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!

Oh wow, you folks really want to be back in the space! With the good weather we had a dozen members and 5 unprompted guests at the lab today, making this evening a soft-open! So while we’re still rough around the edges, we happily welcome folks back to our public open houses!

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!

Hacklab’s current lease is ending, and our building is being reconstructed and repurposed. After almost 3 ½ months of looking for the perfect spot, we voted to move to 1677 St. Clair Ave. W. Moving is a lot of work, so please come and help out! Open house and other public events will continue at 1266 Queen St. W., until further notice.

Our current location, 1266 Queen W, has served us well for the last 4 years. But come the new year, all tenants must leave the building for the constructions of additional floors.

Hacklab needs a new home. A Hacklab 3.0!

If you know of any spaces please reach out to us.

We’re looking for:
* 1500 – 2200 sqr/ft
* Dividable in to three main areas: Machine Shop, BioLab and common area.
* Transit accessibility

It’s everyone’s favorite time again, Junk Independence Day! Rocking Hacklab Toronto, this 18th 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 by Revolution Recycling, who has been participating in our Junk Independence Days since the first one. Thanks Revolution!!

/!\ 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.

Celebrate both Hallowe’en and Hacklab’s milestone 10th year in style at our Hack’o’ween Fundraiser! We’ll have DJs and dancing, a raffle with awesome prizes provided by our members including 1-on-1 lessons and mentoring in a wide range of areas, Hacklab t-shirts, collectables and more! Spooky weird science is everywhere!

Hacklab is the longest-running makerspace in Toronto. Started from humble beginnings as a place for techies to build and play with equipment as well as controlling it with software programming in a Kensington bunker, Hacklab has grown to include the DIYBio and chemistry lab, sewing corner, VR lab and more.

Come help us celebrate and raise funds to ensure the doors stay open and we continue to share and help members and non-members alike make their dream projects come to life!

Snacks, non-alcoholic beverages and fluorescent mocktails will be available however this is a BYOB event.

Nitty Gritty Data:

Saturday October 27th, 2018 9pm – 2am

$20 in advance

Tickets available through Eventbrite: https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/hackoween-2018-tickets-50801266957 linked to Facebook event: https://www.facebook.com/events/2143497519015524/

**no ticket refunds 7 days run up to the event

IMG_3743 by W1N9Zr0

Every last Saturday of the month, from around 3 pm until whenever people leave, the lab opens up our front door to members of the public. We’re specifically excited about folks who want to show off projects they have made or are working on, want to ask for help with making something awesome, or want to help out on other folks’ projects. Bringing a laptop along to just chill out with other geeks is also welcome.

There’s no minimum skill level required to participate, and we do our best to be a respectful, friendly environment for everyone. Regretfully we are not wheelchair accessible – there are steps leading up to the floor the lab is on. As a heads-up to folks with sensory processing issues, the Tuesdays can get quite busy and noisy. 3-5pm tends to be the busiest time, but in our new larger space there are usually places you can get away from it.

Members of the media are also welcome, but in the interest of member privacy, we have cute little press passes hanging by the door and require that permission is sought before taking photos with people in them.

It’s everyone’s favorite time again, Junk Independence Day! Rocking Hacklab Toronto, this July 22nd 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 by Revolution Recycling, who has been participating in our Junk Independence Days since the first one. Thanks Revolution!!

Eventbrite free tickets/reminder:  https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/junk-independence-day-tickets-47904529738

Facebook event page: https://www.facebook.com/events/1821960631159775/