardened server possible in order to handle all that traffic without collapsing. To give a sense of scale, one installation at 36c3 reported that a truly gargantuan 0.5 petabytes of data were spent at a peak of rate of more than 30 gigabits/second, just painting pixels! That’s bound to bog down all but the most lithe server implementation. (“Flut” is “flood” in German.)
While hacker camps may be on pause for the foreseeable future, writing a performant Pixelflut client or server seems like an excellent way to sharpen one’s skills while we wait for their return. For a video example check out the embed after the break. Have a favorite implementation? Tell us about it in the comments!
The exotic cruise destination of Hoek van Holland Haven.
A couple of months ago I wrote a piece about the evolution of hackerspaces, and mentioned that I’d be attending a party for a hackerspace birthday. As I write this that party was last weekend, and it was celebrating both the birthday of RevSpace in the Hague, and the tenth anniversary of hackerspaces in the Netherlands. After a relaxing ocean cruise across the North Sea and a speedy train ride I found myself in RevSpace with a bottle of Club-Mate in my hand, hanging out with not only the locals but a selection of others from all across northwestern Europe and beyond. RevSpace is an exceptionally well-organised hackerspace with a large membership, so there was plenty to talk about and a lot of interesting projects to look at.
There was a short programme of talks in Dutch, covering hackerspace history and interviewing a panel of hackerspace founders. I am told that these may make their way online with an English translation in due course, and should be worth looking out for. Then there was an epic-scale barbecue, an old-school rave with Gameboy chiptunes and analogue synth EDM among other delights, and the chance for an evening’s socialising with the rest of the attendees. Continue reading “Dutch Hackerspaces At Ten Years Old: Celebrating A Community With A Special Map”→
