From tiny solar panels that can power your cell phone to systems with a handful of batteries or panels, Alan will walk you through what he’s learned in his solar power tinkering so far. We’ll have a variety of panels, chargers, batteries and connectors on hand so you can see how it all works. Come by our *new* Hacklab at 1677 St Clair West on Wednesday October 23 at 7pm. The workshop is free and open to anyone who’s interested. Tell a friend to bring a friend and we’ll see you soon!

It’s everyone’s favourite time again: the first Junk Independence Day of 2018! Coming up on February 18th from 2pm-7pm (or later). Bring your e-waste and dig through other people’s for treasures. On previous Junk Independence Days, people have walked away with an iPod touch, a 1TB hard drive, working classic iMacs, bubblejet printers, a Sony mini-DV camcorder, stereo amps, speakers, a desktop computer and even walk/don’t walk streetlights! Not to be forgotten, there are always lots of little chips and bytes for random hacking, too.

https://www.facebook.com/events/1574038156049596/

https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/junk-independence-day-tickets-43005470520

Anything left at the end will be picked up on Monday, 19th of February and responsibly recycled by Revolution Recycling, who has been participating in our Junk Independence Days since the first one. Thanks Revolution!!

Come hang out with some fellow hackers and search for hidden treasures! Tickets are not necessary but Eventbrite is a great way to sign up and get reminders. You can also RSVP via our Facebook event. See you at JID!

[edit: Monday the 19th is a holiday in Ontario so junk will be picked up on Tuesday morning, the 20th.]

The Repair Cafe for a second time has come and gone.
And with that the Repair cafe moves along to another community to aid where the can to repair wayward electronics. In the mean time here is some photos from today’s Repair Cafe.

As some of you might already know, the Hacklab has a photographic darkroom where we do processing of many kinds of B&W and colour films. All of these processes require a series of fairly precisely-timed steps, where the film or paper is exposed to various chemical baths. A number of these processes require complete darkness (no red safelight!), so you can’t have a timer that has a readable display. Commercial timers solve this by beeping once per second, so you know they’re still timing. As you can imagine, this gets very annoying after an hour or more of working in the dark!

I set out to design a new timer that would be less annoying and more functional. My original design goals were:
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The hacklab hackaday bring your hack meetup, back for the second year. Get your (free) tickets here:
https://hacklabhackaday2.eventbrite.ca
Hacklab.TO and Hackaday are hosting a Bring A Hack meetup on April 20th 2016! Doors 7pm, talks start 8pm. Party till late.

We’ll have drinks, snacks, hacks and swag. It’s a Bring A Hack style meetup, where you bring the project you’re working on and show it off to enthusiastic supporters.

There will also be lightning talks, which are short talks about projects or ideas you’re working on.

Sophi from Hackaday will be in town to talk about the Hackaday Prize, the engineering competition with $300,000 in cash prizes (you read that correctly!). http://hackaday.io/prize

Want to get on the talks list? Let us know! (contact sophikravitz at hackaday.com)

NOTE: as with last year, we expect overwhelming demand. Seats will go fast, grab them while you can. Then we’ve got some standing room only in the back/side of the room. If you’re really interested in checking out hacklab, we also offer an Open House every Tuesday 6pm till late, so feel free to drop by.

At the Hacklab, to save power, we needed a way to turn off devices when nobody was at the Lab.  Rather than buy expensive Insteon or Z-Wave modules, Hacklab member Av (that’s me!) reverse-engineered the radio protocol on these super cheap ($8 each) controllable outlet modules.

For a total cost of $47, you can now control 5 or more outlets via Wifi.  All that’s needed is an ESP8266 and a 433Mhz transmitter module.  No soldering or electronics is required, it’s just three wires!

Check out the rest of the project with source code on Av’s Site.

Today’s photo from the lab is a progress shot of a mirror with built in light. The maker was gracious enough to pose with his project just after assembling all the electronic components into the hand made frame.

Glimps at DIYBIO

Hacklab has been hosting our friends DIYBIO for a while now. And with their presence a great symbiotic relationship has developed between the two groups. DIYBIO has a  bio lab in the Hacklab  space that has grown to a place where they can start running experiments.  The photo gallery below shows one of the experiments recently conducted. For more information on DIYBIO visit their website at DIYBIO.to. As well as visit Hacklab on Tuesdays for our open house to talk to some of the DIYBIO people in person. 

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Hacklab.TO and Hackaday are hosting a Bring A Hack meetup on April 15th! Doors 7pm, talks start 8pm.  Party till late.  Please RSVP on eventbrite: Bring a Hack, this will let us buy the right amount of beer and pizza :-)

We’ll have drinks, snacks, hacks and swag. It’s a Bring A Hack style meetup, where you bring the project you’re working on and show it off to enthusiastic supporters.

There will also be lightening talks, which are short talks about projects or ideas you’re working on.

Sophi from Hackaday will be in town to talk about the Hackaday Prize, the engineering competition that sends you to Space (SERIOUSLY).  http://hackaday.io/

In fact, Hacklab entered the competition last year and will talk about their project, Retro Populator. Want to get on the talks list? Let us know! (contact sophikravitz at hackaday dot com)

UPDATE: just to be clear, you can totally just come to see the talks and hacks, you don’t need to bring your own, and nor do you need to be a hacklab member.  Just RSVP and come have some fun!

The electrons are being excited this weekend at Hacklab with the Sound hackers audio meet up happening on Saturday January 10th, 2 pm – 12 am.
Click here to see  a complete schedule of events happening.

As a pre-amp to all the electrons being excited. Enjoy some of the photos from the Toronto Synth meet up, where I met up with one of Hacklabs members Andrew Kilpatrick and had the chance to play with his new Synth the phenol (Photo below). Andrew has a  Kickstarter for the lovely piece of hardware on the go if you like more info on it.  This is a bit of a different cross talk then in the past. For this is the first time a cross talk has gone from an external event into a internally hosted one.
There has been an Audio swap meet in the past and, now we have the great pleasure of hosting the Sound Hackers meet up at Hacklab.
Stay tuned for this weekends photos. In the mean time here are the best of the Synth meet up from November 2014.