• Sunday April 13th
• 12 Noon – 6PM

Got some old electronics hiding away at home? Looking for a source of spare parts for a project? Junk Independence Day is where people bring in and swap old electronics and e-waste.

Typical / past items included:

• iPods / Mp3 Players / camcorders
• Computers, laptops and parts
• Printers / Scanners
• Stereo amps, speakers
• Traffic walk/don’t walk streetlights!
• Hobby Electronics parts + kits

Not to be forgotten, there are always lots of little chips and bytes for random hacking too. Anything left at the end will be picked up on Monday and responsibly recycled!

House Rules: Items brought in for the Junk Day are not to be disassembled on site. If you want only part of an item, take it home, and bring the rest back next junk day.

A-Train’s Ender3000 3D printer.

Deep inside the recesses of HackLab, a Frankenstein 3D printing monster was brought to life! A-Train, a long-time member and seasoned 3D printer enthusiast, hacked together two Creality Ender 3 printers that saw very limited use in the lab to create a beast with two extruders capable of simultaneously printing two different colours and/or materials. He calls it the Ender3000!

“So I was thinking, ‘How could I creatively dispose of these [3D printers]?’,” asked A-Train. “They were useless because they don’t offer anything unique… I could make them do something that the other printers didn’t do.”

The lab is lucky to have several newer, high quality, 3D printers that are far more capable then the two individual Ender 3s. The Ender3000 is an IDEX, or independent dual extruder printer which means that you can print with two materials at the same time. This can be used for printing with two different colors or types of material simultaneously.

Ender3000 printing a two-colour HackLab logo.

In addition to the Ender 3s, the printer was built with a Raspberry Pi 3 that was already associated with one of those printers, a $10 box of rubber belts and some other spare parts from around the lab.

Klipper, a free and open-source software and firmware ecosystem, makes the whole thing possible. A-Train used two micro-controllers that were taken from the original printers. One handles Z axis movement and the extruders, and one handles X and Y axis movement. The Raspberry Pi, running server-side software from Klipper, coordinates those two micro-controllers.

“It can run on any computer, it’s Python-based and it computes the movement a number of steps ahead of time,” said A-Train.

A-Train continues to work on fine tuning the Ender3000. He is adjusting the alignments of each extruder and testing different prints.

“The printer is also intended as a general lab test victim for learning about new software, teaching printer tuning, and experimenting with printer hardware & electronics,” said A-Train.

At HackLab we use Home Assistant to integrate and automate lighting, sensors and a disco ball into our space!

Come get familiarized with our Demonstration Lab where you can experiment with your own hardware and integration.
https://knowledge.hacklab.to/wiki/Home_Assistant_Demo_Lab

March 30th 2-5pm

Matter and Form demo’d their “THREE” 3D scanner tonight at HackLab. We scanned things big and small!

MatterAndForm is going to do a demo of their “THREE” 3D Scanner on Thursday Feb 20th at 7pm at HackLab.

MatterAndForm CEO Trevor Townsend will be running the demo. Should be pretty cool! Here’s a link to the product page if you’re curious: https://www.matterandform.net/products/three

A cup holder meant for a wheelchair adapted using a 3D printed bracket for use on a walker (Photo: Scott Sullivan)

Scott Sullivan, long-time member and current president of HackLab, preaches the practicality of 3D printing. When a regular guest at the lab went from using a wheelchair to using a walker, Scott volunteered to help adapt their wheelchair’s accessories to the new support, including a cup holder. He designed a bracket that allowed the cup holder to be attached to the different shaped body of the walker.

Around the lab, one can also find many examples of practical ingenuity that was made possible by 3D printing. A 3D printed desk organizer sits on the soldering bench holding important components so they are not lost. Customized brackets hold the game consoles to the wall in the TV area. There are even bag hooks at each hot desk so that desks are kept clear, and bags are kept off the ground. Ice trays are stacked up in the freezer with specially created shelves.

“As I’ve had the privilege of visiting other hacker spaces across North America, I’ve never failed to find a 3D printer and some practical problem in the space solved with a 3D print,” said Scott.

Ice trays stacked using 3D printed shelves (Photo: Scott Sullivan)

A big aspect of the technology’s practicality is how quickly new items can be prototyped. Fabricating an item using a 3D printer can be quick and approachable. Whether you find a model online or make your own in software, there is something so convenient and magical about an object coming into existence layer by layer. I needed a bowl for the change that was collecting on my bedside table, so I found a cool design online and printed it. Unfortunately, its original size was too small. Forty five minutes later, I had a perfect bowl for my out-of-control coin situation.

Two 3D printed bowls of different sizes. The bowl on the left was too small so the one on the right was printed. (Photo: Luciano Cesta)

HackLab was an early adopter of consumer 3D printing. In 2009, the lab had a low serial number Makerbot Cupcake CNC printer, one of the first commercially available consumer 3D printers. While the quality of its printed objects was not reliable, it was immediately useful to the lab as something to attract people to the space. It allowed people “to rapidly start exploring ideas,” said Scott.

Hacklab’s low serial number Makerbot Cupcake CNC 3D printer (Photo: Hacklab Public Wiki)

The Cupcake CNC’s frame was made of laser cut wood and was known to break and produce inconsistent prints. As Brian Benchoff said on Hackaday: “The Cupcake was a primitive machine, but it existed, it was open source, and it was cheap – under $500 if you bought it at the right time.” He notes that they were ubiquitous in maker spaces.

The lab now uses printers like the Prusa Mini and the Creality K1 which are more approachable. Preparing the printer and sending a file to print is a breeze. The Cupcake CNC required a lot of tinkering from job to job but was still a powerful tool for drawing people to the lab and empowering them to make things.

With the consistent quality of prints and their ease of use, 3D printers have become practical tools for solving problems that cannot be easily solved with an off the shelf part. As I sit writing this blog post, a member is printing a simple coat hook for his apartment. The printer is whirring away in the background solving another problem cheaply and elegantly.

• Sunday January 19th
• 12 Noon – 6PM

Got some old electronics hiding away at home? Looking for a source of spare parts for a project? Junk Independence Day is where people bring in and swap old electronics and e-waste.

Typical / past items included:

• iPods / Mp3 Players / camcorders
• Computers, laptops and parts
• Printers / Scanners
• Stereo amps, speakers
• Traffic walk/don’t walk streetlights!
• Hobby Electronics parts + kits

Not to be forgotten, there are always lots of little chips and bytes for random hacking too. Anything left at the end will be picked up on Monday and responsibly recycled!

House Rules: Items brought in for the Junk Day are not to be disassembled on site. If you want only part of an item, take it home, and bring the rest back next junk day.

Raspberry Pi Pico MicroPython Beginner Workshop for total beginners

Saturday December 29th 2pm-5:30pm

SIGN UP HERE ON EVENTBRITE

A RaspberryPi Pico Beginner Workshop for total beginners, all are welcome.

A 3d printed robot claw, electronics bits and a RaspberryPi Pico of your very own is included in the $75 ticket price. You’re more than welcome to bring your own kit and attend the workshop for $20. Please contact us to let us know you’re coming (or buy a ticket on Eventbrite).

Zach will show you how to get started with the RaspberryPi Pico, the super-friendly microcontroller platform that even artists love. We’ll cover…

• getting the software installed and going
• hooking up the RaspberryPi Pico
• little bit of basic programming in microPython using friendly examples

You too can copy and paste your way to a working project!

What you’ll need:

• A laptop on which you can install software.
• The thonny python IDE installed: https://thonny.org/

Come on out to learn with us and support your local hackerspace, hacklab.to!

Workshop Wiki Page

Come follow us on Bluesky, the social network with an open protocol that everyone is talking about! We are posting announcements and other fun things there. Our Twitter archive has also been uploaded to the site.

https://bsky.app/profile/hacklab.to

Weekend Open House – Sunday December 22nd, 3-6PM

In addition to our well know Tuesday_Pattern. Join us the also this coming Sunday!

Hope to see you out!
Bring a project if you wish!