NYC Resistor: DIY Hackers Doing Awesome Things

HansonMB writes "Founded by a handful of friends who wanted a place to tinker with electronics and meet like-minded hackers for good, NYC Resistor has blossomed into one of the country's most influential hackerspaces. On any given Thursday night, their cozy, cluttered loft workshop is crawling with a diverse crowd of hardcore tinkerers and curious newcomers. Throwing some caution and many user warranties to the wind, they're there to build, refine, break and share everything from toy robots to intricate paper sculpture to open source musical instruments."

Comments

over a year old

[TheGratefulNet]

This piece originally aired in January 2010.

slashdot: always current

(that's a joke, son)

Labels and Pop Culture

[decipher_saint]

I'll probably feel the burn for this one but I have lots of karma...

I understand that people living in large cities may not get the chance to own a house with a spare room or a garage but is it really necessary to badge themselves? By the loose definition here I know a great "hacker" and I've been to an awesome "hackerspace" (he's my dad, and it's his garage).

At what point did building stuff on your own become something so rare?

I understand the fun in building something yourself, designing/making something new or just tinkering around with something old or broken and making it work but I just call myself a "regular person".

I don't know why being creative in the "industrial arts" has gained hipster status...

Re:Labels and Pop Culture

[Whalou]

I don't know why being creative in the "industrial arts" has gained hipster status...

Haven't you heard? "Get out of my loft" is the new "Get off my lawn".

Re:Labels and Pop Culture

[cain]

You may have missed the phrase in the write-up that makes highlights the difference between your father's garage and this place: "...crawling with a diverse crowd..." This is where people who build stuff can meet and talk about building stuff.

Re:Labels and Pop Culture

[chemicaldave]

One important detail the article failed to mention is that they also offer classes. Some are free, other are paid (to pay the rent). So I'd consider it a step above one person in their garage. They're at least reaching out to the community.

Re:Labels and Pop Culture

[cbiltcliffe]

I don't know why being creative in the "industrial arts" has gained hipster status...

It's either hip, or terrifying, depending on who you talk to.
That being said, the reason is simple:
The vast majority of people nowadays have no idea what goes on outside their own job, and a lot of them don't even know what goes on _in_ their own job.

The days of most people being able to take things apart and fix them themselves are long behind us. What caused this downfall of knowledge, I don't know, but I suspect it has something to do with Fox, American Idle, partisan politics, NIMBY, and excessive litigation.

Basically, society has been moving in a direction that discourages - or downright criminalizes - tinkering. Most people support this, because it means they don't have to know how things work, and the mental stimulation and exercise that might be required is easier to waste on Fox and American Idle.

The fact that you can get sued for changing a chip out in your own hardware is simply an extra reason to avoid even finding out how to do it. If you're a clueless idiot with technology, you can't be accused of modifying that technology.

Re:Labels and Pop Culture

[Gr33nJ3ll0]

What caused this downfall of knowledge, I don't know, but I suspect it has something to do with Fox, American Idle, partisan politics, NIMBY, and excessive litigation. That might have an influence, but I think it also comes down to increasing complexity and decreasing ability to actually fix things. Even as few as 20 years ago it was very possible to pull something apart, get a basic understand, and maybe fix it. With everything being shrunk down to a few chips that can't really be altered this has radically changed. You can no longer pull apart your iPod, and expect to be able to fix basic problems with it, since most of the inner workings are on a few chips. If it breaks you ONLY option is to throw it out and buy a new one. Contrast this with an old fashioned tape machine where all the parts were sized to be manipulated by a human. For the most part miniaturization has had huge boons, but it's seriously cut down on the number of things that people can tinker with.

Re:Labels and Pop Culture

[Splab]

As someone else pointed out, the difference between your dads garage and a hackerspace is the latter is crawling with all sorts of people tinkering and often willing to help you with projects.

Local one in Copenhagen is called labitat ( http://www.labitat.dk/ ), they've build their own 3D printers for instance, first one was build with wood in the shop and from there on everyone who wants to can print the parts for their own. They have some *really* cool machines there and you will find someone tinkering there almost around the clock.

Re:Labels and Pop Culture

[Anonymous Coward]

Yet there is one universal fact... and it works in hackerspaces or in Car clubs.....

Typically the old guys always out-do the young snots. For two reasons, and one of them huge...

1 - old guys know more from experience, sorry kiddies you cant read that one to learn it.
2 - old guys ALWAYS have more money than the kiddies. This rubs the prima donna kiddies the wrong way bad.

Ay my car club one of the new snots claims he could build a car faster than any of the old guys. we decided to teach the snotnosed punk a lesson so we called his bluff...

Buy a mazda Miata, does not matter what year, and make it as fast as you can in 3 months.

He worked hard on it the entire time, scraped together lots of performance parts.
The old guy that took up the challenge installed a Corvette LS3 engine in his. Outspent the snot by 5X.

Guess what, old guy with a passenger that weighed 250 pounds was 4 seconds faster than the snot-nosed kid in his stripped and turboed performance setup. He learned right there that Old guys will always win because we got more money than you kid.

Get used to that 20 something snot-nosed punks... that 40 year old guy will ALWAYS win because he has more money than you.

and yes kids, you CAN easily fit a LS3 in a miata.... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TllaD4VTjCw

Re:Labels and Pop Culture

[GameboyRMH]

But I bet that younger guy learned a hell of a lot - both about cars, and about when to stop bragging to, insulting, and challenging the people who are older, wiser, and far more experienced.

How could he have learned any of that? The only things that were demonstrated to him were that old guys are unsporting and only know how to make cars go faster by stuffing big expensive V8s into them (which, while it requires a lot of elbow grease, isn't that impressive from an engineering standpoint - especially if you just order all the hardware required).

Collaboration

[Anonymous Coward]

The key to this "movement" is, I think, the collaborative aspect. I too grew up with a handy dad, with garage full of woodworking and metal working tools, and a darkroom in the basement and a jewelry studio in the attic. He was always making one thing or another, repairing appliances and vehicles, teaching his four boys how to use the equipment safely, etc., but at the end of the day, it was just us tinkering around the house.

We had some nice tools, but with just my dad's income, we wouldn't have been able to afford a laser cutter or a shopbot or any of the modern design tools that are found in the larger-scale hackerspaces. Also, the pool of creativity was limited to just us. Hackerspaces have room for thinkers, dreamers _and_ makers.

I still have my own tools (not as extensive as my dad's setup), I build and repair electronics at home, but I'm also an active member of The Columbus Idea Foundry where I mix and mingle with metal artists and artisans, and get shared access to tools I could never afford on my own or never take full advantage of even if I did own them.

As for why being creative has gained hipster status - I think you can look at the trend in education for that - with all the emphasis on standardized testing and the denigration of teachers as a profession, who learns how to do this stuff in school anymore? If you've spent your whole life as a consumer, connecting with the "producers" becomes an event.

Re:Collaboration

[vlm]

I've always thought a great business would be a complete machine shop and wood working shop, along with a small supplies type place.

in other words "techshop"

http://techshop.ws/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TechShop

The biggest problem is most likely material and distance. Can I haul around my material including the finished project easily? And can you find a place that is centrally located yet has good enough roads to get there in less than an hour of drivetime?

the last wave of real geeks

[digitalsushi]

I was just trying to rile you up with the subject line there. Don't worry, I'm sure it's just a transparent generational thing.

I heard folks in their 40s saying their teenage kids aren't creative anymore, that the web and games and shows we made were so entertaining they had no reason to be self-creative.

I really wanna figure they're just wrong, that they dont know how creative their kids secretly are. Maybe as I've entered my 30s now, I've gotten it together mentally enough to actually pull some 'hacks' off, see some things through to completion. Maybe I glorify my teens and early 20s and I never really got anything done at all. Maybe we all spend those years discovering tools for the toolbox, and that in itself was discovery and accomplishment.

But there's no such group I am aware of in Boondock, NH. I see that photo of geeks sharing a table, eating poptarts to stay shiny, drinking 'dew, and probably having a hearty laugh at mundane details. And I just lust for such a thing, available only by the numbers a huge city can push. I probably should live in a city to have geek friends I can actually smell. The 'net does a fine job hiding the aroma, but alas also the arcane body language and general vibe of sharing meatspace.

Sigh