Hackerspaces

275 Articles

Adventures In Hackerspacing: Freeside Atlanta, Part I

October 14, 2013 by 12 Comments

advInHSLayout00

The internet is littered with how-to step-by-step guides for starting and maintaining your very own hackerspace. Don’t worry, we’re not adding to the pile. If you want a checklist, Eric Michaud’s got that covered. Adventures in Hackerspacing is different: epic re-tellings, anecdotes, and behind-the-scene stories that fill in the gaps for those fragmented, laundry-list requirements. Here you’ll find nightmare scenarios come to life, clever legal loopholes to save the day, and overhauls that helped a space “click”. Adventures in Hackerspacing has plenty of advice to share, but like every good adventure, it’s about the journey, not the destination.

First up, Freeside Atlanta Part I: Philosophy and Culture.

I sat down with directors [Alan Fay] and [Steven Sutton] on a quiet summer evening to discuss how the space found redemption and success with its philosophy of promoting diversity and embracing humility.

Continue reading “Adventures In Hackerspacing: Freeside Atlanta, Part I” →

GE Garage And Chicago Ideas Week

October 12, 2013 by 4 Comments

IMG_0443

I’ve been on vacation and managed to get a day to play at the GE Garage mobile fab lab currently setup in downtown Chicago. GE has partnered with Chicago Ideas Week to bring the future of fabrication technologies to a space where the community can walk in off the street and work with some amazing hardware like CNC mills, laser cutters and 3D printers. The group is also giving classes at select times on using the equipment and general electrics. Unfortunately I was in town near the end of this event which will be Oct 20th. If you are in the area I do recommend jumping on the excellent transportation you’ll find in Chicago and have some fun at the space. Here are more details on location, classes and times.

I didn’t expect to squeeze any work into my vacation but I did take a guided tour of the fab space with my iPhone 5s.  You can join me after the break to watch the tour, which is a bit rough but still covers a lot of fun topics. Get at look at their line-up or Replicator 2 3D printers. See some fantastic prints from metal made on industrial scale printers. Learn more about the up-scaled CNC seen above that was cutting out skateboard decks. And finish up with an injection molding machine.

Continue reading “GE Garage And Chicago Ideas Week” →

European Hackerspace Tour

October 12, 2013 by 48 Comments

Eurotrip

Wow! What a response we received on our Calling European Hackerspaces post! First off, thank you for such a warm welcoming to your hackerspaces. It looks like HaD is going to have to be way more active in touring and profiling hackerspaces!

Now unfortunately we’re just not going to have time to visit all of the ones suggested, but we’ve outlined a few of the ones we definitely want to check out!

We created a Google spreadsheet to help do this, so if your hackerspace has been mentioned, OR if it happens to be very close to the others and you really want us to come, please fill out some contact info on the spreadsheet so we can setup a time to visit! If you don’t want to put contact info in a shared document, send an email to the tips line instead with the subject [European Hackerspace Tour]. Because its unlikely our trip will coincide with any open nights, we’d love (need) to have someone to show us the space at potentially odd hours!

I will be writing an individual post for each hackerspace tour with lots of photos and details on all the juicy projects you guys are working on. And if we have time, we might even film the tour!

Once again, thank you for the amazing response and we can’t wait to meet all of you in person!

SSTV Beacon Based On A Raspberry Pi

October 6, 2013 by 17 Comments

The Budapest hackerspace did some joint work with a local ham radio club and created an SSTV beacon housed inside a CCTV case that takes an image of its environment and transmits it using slow-scan television over ham bands.

As the title says, the build uses a Raspberry Pi to process the image taken from its camera and then transmits it over the air using a Ricofunk UHF transceiver with a main frequency of 433.425MHz. On the software side, PySSTV is used to convert images to frequency/time tuples, UNIXSSTV then creates the actual audio file and finally sox plays it. To avoid screwing up the Raspberry SD card, every part of the filsystem is either mounted in read-only mode (things like /home and /usr) or uses a ramdisk (things like /tmp and logs).

The plans, schematics and source code are available, so they hope that other hackerspaces will join the ranks!

How This Power Racing Series Car Got On A Plane To WMF

October 4, 2013 by 9 Comments

pwrc-on-a-plane

You really should check out the monthly meetings at your local hackerspace. It’s an excellent opportunity to hear the most interesting stories. Like the tale of how the guys from Sector67 got this electric vehicle on the plane with them. Not only did it go up in the air, but they did zero planning ahead of time on how they would actually pull it off.

[Bob Baddeley] posted an album of the PRC experience at World Maker Faire. There are captions that somewhat tell the tale, but we’ll fill you in as best we can on the rest of the story behind this second car from the hackerspace — lovingly known as the Lamebourghini.

Continue reading “How This Power Racing Series Car Got On A Plane To WMF” →

Calling European Hackerspaces!

October 2, 2013 by 108 Comments

ScreenShot034 copy

In a few weeks time, I will be in Düsseldorf on business for the world’s largest plastics and rubber industry trade show, the K-Show. That’s not very interesting for you, but afterwards a coworker and I will be traveling for a week in Europe, and being the geeks we are, we would rather visit you instead of the typical tourist attractions (mind you I have lived in Germany for half a year).

The majority of our Hackerspace Intro pieces thus far have been limited to North America, so we would love to visit your Hackerspace in Europe! Take pictures, ask a few questions, get a tour, and share it all here!

If you are part of, or know of a cool hackerspace in approximately the geographical doodle shown on Google Maps above, let us know in the comments! We will be traveling around October 19th to the 24th.

Project Thumper Walkthrough

September 29, 2013 by 29 Comments

ScreenShot029

The Geek Group is at it again! Many years ago they built Project Thumper, a 1,600V @80,000A electrical impulse … well … “thumper”.

For those of you that don’t know, The Geek Group is the world’s largest not-for-profit Hackerspace. Lately they have been working on developing better videos for their YouTube channel, and have just released a stunning CGI animation of the build, operation, and explanation of Project Thumper.

So what is Project Thumper? In the simplest terms, it’s a giant capacitor, or more specifically, an entire server rack filled with capacitors. The Hackerspace uses it for experiments and demonstrations — but from the looks of their videos, they mostly just use it to blow things up, as shown in their 2008 Project Promo video. I think we would too. They even used it to blow up an iPhone! (Skip to 3:00 for the explosion). We think someone with a high-speed camera really needs to film Thumper in action!

The awesome CGI animation explanation of it is after the break.

Continue reading “Project Thumper Walkthrough” →