Leeds Hackspace - Doing it right!

On the 7^th July 2012 Matt Little, James Hayward and myself ventured north to Leeds for the Leeds Hackspace Open Day. Having moved in on Star Wars day earlier in the year, Leeds felt ready to show off their Hackspace 2.0.

I’d been to visit the Leeds Hackspace v1 in February 2011 on their open night. It’d not be fair to say they were doing it wrong back then. But they were doing it wrong back then. They’d managed to find a space to rent right out on the ring road at the end of some back-to-backs adjacent to the Eland Road. I spent about 45 minutes on the street looking for the door, which I only found when I saw one blue LED shining out. When I got inside, there wasn’t really anywhere for me to sit. The regular members were already occupying all 6, 1-seat-desks. There was no milk for coffee and I had to introduce myself to people. It transpired sometime later that the Hackspace had run up large debts through unpaid bills for internet and other things.

To show that spaces can rise from the flames lets find out about Hackspace 2.0 behind trendyRegent Street, just minutes walk from the city and main bus station. Okay I have no idea ifRegent Street is trendy. But it’s a huge improvement on the old area the space v1 was in.

http://leedshackspace.org.uk/our-current-venue/

Finding Mabgate Green was pretty easy. Not only that they Hackers had made some really big clear signs for the entrance and side of their new space. No question where it was at all. I think it’s a very good idea to have good signage on the outside of a Hackspace. Lots of folks think this is an open invite to robbers though so the debate continues. I’d argue that there isn’t generally anything much worth nicking in a Hackspace unless there are members in it, then you could get laptops, money, phones and other shiny. However you can say the same about anywhere really.

The space is on the 1^st floor. My first impression was that it is open, airy and well lit. The windows on 3 sides help a lot with this. The space itself is a fair size and is well laid out with workshop benches to the right of the door as well as electronics areas throughout and a big SNACKSPACE-TUCKSHOP area with fridges for both types of drinks. All the light in the day time makes the space very conducive to working on projects. The ceilings are a good height and have ironwork grid girders which are handy for hanging shiny and awesome off of. They also made good use of these gantries for extra lighting.

At the far end of the room is a comfy area with a chaise longue and other comfy seating. The comfort is somewhat offset by the looming presence of a drum kit… how I hate band practice. The Chaise longue adds a certain amount of class I suppose. I was delighted to see the “Chiltern Railways” digital clock being used as a matrix display repeating the last tweet mentioning @leedshackspace. This had been completed by Angus who was in fact himself made by a member of the Nottingham Hackspace so we’ll take credit for that here at Nottinghack too… (Angus’ Mum is an active member of the Nottingham Hackspace).

As we entered Jon who we know well from other stuff bobbed up and gave us the dime tour. I was very impressed with the central work table which had a large Leeds Hackspace sky blue H logo painted on it. The table was easily able to accommodate 6 or more hackers with kit. At the top end HACMan’s Bob Clough presided, he’d popped over by train to warm the space too. Other notable visitors were Jo from Edinburgh Hack Lab and me of course!

I can confirm that Leeds Hackspace has the largest pizzas. These things were the size of mountain bike wheels. There was also cake, lots of cake. Excitingly there is another room right next door about double the size of the one they have. They are currently allowed to use this to break out into and had a lot of their junk stored inside. Below was a brand new unregistered Jag! They’ll have the option to rent this room in the future. At the moment they can’t secure it physically as they have to share access to the toilets with their neighbours (a bike co-operative also worth a visit).

High jinks were had with a small Mamod steam engine trying to generate electricity with it. We almost managed to run an LED with steam, but not quite. Matt Little had a lot of fun plying with some sensors and a pizo buzzer. We were very kindly given party favours of tubes of 555 timers and OpAmps to take back to Nottingham and Bristol too.

 I was keen to grab some audio for Hack ALL the Spaces but like a Muppet I forgot my mic and also my iRig mic for my iPhone. Leeds Hackspace didn’t have a good one unfortunately and we had left it too late to get one from Maplin though an interesting debate about there 9 hour delivery did ensue. Maplin is 2 minutes walk away but was shut. In the end we had to use the tiny mic in a broken headset. I’ve not yet been able to do anything with the audio files we captured because they need converting to a format I can edit. When that is done I will be posting the mini-podcast with myself Bob (of HacMan), Jon and Flig.

Overall I was very impressed with the place. Seems that they are doing it right.