Leeds Hackspace

This weekend was the 3d printshow in London and I (Martyn) went down to see who was there, on the midnight coach on Friday, arriving in at 06:20!

Well there were quite a few interesting people at the show, but some really stand out ones as well.

Makerbot were there in force, I didn’t actually speak to any of the main team, but I understand Bre was there at some point.  Makerbot are quite a controversial brand at the moment given their choice to not opensource the Replicator2.

There was a very nice all-metal 3d printer from cb-printer.com – the idea here is that the printer is a tool, should be solid and well built, much like our MendelMax that we’re building.

Formlabs are perfecting the high-resolution resin-based 3d printing technologies with their very nice looking Form1 printer – with a 25 micron layer height.

Autodesk, Tinkercad and various other 3d software vendors were there, most trying to sell their solutions, which to an opensource advocate like myself, didn’t impress :-)

There were also a lot of exhibitors of artwork, jewellery etc. which even to an uncultured geek like myself were very impressive!

But the hidden gem was printrbot – Brook Drumm was there and is a really cool guy – the printrbot really is the little printer that could – all laser-cut parts, foldable, fits in a backpack and on top of that, it can run off rc car batteries for about two hours!

Of course I got really excited and printrbot is open hardware and $400 for the kit.  If I had a pot of money I’d be looking at becoming a UK distributor for it.  He also showed off his latest prototype that is is a transformer of sorts – it folds up into a suitcase!

I managed to squeeze in a visit to Star Trek London, which in comparison was a huge money making exercise.  Whilst they had a lot of famous actors there, you couldn’t get into the packed talk areas, as the people with money who had the special tickets for guaranteed seats.  £15 for an autograph… £10 for something to autograph… yeah, the yorkshireman in me was sorely disappointed.

I rounded off my visit to London with a visit to London Hackspace, which was good, although I was disappointed to not get my hackerspace passport stamped as they had no stamp and their lasercutter was out of order.

So that’s the weekend of one northern hacker in London.

We have a saying, “everything’s better with lasers!”, this definitely applies to a hackspace and now we’ve got access to a laser cutter we’re out to prove it. Inductions in use of the laser cutter are ongoing, laser cutter time is available for a small charge, and we have a selection of laserable materials available at reasonable prices. If you’re designing something to be laser cut then we’d recommend using either inkscape or librecad (totally down to personal preference) and export it in dxf format.

Soon our battlestation laser cutter will be fully operational, and we’ll be one step further towards world domination.

Yes, on Saturday 6th October we’ll be acquiring our first laser cutter, and it seems that members are already thinking up lots of projects involving it.

We’ll provide further updates once it’s safely installed in our workshop.

There I was, in a field with around 500 other geeks, makers, and hackers, with power and cat5 to any tent that wanted it, wifi to the entire field, a 380Mbps link to the major Milton Keynes datacenter, 1 hop from telehouse, and a grin that lasted all the way to the coach trip home.

There were talks, workshops and general geekiness in every direction.  The badges that we all received before the end of the camp were Arduino-compatibles with RF (nanode/winode compatible), two RGB LEDs, IR send/recieve, Li-Ion battery with charging circuit and a micro-usb programming port which charges the battery too!

The talks were many and varied as well – from Bees to Quadcopters!  There were even a group called MindHack – a group of amateur hypnotists who meet at the London Hackspace.  They put on a workshop and a stage show on one of the evenings.

I had to keep popping to the nearest tescos, as you always do when camping, but not only for stuff that I’d forgotten/didn’t have (yeah, glowsticks and extra alchohol as I don’t drink beer), but for cash! I took advantage of many suppliers having kit with them and bought a nanode, a winode, a pibow and a couple of other bits.

Talking of alchohol – there was a bar – a real ale bar – under the M1! And it had a UV Glowing dinosaur and a screening of Doctor Who.  There was also a floating led matrix in the river at one point.

I’ve levelled up my soldering skills, including surface mount soldering so if anyone wants a hand soldering something, I’m happy to pass on the knowledge I’ve learned.

It really was an amazing weekend and I even got that post-amazing-event blues on the coach back, knowing that although I work with geeks, I won’t be interacting with anywhere near as many until at least barcamp blackpool.

If you are a student in Leeds then we’d like to invite you to come one of our open nights on Tuesday evenings (for free!) and see what it’s all about.

After some discussion we’ve decided to offer a student membership option.  The details haven’t been finalised properly, but it’s likely to be £50 per term (half the usual cost).

Everyone else is of course welcome too!

For a while now we’ve had two big cardboard boxes full of ICs, power regulators and power transistors.  On Friday I got bored, and catalogued them.  The results can be found on the wiki.

There’s still an even bigger box of mainly surface mount passive components, I’ll leave that for someone else.

Some Hackspaces have “do not hack” stickers.  We decided that this was probably a bad idea.  If a sticker is accidentally overlooked, or falls off then someone is probably going to get upset.

Instead we have rolls of green electrical “hack me” tape.  Anything tagged with green electrical tape is fair game and may be re-purposed/dismantled without warning.

DO NOT USE GREEN ELECTRICAL TAPE ON YOUR PROJECTS