Hackerspaces: A Definition
by RAMGarden
Have you heard of a hackerspace?
Chances are that if you are reading this, you most definitely have. But for those who want to know more, I'll give you a definition from my first-person experience as a member of one.
I have been reading 2600 Magazine since 2001 when I first found one at my local bookstore. I always read them cover to cover and wanted to try some of the projects that people wrote about, like the credit card mag stripe reader made from an old tape deck play head. But I lacked the tools, parts, and working space to do this. Fast forward to the year 2011 - around October - and we'll pick up the rest of the story.
I finally decided to go see what one of these 2600 meetings was all about - fully expecting a bunch of people looking over each other's shoulders on various laptops doing some extreme programming and getting some serious hacker "work" done.
Much to my surprise, it was mainly just a bunch of regular people with engineering-type jobs with some average Joes mixed in and just a few laptops out on the table. Instead of talking exclusively about 2600 Magazine or the articles in the latest edition (this sometimes comes up for the really good/interesting ones), they were talking about completely random topics amongst each other like you would anywhere else people would gather. It was awesome.
After spending some time there, I heard a few of them ask each other if they were going to the "shop" after the meeting.
"The shop?" I asked.
"Yeah. It's a cool little hackerspace we have right down the road here where we build and make things, work on personal projects, and write code. Among other things."
I turned my head like a dog does when they hear a high pitched sound. "Hackerspace?" Seeing the confusion on my face, the stranger I had just met only an hour ago replied with possibly the best response ever, "It's a bit like the Matrix. You can't really explain what a hackerspace is. You have to be shown. Follow us."
We got in our cars and I followed them downtown to an old metal building with a garage door on one side and small windows and a metal door on the front. I watched one of them take a USB stick out of his pocket and stick it in a small metal box mounted to the right of the front door. It instantly emitted a beep and I heard the door's dead bolt unlock with a small mechanical sound.
I would later learn that it was a servo motor part of the standard keypad dead bolt they hacked to use USB keys for access control. I walked in to see an office area up front with two couches, two tables, and assorted office chairs in various states of disrepair, complete with rips and stains.
I was then shown the kitchen which had a small fridge with freezer, a stove that was wired in very recently with the wires proudly displayed out in the open, and a microwave that looked like it had seen its fair share of Chinese takeout and pizza rolls. Then they opened up an inner door at the end of a short hallway and I think I made a pretty embarrassing sound or squeak when I saw what was on the other side because I heard of few of them snicker.
I saw a huge, 4000 square foot open area with an upstairs loft full of so many tools and open space with various parts and pieces of projects in progress strewn and stored about. Someone had pulled their car in the garage door to do a quick oil change. There was an old pinball machine that looked like it was rescued from a dumpster - from the 1950s!
Under the loft was an entire area devoted to woodworking tools like a chop saw, drill press, scroll saw, table sander, and power planer. Another area under the loft was devoted to metal working, full of welding equipment and safety gear. The rest of that area had various hand tools, screwdrivers of all sizes and kinds, a collection of nuts, bolts, and screws loosely organized on the shelves, and several safety goggles and gloves in one corner.
In a side room, there was an entire electronics bench with what seemed like hundreds of small, clear, organizing drawers full of all of the various components you'd need for building your own circuit board from scratch or just fixing something like a DVD player instead of throwing the whole thing away.
Also found in this room was one of the first 3D printers made for companies like NASA. It was a BPM Personal Modeler they had rescued from someone who had a few in a barn. They never got it to completely work, but the extruder would move around inside it like it was trying to print the thing it showed on the program written for DOS displayed on the built-in slide out drawer.
They had replaced the old CRT monitor with a flat LCD screen and exchanged the floppy drive with a USB port. Turning around, they showed me the 40 watt CO2 laser cutter from Full Spectrum.
They had various things cut from sheets of 1/8-inch thick clear acrylic to paint and put on the sides of PC towers and custom enclosure boxes for their homemade circuit boards.
Going upstairs to the loft area, they showed me dozens of shelves full of hackable parts, like a Rubbermaid tub full of dead Roomba robots, a stack of old laptops, old flatbed scanners, and a banker's box full of different sized wall wart power supplies.
"Take anything you want!" they said. "What do you mean?" I asked. "Take anything from these shelves, take it apart, and make something useful or just really neat."
I immediately thought of some uses for those Roomba bots as a platform for a telepresence robot I could use to visit home when I travel for work. That night, I asked everything I could about the place.
"This is a hackerspace - or makerspace. Some people don't like to use the word hacker because of all the negative thoughts that have become associated with it. We're not some secret place where nefarious computer geeks sit around computers and write malicious code to try to break into bank accounts and such. We're just a bunch of people who like to tinker and make things or take things apart and make them work in ways they probably weren't intended for, but are better or more useful in some way. Some people have even built prototypes for products and started their own business from here! Everyone has different skills and most are willing to help other people with their project if they get stuck on a part that isn't their specialty. If someone doesn't know how to program, but their project needs a bit of code to run, one of our programmer members can either teach them how to do it or help them do it. It's the community plus the tools that makes this place great!"
Hearing that, I immediately asked how to become a member.
I learned that this wasn't the only place like it and there were several all over the U.S. and across the globe.
I filled out the paperwork and, after visiting several times over the next few weeks, I became a member paying my monthly donation with 24/7 access. I brought in my own USB stick and they added its hardware ID to their white list so now I could open the door.
I worked on various projects over a few years and helped others with the programming parts of theirs. I even helped beta test a "learn to solder" class where you build a six-sided die simulator circuit that one of the members there invented. He called it the ST:EAK or Soldering Trainer: Entropy Approximation Kit.
Scroll ahead to 2013 and I moved away to Florida for the better weather.
Before moving, I made a deal that wherever I moved had to have a nearby hackerspace! Now, I am helping run the local space as the secretary (hackerspaces usually have a President, Vice President, Secretary, Treasurer, etc.) to help get new members signed up and put into our database and Google Group.
Recently, I helped build the RFID card-based door lock that was put together from a Raspberry Pi computer and LCD screen from Adafruit. I look forward to writing up more articles about the various projects I work on in the future.
If you haven't joined your local hackerspace, I strongly urge you to find it on hackerspaces.org.
If there isn't one near you, then start a Meetup for one and see if you can get ten or so people together to rent a small space and gather some tools.
Then pass the hat around for donations to buy a 3D printer and other large tools.
There are lots of hackerspaces out there to ask for help if you want to start your own.
I also recommend that everyone wanting to start a space join the discuss mailing list at hackerspaces.org.
Happy Hacking, Making, and Learning.