Want to try some of DIYBio’s nitrogenous delicacies? We are having a party to celebrate the end of winter with some cryogenic fun!

When: April 29, 2017 at 6:30pm
Where: Hacklab Classroom
Why: Because science is awesome!

Please RSVP if you will be attending (but come anyway even if you don’t RSVP)

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/liquid-nitrogen-ice-cream-party-tickets-33720751676

Our next Junk Independence Day at the Hacklab is Sunday April 9th from 2pm-8pm. Bring your e-waste or other electronics you want to get rid of, root around in other people e-waste, and walk home with new treasure. On previous Junk Independence Days people have gone home with wonderful treasures like a classic Macintosh, old but still good LCDs, Stereos and lots of random electronic bits for hacking on. Come with your e-waste and have some fun socializing with other hackers!

Maker Festival, after the great success of the component art workshop last year, is in particular looking for colourful old electronic components. If you’ve got pretty-looking capacitors, old vacuum tubes, awesome looking ICs, or any other small components that could be used as decorative pieces in a “component art” sculpture, please bring them out, and we will put them to good use. Note: they do not need to be functional, merely good looking!

Anything left at the end will be picked up on Monday April 10th and responsibly recycled by Revolution Recycling, who have been participating in our Junk Independence Days since the very first one. Thanks Revolution!

Once more unto the Junk! Our next Junk Independence Day at the Hacklab is this coming Sunday October 23rd from 2pm-7pm (or later). Bring your e-waste or other electronics you want to get rid of, root around in other people e-waste, and walk home with new treasure. On previous Junk Independence Days people have gone home with wonderful treasures like a classic Macintosh, old but still good LCDs, Stereos and lots of random electronic bits for hacking on. Come with your e-waste and have some fun socializing with other hackers!

Anything left at the end will be picked up on Monday October 24th and responsibly recycled by Revolution Recycling, who has been participating in our Junk Independence Days since the first one. Thanks Revolution

As some of you might already know, the Hacklab has a photographic darkroom where we do processing of many kinds of B&W and colour films. All of these processes require a series of fairly precisely-timed steps, where the film or paper is exposed to various chemical baths. A number of these processes require complete darkness (no red safelight!), so you can’t have a timer that has a readable display. Commercial timers solve this by beeping once per second, so you know they’re still timing. As you can imagine, this gets very annoying after an hour or more of working in the dark!

I set out to design a new timer that would be less annoying and more functional. My original design goals were:
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It comes again! Our next Junk Independence Day at the Hacklab is this coming Sunday June 26th from 2pm-7pm (or later). Bring your e-waste or other electronics you want to get rid of, root around in other people e-waste, and walk home with new treasure. On previous Junk Independence Days people have gone home with wonderful treasures like a 1TB HD, an iPod touch, a decent desktop computer, a classic Macintosh, and lots of random electronic bits for hacking on. Come with your e-waste and have some fun socializing with other hackers!
Anything left at the end will be picked up on Monday June 27th and responsibly recycled by Revolution Recycling, who has been participating in our Junk Independence Days since the first one. Thanks Revolution

Hacklab is a big part of the Maker Festival Satellite Events this year – we’ve got EIGHT workshop/events all queued up for the Month of Making (June 15th – July 17th)! I’m especially excited about the Soldering Workshop – Component Art and the Sewing 101: DIY button up shirt workshops, but there is something for everyone! We’ll also be exhibiting at Maker Festival July 9th & 10th, at the Toronto Reference Library. Come check out our booth!

Awh… The joy of a hacker space. All the tools to build this lovely PiDP-8/I replica of the PDP-8/I kit from Oscar Vermeulen.

The hacklab hackaday bring your hack meetup, back for the second year. Get your (free) tickets here:
https://hacklabhackaday2.eventbrite.ca
Hacklab.TO and Hackaday are hosting a Bring A Hack meetup on April 20th 2016! Doors 7pm, talks start 8pm. Party till late.

We’ll have drinks, snacks, hacks and swag. It’s a Bring A Hack style meetup, where you bring the project you’re working on and show it off to enthusiastic supporters.

There will also be lightning talks, which are short talks about projects or ideas you’re working on.

Sophi from Hackaday will be in town to talk about the Hackaday Prize, the engineering competition with $300,000 in cash prizes (you read that correctly!). http://hackaday.io/prize

Want to get on the talks list? Let us know! (contact sophikravitz at hackaday.com)

NOTE: as with last year, we expect overwhelming demand. Seats will go fast, grab them while you can. Then we’ve got some standing room only in the back/side of the room. If you’re really interested in checking out hacklab, we also offer an Open House every Tuesday 6pm till late, so feel free to drop by.

Our upcoming 100 Member Party is THIS FRIDAY, March 11th, starting at 6pm till late. Because of its proximity to Pi Day (March 14 = 3.14) I’ve decided to combine the parties, so it will also be our annual Pi Day Party! For those who don’t know, Pi Day is an annual celebration which involves consuming a LOT of pie!

It will be free to attend, and everyone is welcome – you do not have to be a member of hacklab to come and join the fun. Please tell all your friends.

If you’d like to consume some of the pie, we ask only that you either bring a pie (sweet, savory, pizza, whatever, all kinds of pie are awesome!), or donate suggested $5 (PWYC) to hacklab. This ensures we’ll have enough pie for everyone.

Hope to see you all on Friday!

At the Hacklab, to save power, we needed a way to turn off devices when nobody was at the Lab.  Rather than buy expensive Insteon or Z-Wave modules, Hacklab member Av (that’s me!) reverse-engineered the radio protocol on these super cheap ($8 each) controllable outlet modules.

For a total cost of $47, you can now control 5 or more outlets via Wifi.  All that’s needed is an ESP8266 and a 433Mhz transmitter module.  No soldering or electronics is required, it’s just three wires!

Check out the rest of the project with source code on Av’s Site.