The first ever Harford Hackerspace meeting went well as planned. We have some great talent in our little group and I can’t wait to start feeding off their knowledge. You can read more about the meeting discussion at the link below or by visiting our wiki. http://wiki.harfordhackerspace.org/index.php?title=Firstmeeting

The first ever Harford Hackerspace meeting will be held on February 22nd, 2009 @ 12pm (noon). It will held at Squintz’ house. To attend you may either e-mail Squintz at info@harfordhackerspace.org or add a comment to this blog.

Pizza, and Drinks will be served!

Agenda: Meet and Greet all the initial supporters of Harford Hackerspace and make new friends.

The members of Harford Hackerspace would like to extend a warm welcome to our newest member from Cecil County Maryland. Q5Sys was refered to us by a friend of his. I’m not sure who that friend is or how he heard about us but we appreciate it. I had a short conversation in the IRC chat room with Q and he is a young, energetic, down to earth kind of guy who is into every type of project you throw at him.

Harford Hackerspace is now officially 2 members large. I managed to reach BSOM through the Baltimore-DorkBot mailing list. Thanks to Q at www.theqlabs.com for suggesting I use the mailing list.

BSOM has been a great help already. He has already created a new logo for us which is a huge hit. He is currently working on Flyers to attract new members the analog way and has plans to customize the look and feel of our website.

I was day dreaming about this logo at work and I even used Paint to sketch the concept. As you can see the original idea included a capacitor and a resistor. I would still like to work some type of electronics or code into the image but my artistic abilities pretty much stop at what you see.

I am certainly open to new ideas. If you are an artist or simply good with computer graphics and would like to make us a nice vector graphic then by all means please do so. Feel free to simply improve this logo. About .001% of my computer skills are related to graphics. Some of the obvious issues with this are are its scale, the font, and the bluriness of the bmp export. It was create in about 10 minutes using InkScape.

One of the main reasons for me starting this club is to create a space for all my tools. Here are my two newest tools which will hapily be loaned to the organization once we get one going. These were aquired with the intention of using them to build a RepRap (www.reprap.org) from Birch plywood.

I plan to use transfer paper to print out the shapes at their full size. Then I will cut the shapes as close as I can with the scroll saw and finish them up with the drill press??? Yes, I said drill press. That’s because I purchased a Drum Sanding adapter that turns the drill press into a drum sander. I’ll of course use the drill press to drill the required holes as well.

Mini Drill Press

Scroll Saw

As you can see this is not your typical scroll saw and drill press. They are miniturized to some extent. The scroll saw is only 16″ long and the drill press is roughly 18″ tall when fully assembled. The price also matches the small size. The scroll saw was aproximately $70 from my local harborfreight and the drill press was $80 ordered online.

I will feature more tools under the Tool Shed category in the near future.

Harford Hackerspace is a club with real people in real places. The idea behind this club is to recruit enough members in the local area of Harford County, Maryland (MD) that we can lease a commercial building and populated with all the tools you need to get your projects moving. 

If it falls into the category of Mechanics, Electronics, Software, Science, or Technology then you are the perfect candidate to join our club. Robotics, Web Development, DNA Research, HAM Radio, and Your Car are all examples of types of projects we could be working on together as a team in a setting like no other.

The ideal Hackerspace location would be a commercial building with a garage, kitchen, several offices for computers and electronics, and a social lounge for speaches, presentations, classroom style learning, general socializing and networking, and PARTIES.  It would also be nice to have a Bar but that’s just me dreaming.

So what do you think? Does this sound like something you would be interested in? If it does then contact me directly at info@harfordhackerspace.org