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

Dear Past, Present, and Future HackLab.TO guests,

Due to the Covid-19 Pandemic effectively immediately until at least April 6th, 2020 Hacklab will suspend public events, including the open house.

This closure comes in recognition of:

• public schools being closed for an extended two weeks in addition to March break
• businesses being encouraged to have employees work remotely
• and social distancing being implemented in shared spaces in the effort to flatten the curve and halt the spread of COVID-19 virus both in our area and the province.

We are sad to close our doors to all of you during this time as the community has always been and will continue to be a key component of the HackLab.TO experience. Open houses usually held on Tuesday night provide an opportunity for us to connect with the local community, invite new members to join, as well as share knowledge and resources in general.

HackLab.TO is an inclusive maker space advocating for all, so please remember that COVID-19 is a virus and as such it is not specific to one race, nationality, or ethnicity.  Treat each other with kindness, care, and compassion in this trying and challenging time.

We hope to see you all soon and are looking forward to getting back to activities as usual.  Until then, please visit our website https://HackLab.TO for up-to-date information, or subscribe to our twitter feed @hacklabto or facebook.com/Hacklab.TO !

~From your local makerspace 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.

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.