In English

Finnish hackerspaces meet in Jyväskylä

2018-03-05 jssmk

Ten participating hackerspaces must be a record for the biannual gathering of Finnish hacklabs! Hacklab Summit Finland 2018 was arranged in Jyväskylä, and despite the local hacklab was in charge of the event for the first time, they managed to make this happening one of the best in the history of HSF.

The major theme for this year was planning the way how to formalise hacklab.fi as an official organisation of hackerspaces in Finland. We now have initial idea how the organisation should work, based on opinions and votes of those, who took part in this meeting. Unanimous conclusion was, that the founding assembly is going to be the next HSF in Helsinki this summer. Hacklab.fi has a history of more or less informal co-operation between cities since 2012. The new organisation will be strictly for member-operated hackerspaces, supporting new groups to get started, offering web services, representing our local scene in events both in Finland and further away, and making all kinds of PR work to help people find their local hacklabs.

Jyväskylä Hacklab took the responsibility to arrange HSF in connection with Instanssi demoscene event. This enabled us to have more space, content and possibilities than before. As usual, the program was fixed weeks before the start, and a hourly timetable kept us on track with finishing robots ready for the competition, remembering to eat, presenting recent happenings in different hacklabs, doing something more than just sitting behind the laptop, going to a indoor trampoline park and of course, the sauna.

Helsinki participated in the robot race track competition with two robots. The robot track is a 1 × 2 m box which has copies of itself in some of the hacklab.fi member spaces. Joonamo found his robot from last summer still working, and I assembled hastily some LEGO robot that had code running just few minutes before the competition started. The program was written in Python from scratch, the robot did zero practicing on the track, and I only knew it could probably move forward when turned on. For my complete surprise, it actually managed to make one clean complete round on the track, and didn’t even finish last on the results list. Joonamo’s robot came 3rd in speed results and 4th in popular vote, and the host city Jyväskylä took the first place. Robot competition was also included in the Instanssi program, so we had a great audience supporting the bots on the racetrack.

The weekend ended in visiting Hacklab Jyväskylä, which is about to move to a larger location soon. Tampere Hacklab is expanding its place with a new metal room and textile work section. There are also plans in other cities to look for larger workspaces and Nokia just started their own lab. This HSF had a very positive athmosphere where collaboration is taken for granted.

Definitely looking good for hacklab scene in Finland right now. A big thanks to Jyväskylä for hosting us!

Photos from weekend:
Helsinki Hacklab flickr
Tampere Hacklab flickr

Robot competition:
Twitch video

Blog posts in Finnish:
Jyväskylä Hacklab
Tampere Hacklab

Next time:
HSF18½ in Helsinki, 8.—10.6.2018

Volunteer Tuesday and Open Tuesday

2018-02-12 jssmk

Finally we have some new info about the next Tuesdays:

Volunteer Tuesday 2018-02-13
– moving work tables and other items, reorganizing and sorting
– many tools not in use yet
– simple tasks for everyone
– only limited possibilities to make anything or get assistance, please consider just doing volunteer work

Open Tuesday 2018-02-20
– normal Open Tuesdays return starting from here

Courses

Basics of wood turning (in Finnish) 2018-02-14
– English course can be arranged if there’s demand

Digital technology
– returns back to its Thursday schedule

— Also, don’t forget HSF18 in Jyväskylä!

Workspace status update, HSF2018 and more

2018-02-02 jssmk

Some development in the workspace – the next Open Tuesday still undecided!

Open Tuesdays and other weekly happenings should soon return, but as for now, the cancellations are still going on. The floor gets painted, and it might be impossible even to visit the hackerspace during following next days.

Hopefully we can return to normal actions on the second week of February. Please follow updates on this site to know better.

Update: Helsinki Hacklab closes its doors between 6th Feb. and 12th Feb

Open Tuesday is cancelled on 6th Feb.!

Also, basics of woodturning is moved to next week and the digital technology course skips this Thursday.

HSF2018 – Hacklab Summit Finland

This year organized by Hacklab Jyväskylä for the first time! The event is held simultaneously with Instanssi digital culture and demoscene party. Our HSF robot competition is presented to the audience, and all the demoscene shows are also available for the hackerspace groups. We also have time to plan co-operation just with our hacklab.fi friends.

Major theme will be deciding if hacklab.fi should organize itself into a formal registered association, as a top level co-op of Finnish hacklabs. We hope that these hackerspace and makerspace groups can join in the discussion.

Hacklab Summit Finland has been organized annually since 2012. The ticket shop is now open!

HSF18

Photos from January

One of the few remaining Turku Hacklab stickers

Minifactory 3D printer. Always keep a spool of pink available.

Disobey 2018 Friday

2018-01-12 jssmk

Hacklab.fi is right now at Disobey 2018. Hack your badge at our tent!

Use our tools, meet people and get a new sticker on your laptop. We’ll be here also on Saturday.

Exceptions in Open Tuesdays

2018-01-09 jssmk

The hackerspace is waiting for new paint on its floors in some areas. We have already emptied two rooms in advance and moved all stuff to other locations. The electronics room and vinyl cutter etc. are not currently in use. We do not yet have the exact date when the painting will begin, but hope it will start soon.

Because of the painting and other renovation, there are currently no general Open Tuesdays until we inform otherwise. If you have the time, you can come help us with renovation, reorganizing and cleanup and other tasks on Tuesdays or other occasions. Please ask on Slack or IRC if you want to know more.

Sorry about the inconvenience. We hope that the lab will be even better than before once this all is over!

Disobey 12.-13.1.2018

Helsinki Hacklab, along with our friends from hacklab.fi, are coming to Disobey infosec event this weekend. Come say hi and meet us at our table.

This was 2017

2017-12-30 jssmk

Year 2017 at Helsinki Hacklab had some remarkable moments. Most importantly, we made a major expansion in the workspace, adding more room space from 215 m² to somewhere around 370 m² effectively, when excluding rented out areas. We also got a grant from Arts Promotion Finland (Taike) for our yearly children’s event and other expenses. The unfortunate piping leak, which happened closer to the end of the year, meant that some areas had to be rebuilt completely. While this is still ongoing issue and the floors waiting for a new coat of paint, we can hopefully now say that the end result might become something way better than the original ever was. Next year we have a usable separate workroom for chemistry.

The expansion and our new woodworking area

The expansion plans – including figuring out how to finance everything – had to start quickly because our behind-the-wall neighbor was leaving the building, and letting anyone else seize this opportunity would stall our hopes of any expansion for years to come if staying in this address. A quick draft showed that with some active keyholder member recruiting and finding subtenants would make this a feasible plan. The old woodworking room was in pressure to grow larger, as it could not fit more users to meet the demand. It had no room for table saw or any other new tools. The quickly negotiated expansion plan reserved most of the new free space for woodworking alone, one third for a subtenant woodworker with his separate workshop, and the remaining part mostly for storage. The new areas include a back door, a lifting garage door and a second WC. At the end of this year, we seem to be doing okay and call it a success.

Robots in Strömberg Park, a family event organized by the hacklab.fi co-op network in Helsinki, was organized for the second time and is very very likely to happen in 2018 too. (How soon we can call it a tradition?). We had competitors from at least five other hackerspaces and a large new tent bought with Taike’s grant. The competition was preceded by weekly robot meetings, to prep the bots to be ready enough for the big day.

The sauna we brought to SHA2017 hacker camp turned out to be a wildly popular, at least in number of photograph attention it got. Let’s say this was our contribution to Finland’s 100th year of independence festives. Greetings to all who were brave enough to try out the sauna and to all our Nordic fellow camping neighbors! We fear we have no other option but to try to bring a sauna for the next hacker camp too.

In organizational stuff: we started to have so much diverse discussion and many users on our IRC channel, that we tried using Slack and so far got stuck to it. The old IRC channel is available too, but many topics have now their own places in our Slack group. In the workspace, the layout of things got shuffled again. We switched all our tables for folding ones in the classroom – thanks to Stockholm Makerspace for the idea!

The FPGA course continues our many year long continuous tradition of digital technology Thursdays, which started sometime while still in our previous address. We again collaborated with visual artists and also helped a samba group building their costumes in our workspace.

Some memorable member projects:
– steam powered maze robot, with Lego mechanics
– synced clock displays for broadcasts and event audiovisuals
– experiments with woodturning using our new lathe
– towable grill for bicycle
– large LED display matrix

2017 in numbers
– 2500 new uploaded Flickr photos
– 100% increase in rented floor area
– 128 member applications received
– 6 events visited and one organized by ourselves

Syyskokous 2017 ja pikkujoulut

2017-11-18 jssmk

Tervetuloa Helsinki Hacklab ry:n sääntömääräiseen syyskokoukseen. Kokouksen jälkeen jatketaan illanviettoa epävirallisemmin pikkujoulun merkeissä. Tilaisuus on alkoholiton, tarjoilu nyyttikestiperiaatteella.

Aika: lauantai 9.12.2017 klo 14.
Paikka: Helsinki Hacklab ry:n kerhotilat, Takkatie 18.

Ohjelma

kokouksen avaus
valitaan kokouksen puheenjohtaja, sihteeri, kaksi pöytäkirjantarkastajaa ja tarvittaessa kaksi ääntenlaskijaa
todetaan kokouksen laillisuus ja päätösvaltaisuus
hyväksytään kokouksen työjärjestys
vahvistetaan toimintasuunnitelma, tulo- ja menoarvio sekä liittymis- ja jäsenmaksujen suuruudet seuraavalle kalenterivuodelle
valitaan hallituksen puheenjohtaja ja muut jäsenet
valitaan yksi tai kaksi toiminnantarkastajaa ja heille varatoiminnantarkastajat
käsitellään muut kokouskutsussa mainitut asiat.

Terveisin Helsinki Hacklab ry:n hallitus

The second annual general meeting on Dec 9th starting at 2pm. Meeting will be held in Finnish. After the official part we’ll have our christmas party. As usual
the event is non-alcoholic and food/beverage is handled on the potluck principle.

Bringing a sauna to a hacker camp #SHA2017

2017-08-14 jssmk

Photos now in Flickr album: SHA2017 pictures

The outdoor hacker camp SHA2017 is now over and we want to thank you the organizers of the awesome event. This time the Finnish Embassy came to the camp with an electric barrel sauna. Initial negotiations with different organizing teams suggested that there was enough power to choose an electric sauna and reasons not to take a wood heated model, and we gratefully received help finding one. The popularity struck us with surprise and the sauna was occasionally not enough large for the masses. For those who might be interested, the sauna was rented from NL, not far from the event site. If you plan to bring an outdoor sauna to an hacker camp in the future, it might be easier to arrange than you think! We’ve heard there are already plans elsewhere to bring a sauna to Chaos Communication Congress 34C3.

As soon as we received our event badges, we decided to make something sauna related with it. The sauna temperature app was soon prototyped and launched on camp day one. We used RuuviTags and other sensors for monitoring the heat and informing everyone when the sauna was ready to use. The app even got mentioned in badge presentation highlights.

The sauna was still going strong after 2 am when music started to fade out on the field. We only have vague hearsay that the sauna or nudity at the camp caused some disapproval, but everything we witnessed ourselves at the sauna was only positive.

See some of the sauna reactions in Twitter: Twitter search sauna and sha2017

Planning

This time everyone from Finland took a plane for this event, so to keep us properly equipped for all the flashiness and coziness, we had to think another ways to bring our stuff other than distributing it in multiple luggage bags. Tarlab and other campers from Oulu, Burner in lead, packed (video) and delivered a cargo pallet full of materials such as lights, camping equipment, Finnish salmiakki candies, power cords, a small fridge and loads of other stuff. Arranging a shipment like this to a hacker camp is doable and we managed to get it on site nicely and in time – also not too early. Just make sure with logistics and villages teams know about your plans beforehand. Our delivery had a GPS transmitter inside, so we could follow the shipment arriving to SHA camp field live.

This time the Nordic Villages area was somewhat more planned than in Chaos Communication Camp 2015, and we had some idea who were joining the cluster beforehand. For the next camp we could try to be even more coordinated and plan what equipment different groups could bring. For example, we had no sound system, but could use the Swedish one using their awesome Youtube playlist IRC bot – thanks! The Nordic Villages and hackerspaces mailing list is an attempt to collect interested people to join future planning for camps, happenings or maybe demoscene events and visits to other hackerspaces. Let’s see what use it might find. We need enough people in the list to keep us connected, so please join the group.

Keeping the spirit up

Hours after the closing ceremony, the leftover campers of Nordic Villages were still going strong continuing with completely new programme. The Norwegian Embassy took over the near emptied Swedish tent and spray painted a sign on a remains of a Kartent to make it “look official”. Lars from Malmö started inviting bypassers and asking them “are you here for the lightning talks?”. The spontaneous presentations were either recycled slides from other occasions, mixed topics, show-and-tell style talks and such. After 8 or 9 pm when the camp site went silent and power was shut down, we continued in the dark using flashlights. Almost everyone in the tent also gave a talk.

Nordic Villages is most likely happening also in Chaos Communication Camp 2019. Thank you for all those who visited the sauna, Taike for the grant, our neighbours, and the SHA organisation to let us make this happen!

(200th blog post on this website!)

Sauna arrived in SHA village

2017-08-03 jssmk

Hacklab.fi rented a sauna for SHA2017 event in Netherlands. The electric barrel sauna arrived today at 4pm and is now running hot. Come visit the sauna if you are with us in the event!

New rental contract and extending our hackerspace

2017-07-03 jssmk

Helsinki Hacklab ry. has today signed a new rental contract that increases our floor area from 215 m² to around 430 m². The contract is both for our current workspace and its neighboring storage rooms, which are now combined. Some of this area is subrented for other users, which means a total of something about 360 m² area in shared use for all our members. The extension enables us to rebuild our wood workshop completely, with more room for working and handling larger workpieces.

The area that extends our hackerspace has both a lifting door and another door for exit. The right to use the loading area in the back yard, which is the ramp that leads to our main door, is now included in the contract. Starting from July, the whole basement level of the building and most of the back yard is now shared only between our organization and our subtenants. In case of large workpieces, twin doors were installed between the rooms that lead to the wood workshop in the other end of the building. Oh, and we now also have a second bathroom too.

This area will be subrented for a woodworker. The room with lifting door can be seen in the background. Viewed from our our new wood workshop direction.

When we moved in our current address the wood workshop was designed too small, with possible future extensions in mind. We couldn’t fit a proper size wood workshop back then, so we built a tiny one instead. The new extension enables us finally to have more people working at the same time, build dust collection, and to have some floorspace reserved for possible future equipment purchases.

The lifting door makes it easier to work with large items. The room immediately behind it is probably used for storage purposes for now. Other near future plans are building compressed air piping lines in most of the hackerspace and installing the compressor in its own room in our new area.

We were generously given this June free for moving in and renovating the extension before starting to pay complete rent. So far we have progressed with necessary changes quite a lot, but we still need more volunteers to help us build and renovate the area. We also have plans for more work in the old section of the hackerspace too. Improvements could also be made outside when we have time for it.