It’s a slow Tuesday night in December when I visit the ATX Hackerspace. Across town, MakeATX is packed away for the holidays, so this is the sum of the diehards in the Texan capital city. The guests bring a dash of flavour; one passerby had been through the Toronto spaces, and really just stopped by to get some nuts tightened on his Kawasaki as he keeps on keeping on from Los Angeles. So you can fix your vehicle here! Another newcomer, a bit of a body-modder, is looking carefully for any signs of madness that he found at his old space in Portland, whilst regaling the crew with talk of his time in Tucson. So there’s a biohacking community here!
That week’s other meetups (Linux Wednesdays, Microcontroller Mondays, etc) are about as slow, though not without a lively debate over the finer points of the cellular network. One thing’s for sure, it’s so much better in Europe. These guys aren’t shy about ordering from AliExpress, which still is a hair-raising experience for the uninitiated. A maze of odd international trade principles, and row after row of scummy operators, are involved in AliBaba, only most of which are cut out by AliExpress. The key to staying happy with the system is embracing the hassle of complaining when your order results in AliBaba’s not-atypical delay and inaccuracy. The bottom line here: 800 tiny stepper motors for 80 dollars – a deal that just might be worth chasing.
In my quick breeze-though of the workshop tooling, what pops out is the engine stand and engine lift – they’re serious about their car work here – and a massive 1.6×2.8 meter CNC mill, sized to work on “Russian” plywood boards, some of which have been turned into wavy topograms on display in the gallery up front. It’s the first space I’ve been to with co-working cubicles, about a dozen of them in a keyfobbed side room ready to go, for $250 on top of the $60 membership. Plus there’s a chemistry lab, complete with working fume hood!
You could get some definite mad science going on here – and what better for a logo than a tricked-out flying bat? Definitely the most oblong entry I have in my hacker heraldry collection so far, most of which confine themselves to squares or cogwheels. Bats are kind of a big deal around Austin, the Texas “Hill Country” being of Karst topography. Among other things, the ATX Bat adorns their fully-functional MAME arcade machine, which is right alongside a motion-control ride machine! This place is clearly happening – I’ll have to pay a visit again sometime, when I can sit down for the stories and really catch the spirit of the place.