Hacklab will be hosting 4 satellite events for maker festival:

Hacklab 7th Birthday Party and BBQ – Saturday July 25th at 6pm – late. Tickets are $10 and get you free food and drink! Project Show & Tell event at 9pm, come and see or come and show off yours!

Hacklab open house – Tuesday July 28th, 6pm-11pm. Get a tour on our most crowded open house of the year! Come hang with fellow makers and get some last minute help on your project.

3D Hubs & ColorFabb Workshop Toronto – Wednesday July 29 6-8PM. Tickets include some samples of cool new 3D printer filament materials and workshop on how to use them.

DIYbio.TO presents The Evolving Landscape of Open Source & Biotechnology, a discussion of open source and biotech with Ryan Merkeley – CEO, Creative Commons; Abigail Cabunoc – Lead Developer, Mozilla Science Lab; Raymond Hui – Scientist, Structural Genomics Consortium; and others, including you! Free or PWYC.

Finally, Maker Festival itself is August 1st and 2nd at the Toronto Reference Library, hacklab will be an exhibitor, come and see our stuff. And the stuff of ~100 other makers! Tickets are free!

Lockpicking is a fun and unusual skill, and can help people get a better grasp of their physical security situation. Come to one of Hacklab’s two lockpicking workshops and learn a skill which is applicable for physical/digital security experts, security-minded home-owners, and anyone who wants to survive the zombie apocalypse!

Hacklab is running two Lockpicking workshops on July 5; the first running from 2pm until 4pm, and the second running from 5pm until 7pm. This event is open to all ages and all interested parties. Free signup at EventBrite is mandatory — there are only 5 spots available at each workshop. This event is Pay-What-You-Can, with a suggested donation of $10 or more to help us keep the lights on. Nobody will be turned away for lack of funds.

If you don’t get a ticket, don’t worry: we’ll be running this workshop again soon!

Signup for Lockpicking Workshop #1 or #2 at Eventbrite

Hacklab will be at the Maker Festival this coming August 1st and 2nd, showing off our awesome member projects. Previously known as the Toronto Mini Maker Faire, it’s back this year bigger and better, with more room for exhibitors, and a upcoming set of satellite events all across Toronto and the GTA. Maker Festival celebrates making and the people who make things, including things near to dear to hacklab’s heart like electronics, robotics, 3D printing, wearables, and drones. Tickets to the event are free and you can RSVP now to avoid the waiver-signing line. If you’re a maker, the Call for Makers is still open – but hurry it closes May 30th at midnight! We’d love to have you at a table beside us at the festival!

Hacklab member Daria demonstrates the radiating power of our 100W 80m-band transmissions on the Hacklab’s new amateur radio antenna.

Hacklab has been slowly been building a HAM set-up for a while now.
It started as a discussion and when equipment started being installed it quickly built up to a full installation. Note if you are part of another hacker space or an individual in North America or in the GTA with their own HAM set-up, Tuesday night is our open house and it’s likely the best time to reach us.

There was a huge turnout at our event yesterday in collaboration with Hackaday! Check out some photos.

Hacklab.TO and Hackaday are hosting a Bring A Hack meetup on April 15th! Doors 7pm, talks start 8pm.  Party till late.  Please RSVP on eventbrite: Bring a Hack, this will let us buy the right amount of beer and pizza :-)

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 lightening 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 that sends you to Space (SERIOUSLY).  http://hackaday.io/

In fact, Hacklab entered the competition last year and will talk about their project, Retro Populator. Want to get on the talks list? Let us know! (contact sophikravitz at hackaday dot com)

UPDATE: just to be clear, you can totally just come to see the talks and hacks, you don’t need to bring your own, and nor do you need to be a hacklab member.  Just RSVP and come have some fun!

Junk independence day at hacklab again, Sunday March 22nd!  2-7pm. Bring your e-waste, 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 various pieces for projects… Anyway, come with your e-waste and have some fun at hacklab!   All e-waste will be responsibly disposed of by Revolution Recycling, they are scheduled to pickup stuff at hacklab on Monday March 23rd.  Thanks Revolution!

Just in case you were wondering.

Location: 1266 Queen Street West, Unit #6
When: Feb 28, 2pm until 8pm (or later if there are still lots of people around)
How to get in: use the buzzer panel beside the door to call for entry

Good news for all the folks who can’t make it out for our weekday open-houses: this Saturday February 28, Hacklab will be hosting a weekend open-house from 2pm until late!  Scheduled end-time is 8pm, but it could go on longer depending on how many people show up.

This is an all-ages event, and is open to everyone regardless of experience or technical skill level.  We love meeting new people and seeing regulars, so come and check us out.  Bring your projects to show off, your laptops to hack/code on, or something you’re curious about.  Hacklab has an electronics/coding area, a large classroom, a wood-shop, a kitchen, a lounge, and a sewing area, all of which are open for use.

There will be some free vegan food, but if you feel moved to bring some noms to share, we encourage that.

See you all there!

RSVP with Eventbrite (not required, but encouraged)