57North Hacklab is a small hackerspace in the North East of Scotland City of
Aberdeen. We popped up in 2014 when a group appeared to do something
hackerspace like and we quickly found office space in the center of the city.
57North is now on its third iteration moving this Autum from the basement of a
gaming cafe to some unused space in a commercial office building.
We offer a space for members and visitors to talk about technology, and access
tools and components to make projects possible. The space has a large selection
of tools, though in our current location not a lot of space for really messy
activities. We have several 3D printers and a laser cutter, but sometimes it
feels like these are more in the realm of member projects.
Both Tools and equipment are free for anyone to use and you can just drop by.
We have a weekly Tuesday open night, this acts as the main meeting night for
the space. We also have a large stock of components generated by members buying
excess parts when working on their own projects. These components are made
available for everyone, we would much prefer you were able to finish your
project today and if we have to look after some extra cool components to do it
all the better.
We are a space built and driven by our members and a lot of our activity comes
from their interests. MS0SCZ is a radio club growing within the Hacklab, with a
wide selection of cool radio projects. The club does basic voice operations and
is expanding into do data mode radio on both HF and VHF. There is an effort
now in the Hacklab club to help others get their licences in a modern friendly
environment.
The Hacklab has a lot open source activity, with developers for the FreeBSD and
Debian operating systems. Some open source work tends to trigger more work, the
members involved in open source projects are eager to leverage their local
network to get help with problems. A member of the Hacklab and radio amateur
recently started the HamBSD[0] project to build an open source, well designed
and written APRS network stack.
We like blinkenlights. Our previous space had an entirely home assistant
driver lighting system that integrated with commercial lights as well as
lights made by members from microcontrollers and led strips. Our current space
is getting an entirely new lighting system.
Out of the Hacklab the Air Aberdeen[1] group started workshops to build air
quality monitors for citizen science. Air Aberdeen works with the global
Luftdaten[2] network of air quality monitors, these monitors give a picture of
air quality conditions around the world in the form of open data. The Air
Aberdeen workshops introduce people to collecting their own air quality data
through building sensors to deploy at their own homes and work places. The
project uses off the shelf microcontrollers and sensors with open firmware.
We are small, but have taken it on ourselves to represent Scotland at various
hacker conferences, camps and festivals around the world. If you are at an
event it might be worth searching to see if the Scottish Consulate has a
presence. You should drop by if you are up in Aberdeen or come and find us at
Chaos Computer Club events in Germany or at EMFCamp in 2020.
[0]: hambsd.org
[1]: airaberdeen.org
[2]: http://luftdaten.info/