The drive from Plano to Arlington is a bit daunting – they don’t call it a Metroplex for nothing – it proves to be a round-trip voyage of about 110 miles, past the original Six Flags theme park and the giant AT&T Stadium, home of the 4-and-11 Dallas Cowboys. The University of Texas as Arlington is located just south of downtown, where free 2-hour parking isn’t so hard to find. Still, it is a bit of a hoof deep into campus, past the Engineering Quad and the maze of other buildings to the central Library, the home of the UTA FabLab. Like in Tulsa or Oklahoma City, it’s open to the public, though have your Driver’s Licence ready; the library makes you stop at a check-in desk.

The creative space is tucked into the southwest corner of the first floor, just off to the right of the entrance. A large wheeled whiteboard serves as the OPEN/CLOSED sign for the space. It’s a little bit before noon, well into the swing of things; the board’s OPEN side is invitingly facing your way, between a few scattered study desks, though beyond a certain point off to the left, there’s just bare tile floor. Today, the entire south side of the building past the FabLab is ripped apart and cordoned off with black plastic sheeting, clearly for some impending renovation. Nearly a dozen people buzz about the well-used facility, the printers chugging away, and the vinyl and laser cutters are seeing steady use as well.

Daylight streams in abundance through the south-facing windows; so many shop floors are enclosed, and wholly lit by fluorescent tubes. This is easily the brightest space I’ve yet seen. Clever stickers and galleries of past works abound. Machined designs of all types, from building models to functional object lifts, printed as a whole piece. You even have your choice of material to ape that famous Vapourwave album cover from Macintosh Plus, “Floral Shoppe” — available in your choice of rustic wood veneer or wispy traces in glass. Welcome to the future!

The equipment is all the standard FabLab fare, though they have a sewing machine as a bonus, plus a little extra in the way of 3D scanning; There’s a static unit suitable for small objects, or a handheld 3D Sense “wand” that can capture human sized objects – like, say, a bust! You have to stay pretty still, and the optical pickup doesn’t quite deal with glasses. But there it is, 15MB of me!

Turns out, it’s actually a very auspicious time to visit this lab – over the next few weeks, half of the Library’s first floor will be renovated into the Fab Lab Expansion – home to all the woodworking and metalworking equipment they don’t yet have. Along with this, a second laser cutter is going into the southwest corner, right next to the existing one! As the lab grows, they’re contemplating adding a membership fee, but they have a commitment to keeping the space open to the public – the exchange of ideas is important to the health of any creative space, after all.

The FabLab isn’t just for making cool doodads, though. There’s serious research going on here, too! My tour host has actually been working on a Master’s Degree and is now starting on a Ph.D, all deeply related to the FabLab and its manufacturing technology. Of course, when you write your thesis and go straight into your dissertation, it’s not sent straight out, it’s on hold pending the rest of the work. So you’ll have to come back in a couple years to get the full white paper on the UTA FabLab, but you only have to wait until February to check out all the cool new stuff!

My time in Dallas was professionally productive, in no small measure due to my participation with TheLab.ms. The group caught my eye almost immediately when I set out; their focus on computer networks, in addition to the other trappings of the makerverse, is an interesting angle, and the group was certainly more intimate than the gigantic Dallas Makerspace in Carrollton. These are real nerds, to be sure; their logo is based on a glider pattern from The Game of Life. It’s an exciting time to stop by; the Hoverboard is a viable means of transportation here, and just weeks ago, several teams from the space participated in a massive Trebuchet competition in Plano, launching pumpkins and squids to improbable distances.

The genesis of TheLab.ms was in Meetups, many at the (sadly, defunct) Alan Wicker’s Bar in Plano. In August, TheLab officially moved into its space, sandwiched between three restaurants and a coffee bar in a strip mall. Inside, you’re greeted by a small room home to the space’s two identical MakerBot-clone 3D printers, dual-extruder units with acrylic cabinets that work well with ABS. The resident print czar has already retrofitted them with Raspberry Pis, webcams on $8 IKEA desk lamp arms to take full advantage of Octoprint. Calibration is almost there, with the first attempt to print an RPi case demonstrating that the printer is just a little bit off dimensionally (Getting the right model to print off of Thingiverse, that’s another story entirely!)

These units have a lot of flexibility; they can print two identical objects at once (if the print is thinner than the extruders are set apart), or layer two colours of plastic in a single build (like a VLCesque traffic cone), or the traditional pathway, where one material provides support whilst the other remains in the final product. It’s all customizable, whereas many dual-extruder printers only let you run the support material option. Another custom mod is the glass sheets covering the print stage; the units ship with polymer stages that feel like sheets of painter’s tape, which have great adhesion but typically last just 50 or so prints. The glass sheets are much more durable, even if shattering is a worry. Another advantage of moving to removable stages? No more poking at the bottom with a metal spatula to get your plastic, just pop your completed print in the freezer, it’ll detach in moments. Just ignore the popping sound the glass makes as it shrinks – sure, breakage might still be a worry with the cheapest window glass from the hardware store, but decently strong potash or borosilicate glass is certainly an option down the line, now that the concept is proven.

Past the printers is the doorway to the main hall, leading left to Classroom One, the main hangout for the coders and remote-workers, rigged with dual screens and dual cameras for teleconferencing and presentations, or head right to the Common room, host to the refrigerator, browning convection microwave, network equipment, soldering stations. This is the main space for member meetings, and there’s a comfy recliner sofa along with sets of deployable stacking chairs. Farther down the hall is Classroom Two, presently set up as a boardroom, and behind that, the storeroom that will eventually be a Recording Studio. At the end of the hall is a restroom, complementing another just off the Common room.

They’re still rounding the corner on infrastructure development; By mid-December, in addition to renovating and painting the entire place, they had succeeded in running cameras and Ethernet cable everywhere, with the help of spiffy 3D-Printed mounting clamps. Things like a laser and woodworking gear are planned for down the line; in the near-term, a second space for a “dirty” workshop for wood and metalworking, as their member base and interests expand. In the “clean” space the next item on the list is professional recording equipment, to get together a nice soundbooth for podcasting and more! Also, each classroom is getting a nice USB condenser mic hung from the ceiling, which will make for better conferencing and recording compared with the pickups on the cameras.

The membership consists of a plurality of web designers, with a smattering of hardware and network engineers, plus bloggers and other technical types. During my visit, another passing blogger hangs a television on the wall, and gives a half-decent talk to the members; more on him soon. The network engineers are very interested in getting the network hyper-secure, RADIUS on the WiFi and everything, but are also among the most busy of the members, so the work is taking a little longer than planned. I get seconded to terminate a dozen or so network ports they’re still deploying to the rooms. When I plugged them into the router, they “worked” electrically, but data was blocked by router configuration. Such is the nature of Infosec. Another frustration they have is being surrounded by optical fibre, yet their building didn’t have it put in. There are always ways to jumper bandwidth over a modest distance – though for now, a business-class Cable Modem will do.

Food of choice here? Marinara Pizza next door – amazingly good, New York Style, $5 for a drink and a slice. TheLab’s fridge is filled with 50-cent Soda, so it seems I have managed to cross that line, though by all accounts this may be partially due to the place being full of northern ex-pats. This is also a beer-drinking club! The fridge is usually full of a serviceable microbrew, and every month, there’s a brewmaster meetup, you can even rent $30 worth of equipment if you don’t have it, to enjoy 5 gallons of home-grown beer.

The newest and coolest tradition is WoFLFri (Work From the Lab Fridays) – an opportunity for work-from-home types to get-it-done at TheLab for a nice change of pace and lunch at Plano’s dizzying array of mealtime choices. And naturally, there are the monthly Open Houses, on the Second Saturday of the month. Going into Year Two at their own space, TheLab is starting to save up a few nickels to think about getting shop equipment – new members are coming in at $30 a month, still totally reasonable as far as spaces go.

TheLab has yet more ambitious ideas, as far-flung as Optical Networking and Costa Rica. It isn’t hard to stay in touch with the group, in addition to the standby Meetup.com events page, their website is going through a redesign soon, and they have both IRC and SLACK! I did make a donation as a member for the month of December, and the crew was very excited to host me. In addition to providing me one of their old-school Conceptual Intercourse T-Shirts, TheLab let me hold onto one of their Red RFID keyfobs – one of the first issued, as it happens – and their first dual-extruded kickstand-key, suitable for propping up non-phablet sized phones for easy video watching! I’ll be sure to put it to good use on my next anime night.

On Tuesday, the sun began to shine again over a rain-soaked Oklahoma City, just the thing to bring out the bright colours of the Rose State College Health and Environmental Sciences Building.  Its blue and gold veneer faces Interstate 40 just off Tinker Air Force Base.  A column past the grand carport holds up a glowing marquee inviting passersby to register for Spring Classes at this “military friendly” community college.

Veering off I-40 presciently before this display, or perhaps backtracking circuitously from Southeast 15th Street, where Google and the campus newspaper say Rose State is, one may find this building’s parking lot, sunk into the ground just out of sight from the cross street.  You’ll have to drive through a couple other lots to find the large banner strung across the rear entrance of “HES” announcing the location of the FAB LAB at Rose State College.  Entering in the automatic double-doors, you find the foundry just to the left, announced by bright acrylic panels stuck to the wall, its double doors angled to face both the entryway and the passing hall.  The computer lab ahead is also part of the space and the restrooms are just to the left down the hall.

As soon as you enter, you see the entire World to your left, brought here via webcam and a big-screen TV.  (Europe isn’t awake right now.)  You can pantomime, draw, or fiddle with the remote until the microphone works, and trade questions with the other FabLabs – “Do you speak Portuguese?”   Moving clockwise,  the Laser Cutter, the Mill, the Moulding station, the vinyl cutter, the T-Shirt press, the Makerbots, and the in-house design lab.  At each step, my host shares insights into how the membership has been uses each to benefit students and the community.

For laser-cutting, the materials of choice here are cardboard – in vast supply, donated from a restaurant – and acrylic, which holds a sharp edge without mess or fumes.  Various cardboard structures are placed upon the space’s Christmas Tree, topped with a star-like ball made of 30 well-styled sigmoid curves.  Tour groups of schoolkids get to build their own papercraft butterflies and pterodactyls, just like the ones flying under the tile ceiling.  Starting with the files from Thingiverse, taking them through 1-2-3D Make, and finishing with laser-cutting and assembly.

Another cornerstone of the lab’s toolbox is cast moulding, the simple joy of being able to copy objects!  Imagine having a precious family heirloom, like Grandma’s ceramic turtle.  A layer of silicone, a layer of rubber, then set in some liquid plastic, and now all the aunts have a copy!  Or cross the streams – combine a lasercut acrylic or 3D printed master, and cast as many decorative chain links or Commander Shepard Paragon Points as you like, no need to do them one at a time on the slower machines.

Of course, the 3D Printer can build parts that cannot otherwise be cast or cut – for example, the NASA socket wrench recently designed to replace a part on the International Space Station!  Not satisfied with bland squares and hexes inside these 3D parts, the lab has a certain fondness for changing their infill pattern.  One build is filled with tessellated cats, another with sharks!  It’s showy – when you print in an opaque plastic, you’ll only see the pattern until it’s sealed off.  But who needs practicality when you have fun?

When it comes to building or refining concepts, the staff is very eager to assist area makers; Community entrepreneurs have prototyped a few inventions at the space, and there is also a fair bit of academic interest in the facility, especially from a medical perspective (handy being in a health building!).  Along that line, it’s being used to build prosthetic arms and there’s an edgy project to model tumours inside brain tissue, there’s all those sticking points with data ethics and privacy of MRI scans.  More practical is the service the FabLab provides the local facilities staff, replicating hard-to-find or out-of-production replacement parts, things like window clips or ceiling light mounts.  And as a bit of fun, the lab has made Oscar-like statuettes for awards events, it is Oscar Rose State College, after all!

They feed the MakerBots with PLA and the uPrint with Stratasys ABS and support material.  in the eternal back-and-forth between Painter’s Tape and Kapton, there is no contest here.  50mm rolls of Blue Painters’ Tape does it all!  Rolls of it sit everywhere in the facility.  Use it on the 3D Printers for a stick-free build, use it to cover the seam of a casting, and naturally you can even use it as tape!  They try to keep food out of the lab, it’s not exactly the sort of place tor heavy collaboration over lunch or dinner.  Still, every now and again, the go-to crowdpleaser is Hot-and-Ready Little Caesar’s Pizza, fetched as carryout from the nearby location.

There’s nothing in the way of woodworking, though there are other campus shop spaces where that’s possible.  This Lab is in a Health Science / Environmental Science building, and a bunch of sawdust everywhere would be hard to manage.  The space is safer and more accessible with a clean room design.

In Tulsa, I had mentioned that FabLabs are often limited in their reach.  Yet here is an academic institution getting it right, in my book, by being open to the community as a whole, and certainly not shy of doing a tour on short notice.  They’re working on getting the space integrated into more of the engineering and technology coursework, to help familiarize people with what they can do here, and get more Rose State students excited and invested into the space.  It’s definitely worth the hike from the middle of campus, or from anywhere in Central Oklahoma!

December has dawned in Oklahoma City, it’s 7pm and the trendy Midtown neighbourhood is lightly abuzz with holiday shoppers filtering between geodesic domes of seasonal fare. The domes are white-strutted, sized between jungle gym and toolshed, just about what you’d want for a pop-up stall. Some have clear panelling, you can see the tinkling and faux-fire lights, holly, and pine wreathes within. Others are covered in buff vinyl, their yuletide offerings a mystery as I walk down Northwest Tenth Street.

A pile of pickup trucks surround two sides of a uniformly beige building. Two steel columns come down from a high, flat roof to an island, cutting an accessway off from the street. Two giant garage doors facing this drive give the space every outward appearance of being a former service station. In the bay window facing the end of the turnaround, an LED matrix is hung, blaring makership to the otherwise unknowing external surface. The brasshandled door, guarded by a green loop of circuitry, says “ProtoTek” across the window. The line of grey vinyl-on-particle-board tables just past the threshold are lined with members, each facing into their respective laptops. I try the door; it’s not open house night, so the fob loop frowns red, and it stays put. My knock causes a minor shock, but presently, the head honcho comes to greet me.

Meeting rooms lay deep off ahead and to the left. The electronics workshop is in the corner, sandwiched between an office and a photography studio. The right wall is covered with a huge eight-segment projection HDTV, like you might expect from NASA Mission Control. As a backup, they still have a decent projector and a massive screen ready to be pulled down for the odd presentation or pizza party.

That’s just the lobby! My vision of this fairly new space, ProtoTek’s second and current home, continues into the cavernous shop floor, ready with a modest amount of donated machinery. At a glance, it looks bigger than The Hack Factory, and certainly more open. All that’s being built at this moment is some tabletops, just being sanded and stained, nothing that would mandate safety goggles just yet. Brand new to the space is the TIG Welder, and a mighty industrial unit it is. Weld cables are strewn about the floor, someone must be half-done running it through the paces. Despite being offered apologies for the mess, to my eye the floor is empty and clean, for a Makerspace anyway.

The well-loved machines have a certain appeal, one might even say a dieselpunk quality. Each mill and drill was donated, and generally speaking, older than you’d find in a factory setting. It’s all sui generis, no cookie-cutter FabLab template applies; this is a plus in my book, the more DIY you are, the better. They have a secondhand metalworking CNC with integrated bubble-button keypad and CRT display, and an in-progress custom woodworking CNC, which works fine but the finishing touch will be rigging it into a handsome blue enclosure, scavenged from some inoperative equipment.

By this point I’m facing the inside of those giant bay doors, and lo and behold, they still have extra panels to match the Mission Control screen, and there’s two big robot arms, only one of which has been gotten to dance around (the other’s ROM leaked out, meaning the thing will likely need to be tuned from the ground up). The orange one is gigantic, taller than me, and it must tilt scales north of a tonne; yet its balance is such that it can be turned and spun by hand, if necessary. As a last curiousity, a dead tree is hung lengthwise across the ceiling, part of a member’s sculpture set (the rest of it isn’t immediately around).

The garage doors beg the question – Do people work on cars in here? Sadly not. Once this building served as the automotive lab for a high-powered lawyer, expert in suing the car companies over manufacturing defects. Buried somewhere in the back, there’s still a pre-safety era car lift, without any secondary stop or lock system, sure to mangle limbs if put too hastily back into service. If it were fixed or removed, and finagling were approved in a later lease, only then might a grease monkey have a chance to bring in “MAH TRUQ”.

Back in the lobby, my brief foray into the electronics laboratory gets me caught on to the new PIC programmer soon to get installed; Arduino is nice, but to the coders of ProtoTek it’s just a starter set. Given the perpetually just-out-of-reach price of FPGAs, Microchip-brand MCUs are a reasonably sophisticated next step. Yet my time is cut short by the discovery that the building is leaking, the rainfall patterns having been changed recently with the new development built next door. They’re hardly strangers to of hydrological issues here. At one point, something like 900 tons of water – “TWO MILLION pounds!!” was sitting atop the flat-roofed structure; clogged gutters had caused the meter-high lip of the flat roof to get more than half full. As a result, the gutters now get cleaned out periodically by the landlord. It’s reassuring, given the bland or too-hands-off landowners I’ve heard about so far.

If I were to sum up the space, well it’s the kind where everyone has a job, a truck, and a laptop. My stop is all too brief to be treated to the full spirit, but the little things assure me, this is still my kind of place. It comes as a bit of a surprise to me that ProtoTek is actually a business, as its rates are in line with community-owned spaces, and the doors are gladly open to monthly visits from a wall-filling list of learn-to-code focus groups. So I have to doubly admire the ethos, the way they look at the maker movement, right down to the phraseology. My guide to this space is a self-described “smash-it-with-a-hammer” maker. I’m more of a “blinky lights” type.