Tour Houston's Texas-Sized Hackerspace (Video 2 of 2)

Posted by Roblimo on Tuesday October 8, 2013 @06:57AM from the every-hackerspace-should-have-foosball-and-pancake-breakfasts dept.

A few weeks ago, on his way to LinuxCon, Timothy stopped by the biggest hackerspace he'd ever seen. Houston's TX/RX Labs is not just big — it's busy, and booked. Unlike some spaces we've highlighted here before (like Seattle's Metrix:CreateSpace and Brooklyn's GenSpace, TX/RX Labs has room and year-round sunshine enough to contemplate putting a multi-kilowatt solar array in the backyard. Besides an array of CNC machines, 3-D printers, and wood- and metal-working equipment, TX/RX has workbenches available for members to rent. (These are serious workspaces, made in-house of poured concrete and welded steel tubing.) There's also a classroom full of donated workstations, lounge space, a small collection of old (but working) military trucks, and a kitchen big enough for their Pancake Science Sunday breakfasts. Labs member Steve Cameron showed me around. You saw Part One of his tour last week. Today's video is Part Two.

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Re:Hackerspace? by Davorak · 2013-10-08 08:51 · Score: 4, Interesting

We choose to use it for several reasons some of which are:
* The term seemed to growing in usage and how it was being used described a reasonable chunk of what we were trying to do. I dislike new terms for the sake of new terms, though I am not 100% sure that is the case here, and it would have been going against how the terminology seemed to be evolving.
* Workshop and similar words invoked images of a for profit business(Tx/Rx is a non-profit).
* Workshop correctly invoked thoughts of metal working, wood working, CNCs, but did not invoke thoughts of programming, soldering, circuit design, or a tight knit community. At least to the small number of people I asked when we were trying to decide what we would call ourselves.