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NYTimes Visits Menlo Park's TechShop
ridgecritter points out this interesting article in the New York Times on TechShop, a membership resource (a.k.a. hackerspace) in Menlo Park, CA, for building stuff. "From hammers to 3-D printers and laser cutters. Fun!" Along similar lines, and also recently in the NYT, a quick on-the-train conversation with Bre Pettis of MakerBot.
The article mentions a new location coming is San Jose this year, but their locations page doesn't. Anyone have more details about this? San Jose would be a lot more convenient for those of us on the other end of 17 from the valley.
From the article:
They will do this because the tools needed to make really cool things have become cheaper and because humans feel good when they make really cool things.
If the bar on creating "really cool things" gets lowered, that also raises the bar on what's "really cool". Creating cool stuff takes time, effort and usually includes a learning curve. That said: you can start small, and take on bigger/harder projects as you go.
I'm a student in the Seattle area and we're trying to set up a hackerspace, but more geared to high school students. If there are cool spaces for students to hang out and work on science/tech projects, we'll be able to get more students interested in science and technology. Link in my sig.
Student Research and Development
As someone who uses the Menlo Park TechShop, a few comments.
It's a very broad shop. It's not the only public shop in Silicon Valley. If you want to do electronics, Hacker Dojo has better workstations, where surface-mount work is possible. If you're building furniture, The Sawdust Shop has a better wood shop. But TechShop has both sewing machines and CNC milling machines, a stereolithography machine and a plasma cutter, which you usually don't find under one roof.
There are Silicon Valley companies which buy memberships and send their employees over to use the machine tools. The four big manual Bridgeport mills, the big lathes, and the stereolithography machine are usually being used by pros. TechShop gives classes constantly, but most of the people who use TechShop already have considerable familiarity with tools. They just need access to the bigger machines. It's a good place to learn how to use CNC machine tools. CNC software is quite good today, and TechShop has reasonable midrange CNC design software (Vectrix Cut2D/Cut3D, SolidWorks, etc.) installed on their rather sluggish Windows Vista desktop machines.
There's not much electronics and robotics work. Although TechShop gives Arduno programming classes, and people take them and build the projects, not much electronics gets built there. They have power supplies, meters, scopes, and soldering stations, but they're 1980s technology.
The most popular activity is cutting decorative patterns with the laser cutter. It's easy to do, and two laser cutters are busy doing it almost continuously. Those machines just need line art in CorelDraw; you don't have to learn SolidWorks or Vectrix and do real CNC programming. No one activity dominates, though; there are people building birdhouses and people building rocket engines.
http://hackerspaces.org/wiki/List_of_Hacker_Spaces. Be warned that TechShop is a commercial entity in this market, while many hackerspaces are non-profit. TechShop is a franchise with a gym membership model, so with it comes the same pains.