On Saturday the Repair Cafe had a successful repair clinic at Hacklab Toronto.
Many came through the lab for a tour while waiting for their spot in line to start
work on their personal treasures to be repaired, and to learn a little about
repair themselves. Like those articles and photo narratives, in the past
crosstalk has featured other spaces, how others engage with the wider community.
This successful Repair Cafe was hosted by Hacklab Toronto, and allowed the lab
to give back to a community that does great work.

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.

Collaboration on the Retro Populator is still on going and some new progress photos can be found below. We have a new needle assembly, and have been doing minimum pressure testing to pick up components.
Additional news is that the Retro Populator has been announced as an semifinalist 1 of 50 top projects. In addition I learned earlier this week, that Hackaday.com featured the Retro Populator in an article post on there website.  Eric, Charles, Rob, myself, as well as Hacklab Toronto was mentioned in this post. Unfortunately Hackaday did not mention The Ultimate workshop and I hope they fix this issue soon. The Retro Populator is a collaboration and joint creative adventure between both Hacklab Toronto and The Ultimate Workshop. Both sharing resources, knowledge, and skills to create something that we hope others in turn will create there own enhancements for, and use it to create new technologies.

Every Project has a story.

This post could be a run on sentence if it were possible to do so with photos. Today I will be doing a double photo feature, about an ongoing collaboration between the Ultimate Workshop and HackLab Toronto, and one regarding what you will find at the Ultimate Workshop.

This on going collaboration between the two spaces is called the Retropopulator. The Retropopulator gets it name from its function and purpose. Retro is short for Retrofit, in this case we are re-purposing a 3D printer. While Populator is what happens when the 3D printer now is able to place components onto PCBs. The Retropopulator is intended to be a simple way of using older 3D printers as a pick and place. This project was born out of a response to Hackaday’s contest for the next new thing. To take a look at the Retropopulator on Hackaday.

For more photos of the build look below for (continue reading…) below.

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