• Sunday April 30th
• 2PM – 7PM

Got some old electronics hiding away at home? Looking for a source of spare parts for a project? Junk Independence Days 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.

• November 27th
• 2PM – 7PM

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

Items likes:

• 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 the following 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.

With Ontario re-opening efforts well into Step 3, Hacklab is also making steps towards re-opening to the public. As of Tuesday Aug 3rd, we running a limited form of our usual weekly open houses.

To maintain a safe space, masks and social distancing will still be required while inside the Hacklab Toronto space. But we look forward seeing folks out and being social once more.

Like many Canadians, Hacklab’s membership has been watching the events that have led to the ongoing protests in the United States and the world, including here in Toronto. We acknowledge and denounce the ongoing systemic racism, white supremacy and police brutality that many Black, Indigneous and racialized communities face everyday that have led to these protests. We acknowledge that these problems exist in Toronto, including in the Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, and Math (STEAM) community. Hacklab stands in solidarity with Black Lives Matter and the fight against all forms of racism. 

As a maker collective in Toronto, Hacklab is committed to helping build a community where everyone can live with dignity and freedom from fear. While we strive to be a welcoming makerspace in Toronto, we admittedly have fallen short in many areas that have led to gaps in representation of individuals from Black, Indigenous and other racialized communities.

We acknowledge that as a maker collective we need to do more to be an inclusive community. We understand that we need to centre the voices of the many Black, Indigenous and racialized makers of Toronto and the surrounding areas. As part of our actions, we are actively working to ensure these voices are heard. Our commitments include:

• Expand our outreach to Black, Indigenous and other racialized communities (e.g., by forging closer ties with groups led by and represented by those community members);
• Identify and reduce barriers for Black, Indigenous and racialized members of the STEAM community to participate in Hacklab as guests, members, and board members; and,
• Ensure that Black, Indigenous and racialized members of the STEAM community guide Hacklab to actively improve our diversity and inclusion efforts and support ongoing decision-making that considers diverse perspectives through our new Diversity and Inclusion Committee.

We all have to take ownership and responsibility to actively oppose racism within our organizations as well as ourselves as individuals in order to break down systems of oppression and exclusion. We recognize as Hacklab that we draw strength from the diversity of ideas and perspectives. As a community space that encourages people to socialize, share knowledge and collaborate, we recognize that making our own space more inclusive will strengthen our ability to “make things, repurpose things, program things, invent things and make lights blink” for the betterment of our members and our broader community.

Hack The Planet!

– HackLab.to

The Ontario Government is ordering all businesses not covered by the updated essential business list to remain closed until at least June 30th, 2020, with the possibility of an extension as the situation evolves. This is to confirm that HackLab.TO remains officially closed until further notice. This means, our public events continue to be suspended, and members should not be entering the space.

We will continue to update you as we receive updates, and we look forward to further growing our online community with all of you via email and other channels until such time as the doors of HackLab.TO are able to be reopened. We encourage you to be supportive and understanding of one another as we continue to get through this novel situation together.

COVID-19 Toronto Public Health Advice: https://www.toronto.ca/home/covid-19/

~From your board @ HackLab.TO

We’re Open! With our Tuesday Open Houses falling on Christmas Eve and New Years Eve, it’s a time to be with Friends and Family. And the community at hacklab certainly feels like the best of friends and family. So we’re open, and will be hanging out and celebrating. Your welcome to join us!

It’s everyone’s favorite time again, Junk Independence Day! Rocking Hacklab Toronto, this 8th from 2pm-7pm.

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.

Anything left at the end will be picked up on following Monday and responsibly recycled!

/!\ Reminder: Please don’t disassemble items brought in for the Junk Day, if you want only part of an item, take it home, and bring the rest back next junk day. This avoids unfortunate situations were someone brings in a working laptop, and some who really needs it, can’t get it because in between someone else tore it in half for a speaker or a battery.

Hacklab has been a rather regular cadence of activity. Our members have been focusing on shaping the upper floor which will serve as our hub, class room, kitchen and lounge area. The workshop and DIY BIO will be in the downstairs. We’d like to thank our member Norm for putting together the following two progress update videos.

In case you haven’t seen all our recent posts, Hacklab is moving! With moving comes costs, both in time and finances. To help us build our new space to meet the needs of a premier makerspace for our world-class city, our new space is undergoing a massive cleanup as well as some renovations.

Please consider donating to our Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign in order to help us move to our new location on St. Clair West. Or, if donating money isn’t your thing, shoot us a message because we’d love it if you could donate some time and muscles to help us do the heavy lifting or even swinging a hammer in the new space. Or heck, if you can share the link above that would be great, too!

We’d like to take this quick moment to thank everyone, from past and current members to our current open house guests, for joining us in our amazing journey growing from colourful Kensington Market to quirky Parkdale and onward to funky St. Clair West. Open houses are still going on at Hacklab 2.0 every week until further notice and we’d love to have you pop by for our last days in Parkdale.

Check out our awesome crowdfunding video on YouTube and we’ll see you for $5 vegan dinner this Tuesday (served around 7:30pm) at 1266 Queen Street West buzz unit 6!