Hackaday.io has just turned two today and we couldn’t be more excited about how far we’ve come. What started out as a simple proof-of-concept, inspired by ye-olde idea of a “virtual hackerspace,” has truly evolved into a global playground for some of the best, brightest, and most creative minds you have ever met. It also became a home and the place to spend sleepless nights for many of us on the team, and we’re excited to share a few ideas on where we are headed going forward.

But before we do that, let’s look at some data.

The Data

We’re thrilled to report that over the last two years, Hackaday.io has grown from zero to a 121,158-member strong community, who have together created a total of 9,736 projects. To put this in context, it is more than a two-fold growth from last year’s milestone of 51,838 users / 4,365 projects. And it doesn’t seem to be showing any signs of slowing down.

Projects

Though these “vanity” metrics sure are a nice validation, the number that gets us the most excited is the fact that the 9,731 projects currently on the site have been created by a total 4,966 different users. What’s even better is the fact that 949 projects are a result of collaboration between two or more people. Altogether, a total of 7,170 different users have participated in the creation of the vast body of engineering knowledge currently residing on Hackaday.io.

But what really boggles the mind is trying to picture just how many project are in this collection of (almost) 10 thousand? Anytime we go out to browse projects on the website, we find ourselves overloaded with information before even reaching 100. While this probably has something to do with the fact that you can only process so much data while still having a meaningful user experience, we thought it would be fun to give it a shot. So the other night we whipped up a quick visualization that might help you get the sense of the overall project space:

You can also explore the SVG version at hackaday.io/projectscape/.

Community

We always think of Hackaday.io as a “virtual hackerspace” – a place to get inspiration and meet people who can help in making your ideas a reality. Or, it could simply be a place to have fun while learning and sharing knowledge (we like to call this “mindful entertainment”). So, from the very beginning, we tried to build in mechanisms that help you discover relevant projects, connect and collaborate with other members.

From a quantitative point of view, the easiest way to think about this is in the form of a directed graph with nodes representing projects/users and edges representing user/project follower relationships. A year ago, this graph measured 88,703 user->user and 105,315 user->project follower relationships. Today, it’s an order of magnitude higher – 868,698 user->user and 795,160 user->project follow relationships. The “social” thing on the site seems to be really taking off.

Hacker Channel

Another major feature we released over the past year is the support for real-time private “conversations” between project members, which has resulted in an explosion of micro-communities on Hackaday.io. Our favorite abuse of this feature is the Hacker Channel. With it’s 775 members, this project has become a source of non-stop entertainment for many of its participants and lurkers alike. Here’s a little illustration of the daily activity you can expect if you find yourself in this corner of Hackaday.io:

The Public Side

Though we all know vanity metrics shouldn’t matter, a few of us can’t resist the small hits of dopamine that we get when someone gives our projects a little bit of love. After all, why should we? Projects take time and energy, so whatever keeps our motivation up and gets us going is probably a good thing.

There are plenty of ways to share the love on Hackaday.io: project views, follows, skulls, and comments. Here are a few stats on the distribution of these metrics across different projects:

A couple of exciting points that immediately stand out:

• The top 100 projects on Hackaday.io each got more than 17,500 views, 705 followers and 101 skulls
• The top 1,000 projects got over 3,000 views, 243 followers and 17 skulls
• 50% of all projects on Hackaday.io each got more than 272 views, 100 followers and 8 skulls

The last point is especially important, as it indicates that no matter the kind of project you put on Hackaday.io, it is very likely to get significant exposure, which can easily turn into just the kind of feedback you need to keep it going. We have heard numerous stories of people putting their projects on .io and immediately meeting their new collaborators, jointly iterating on the project, and on the wings of all the encouragement they got from the rest of the community, ultimately turning their ideas into successful Kickstarters and companies.

Moving Forward

This concludes all the patting on the back that we deserve for this year, and now, it’s time to get back to work. Here are some of our priorities for the months to come:

1. Issues/Bugs: Though the supply of these is infinite, our top priority is always to be as responsive as possible in resolving critical issues and to continually work toward improving the overall quality of the platform.
2. UX Refresh: It has been two years, and we feel like it’s time to take a fresh look at both overall design and the core User Experience. Though we’re not planning any radical changes, nor trying to drift away from our “dark” theme, we are looking at a better navigation of project pages and a major polish of personal profile pages as well as the ability for users to customize certain elements of the layout.
3. Tindie Integration – Tindie has been a part of the Hackaday.io family for a while now, and we believe a lot of great things can happen by bringing the two closer together. To start, we’re working on incorporating Hackaday.io into Tindie seller profiles as well as tighter coupling between Tindie products and Hackaday.io projects.
4. “Idea marketplace” – Collaborative hardware development is something we’re really passionate about, and we feel like we need to build better mechanisms for people to find collaborators and form teams around ideas. So we’re working on it.
5. Better BOM/Schematics Data management – This is the one feature from last year’s list that we haven’t yet delivered on. We’re working on making it a reality as soon as possible.
6. Collaboration Improvements – Team messaging is just the beginning. We have some awesome ideas on how we can expand it with features that significantly improve the overall project collaboration flow.
7. Mobile App – A lot of people have been asking for this, so we’re adding it to the queue. Being able to update project logs and interact with team members directly from your phone is a priority.
8. Jobs Board – The success of the Jobs Board project has been a complete surprise for all of us. So we’ll be turning it into a full-blown feature.
9. Contests – Other than the Hackaday Prize, these haven’t been much of a focus for us, and most of the “contest” support at the moment is just a hack on top of the standard project view. However, the community seems to thrive on the motivation that these kinds of challenges bring, so we’ll be working on improving support for contest self-provisioning, as well as a much nicer user experience for all the contest participants.
10. Hackaday.io Physical Layer – First and foremost, we are an online community, but our core mission is fostering Collaborative Project Development. And for this, we need our community to connect in the real world too. We’re working on something exciting that should help with this.

Most importantly, we’re looking for your feedback on things we should improve and features we should develop. If you have ideas, comments or bug reports, please send them our way. The core development team is on Hackaday.io most of the time, so if you just feel like chatting, feel free to ping us directly.

Finally, a huge thanks to the entire Hackaday.io community who has been incredibly supportive and helped us get this far. We’re looking forward to the equally exciting Year #03!

A little over two years ago, we announced that Hackaday became a part of Supplyframe. This was a natural fit: both sides are comprised of hardware engineers, computer scientists and hackers alike. We immediately pooled forces and set out to make Hackaday bigger, with a broader mission. So far, it has been an amazing journey: Hackaday.io is approaching 100,000 registered users, The Hackaday Prize is in its second year, and the Hackaday Store is about to fulfill its 5,000th order.

The main theme behind all of this is fostering collaboration, learning, and providing incentives for everyone in the community to stop procrastinating and try to build something amazing. Hackaday.com is here to inspire, Hackaday.io to help develop projects in the open, and the Hackaday Store is to provide a way to turn passion projects into a self-sustainable lifestyle. While the road to community-powered innovation might not be easy, it’s something we’re all incredibly passionate about, and will continue investing in to further this goal.

With that in mind, we’re very excited to announce that everyone’s favorite hardware marketplace – Tindie, has been acquired by Supplyframe and will be joining the Hackaday family! Apart from the fact that most of us are personal fans of the website, we believe that Tindie fills an important gap in helping projects cross the chasm between prototype and initial production. Crowdfunding provides access to capital for some (and access to laughs for others), but it’s not always the way to go. You might not be ready to quit your day job or take on a project full-time. You might be working on rev1 of the project and want to try the “lean manufacturing” thing. Or maybe you’re building something for your own purposes and have some extras lying around. Tindie is a platform that has helped launch many such projects, and we’re incredibly lucky to have it be a part of Hackaday.

Now what?

Naturally, the question that’s on everyone’s mind is, what happens next? Are we going to mess things up? Paint Tindie in black? Change the fee structure? While we have ideas on things that we could help with, our main goal will be making sure that the Tindie community continues to thrive. The only changes we’re interested in are the ones that make the community stronger. We are fascinated with the challenges surrounding the supply chain and will be looking into tools to help sellers improve margins and ship better products. Hackaday.io and Tindie combined represent the world’s largest repository of (working) Open Hardware products, so we will be looking into more closely integrating the two. We will also make efforts to grow the overall Tindie audience, as every new buyer helps move the community forward.

All of these are some of the ideas, but we’re ultimately looking at you for guidance: things we should do, problems we should attack, dreams of future capabilities.

Wish us luck in this new adventure.

Aleksandar Bradic
CTO
Supplyframe

When it comes to manufacturing, no place in the world has the same kind of allure as the Pearl River Delta region of China. Within just an hour-long train ride, two vastly different cultures co-exist, each with its unique appeal that keeps attracting engineers, entrepreneurs, and hustlers alike. On the mainland side, cities like Shenzhen and Guangzhou bring the promise of cheap components, low-cost contract work, and the street cred of “having done the Shenzhen thing.” And on the island, the capitalist utopia called Hong Kong glows with all of its high finance and stories of lavish expat lifestyles.

As the “new” China evolves, it seems like it’s exactly the convergence of these two cultures that will bring the biggest change—and not just to the area but to the whole world. Still, understanding what exactly is going on and what the place is really all about remains a mystery to many. So, this June, we jumped on the bandwagon and headed east, trying to get our own feel for the whole thing.

Here’s what we came back with…

We’d like to give a huge thanks to all the amazing people who donated their time and helped in filming this mini-documentary: Chris “Akiba” Wang, a Hackaday Prize judge and one of the most amazing people you’ll ever meet; Stefania Druga of Hackidemia and the organizer of Shenzhen MakerCamp; Massimo Banzi of Arduino.cc; Andy Kong and Michael Guillemette of Hong Kong’s Dim Sum Labs hackerspace; the Seed Studio crew; and a number of other people who have helped us with their insights and opinions on what it’s like to live at the doorsteps of the Factory of the World.

Open Science has been a long-standing ideal for many researchers and practitioners around the world. It advocates the open sharing of scientific research, data, processes, and tools and encourages open collaboration. While not without challenges, this mode of scientific research has the potential to change the entire course of science, allowing for more rigorous peer-review and large-scale scientific projects, accelerating progress, and enabling otherwise unimaginable discoveries.

As with any great idea, there are a number of obstacles to such a thing going mainstream. The biggest one is certainly the existing incentive system that lies at the foundation of the academic world. A limited number of opportunities, relentless competition, and pressure to “publish or perish” usually end up incentivizing exactly the opposite – keeping results closed and doing everything to gain a competitive edge. Still, against all odds, a number of successful Open Science projects are out there in the wild, making profound impacts on their respective fields. HapMap Project, OpenWorm, Sloan Digital Sky Survey and Polymath Project are just a few to name. And the whole movement is just getting started.

While some of these challenges are universal, when it comes to Biology and Biomedical Engineering, the road to Open Science is paved with problems that will go beyond crafting proper incentives for researchers and academic institutions.

It will require building hardware.

At this year’s SXSW Interactive, we had an opportunity to talk with [Charles Fracchia], a renaissance hacker at the MIT Media Lab. Reinforcing the Media Lab’s “eclectic genius” stereotype, [Charles]’s background spans an impressive range of fields—from Synthetic Biology to Biomedical Engineering and beyond. A biologist by training, he is also a self-taught hardware hacker and, these days, is spending most of his time building “hybrid” systems at the intersection of Biology, Computer Science, and Electrical Engineering. True to the hacker spirit of open collaboration and sharing, he is also a big proponent of Open Science and is committed to making it a reality in the field of Biomedical Research.

Most of [Charles’] recent work has been motivated by the surprising fact that a vast proportion of peer-reviewed biological research is not independently reproducible^[1]. Reproducibility is a huge challenge in this field, and part of the problem lies in the fact that a number of environmental factors that could impact the results of the experiments are currently not captured at all. The solution that [Charles] and his team are working on is a range of environmental sensor nodes, designed to be packaged as a part of the standard biological lab equipment. Such nodes could enable an easy collection of necessary data in a “natural” environment of the experiment, making it easier to pinpoint the exact conditions under which the results were obtained.

It is projects like this, especially if created as Open Hardware, which have the potential to change the Open Science game in Biomedical Research. Affordable, peer-reviewed hardware that every lab can independently manufacture can show the way to standardization in the sharing of experimental data. [Charles] and his team are committed to this mission and are taking things beyond academia and into the real world. They are starting a project called BioBright, which aims at revolutionizing the biology lab and making Open Science in this space a reality.

References:

[1] Challenges in Irreproducible Research” Nature Magazine

Few things have managed to capture the imagination of hackers and engineers around the world the way Synthetic Biology did over the last couple of years. The promise of “applying engineering principles to designing new biological devices and systems” just seemed way too sci-fi to missed out on, and everyone jumped on the bandwagon. All of a sudden, the field which used to be restricted to traditional research organizations and startups found itself crowded with all sorts of enthusiasts, biohackers, and weirdos alike. Competitions such as the International Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM) paved the way, and the emergence of community spaces like GenSpace and BioCurious finally made DNA experimentation accessible to anyone who dares to try. As it often happens, the Sci-Fi itself did not go untouched, and a whole new genre called “Biopunk” emerged, further fueling people’s imagination and extrapolating worlds to come.

That’s where the MIT Media Lab’s Mediated Matter group comes in – somewhere in between the real world of DNA experimentation in research labs and “design fiction,” exploring concepts and ideas at the very edge of what’s possible. Led by [Prof. Neri Oxman], this amazing group deals with research “at the intersection of computational design, digital fabrication, materials science and synthetic biology”. In the true Media Lab spirit, the group goes beyond pure research and engages in designing and fabricating incredible structures at both micro and architectural scale, demonstrating potential uses of new materials and design concepts. Probably the most famous piece showcasing the sheer awesomeness happening in the Mediated Matter group is the Silk Pavilion — a large-scale structure created with the combination of “digital” and “biological” fabrication. For this piece, primary structure was created with CNC-deposited silk fiber, whereas the rest was completed by deploying 6,500 live silkworms.

At this year’s SXSW Interactive, we had an opportunity to talk with [Sunanda Sharma], a graduate student in the Mediated Matter group. One of the projects [Sunanda] is working on is digital fabrication using the hydrogel called chitosan, made by deacetylating crushed shrimp shells. The team that [Sunanda] is a part of has developed a custom 3D Printing technique based on extruding chitosan at different concentrations and viscosities, allowing them to fabricate large architectural structures solely based on this amazing new bioplastic. While the kind of “living” pavilions that the group fabricates primarily reside in the domain of “what could happen in the future,” they also serve a great purpose of initiating the conversation about the many potential real-world applications of biomaterials like this. Not the least of which is replacing plastic with something completely biodegradable.

For more info, check out the interview that Hackaday’s “mythical creature” [Sophi Kravitz] did with [Sunanda] at this year’s SXSW:

Today marks exactly one year since we announced to the world the first product from our software lab – Hackaday.io. In what has been an incredibly exciting year for all of us, we evolved from a simple idea and a prototype to a truly massive community that’s making its mark on the world. Day after day, carefully listening to the invaluable feedback from our users, we have improved and moved forward, one line of code at the time.

We still have a long way to go, but we’ll pause for a second now and reflect on how far we’ve come. Then get right back to fixing bugs and developing new features.

It all started with a simple idea – building a better project hosting website. Though there are project and content websites galore out there, with new ones popping up every day, it all still felt too bland. We thought we could do better. After all, the medium is the message. The place where something lives sooner or later becomes a key part of its identity. So in order to prevent a dystopian future in which we’re all hosting our projects using the (fictional) Microsoft Maker Suite 2020 and simply don’t care, we started to work on providing an alternative.

We quickly realized that we had a much bigger mission on our hands. Sure, a better project hosting website would be nice, but what we felt we really needed was something [Brian Benchoff] has been talking about for quite some time – a “virtual hackerspace.” Not just a place where you can post your builds once you’re done (and hope someone sees it), but a living, breathing community: a place where you can start with an idea and get feedback as it develops, find collaborators, iterate, and ultimately end up building something way more amazing than you would have accomplished on your own.

This has been the aim of Hackaday for many years, but most of the collaboration was constrained to the limited space of post comment threads and biased by the editorial choice of articles and topics. With the introduction of Hackaday.io, we open up a space for anyone to unleash their creativity and expertise, and together, change the way people build things.

The Data

Unfortunately, making bold claims about how we’re out there changing the world is pretty much a commodity these days. As most Web startups can testify, it doesn’t take more than a simple landing page with nice photography and some uplifting message for any arbitrary claims to appear credible.

So instead of trying to convince you with words about how awesome the last year had been, we’ll just stick with the data.

This is what our user and project growth looked like:

Over the course of the last 365 days, Hackaday.io has grown from zero (well, technically a handful of testers/developer accounts) to a total of 51,838 registered users. More importantly, it has grown from zero projects (we didn’t believe in pre-seeding it with content) to 4,365 strong, all created by our amazing community members.

The part that’s the most impressive here is that it did not happen as a result of a blip but rather a sustained growth over time. Although the THP 2014 deadline did cause some acceleration in project submissions, most of the growth has been happening completely organically. While this is to be expected with “social networks” that rely on pulling in all of your friends onboard as soon as you sign up (think Facebook, G+, Linkedin…) in our case is nothing short of a miracle. After all, how many people have you invited to sign up for Hackaday.io? And we still managed to grow to 50k, one user at the time.

Projects

Now the number of users and “vanity” metrics are great, but what we’re really all about here is building things. And it’s the vast space of 4K+ created projects that makes us all incredibly excited. On the development team, we have gone from knowing every project on the website by heart, to using it as a source of inspiration and always getting surprised by new projects we discover every day. To show just how mind-bogglingly huge this is, let’s look at the distribution of the number of projects across top categories:

There are 70 different categories with more than 20 projects each. That’s a lot to explore! No matter how specific your interests are, it’s very likely you’ll find something worth checking out.

Community

The project side of things was the main focus of the website from the day one, but we also knew we have to deliver on the whole mission of building a real “community”. Whether we liked it or not, the only way known to was to add some of these dreaded “social” features. So Project/User follows, Global/Personal feed, and most importantly, the infamous “Skull” found its way to the site. We honestly had no idea whether anyone would use these features at all. We tend not to be among the most “social” people on the block, so we were naturally skeptical.

We were so thrilled when we realized we had been proven wrong! At the moment, there are 88,703 user->user and 105,315 user->project follow relationships on the site. Clearly not as “social” as something like Facebook (nor is that the goal), but we can see the real project community taking shape.

In the interest of general geekery, we thought we should celebrate this with a little rendering of user-user graph using Gephi (restricted to top 5,000 users since large-scale graph layout is a nightmare):

The Public Side

Now all of this is just the tip of the iceberg. All of the content on Hackaday.io is completely open, and most of the visitors don’t end up creating accounts at all. In the last 30 days alone, we had 246,270 unique visitors to the site, resulting in a total of 1,224,619 page views. That’s 1.2M impressions of someone’s work, collaboration, feedback and all other creative uses and abuses of our platform.

The natural question is – how is all this attention being distributed? Sure, popular projects are likely to get a lot of attention but what can I expect for my little toy project? Is it just going to sit there, dead markup on the page and never get any attention?

So we look into the distribution of page views and project follow/skulls across all 4,365 projects:

In a nutshell, what these are telling us (for those that don’t like the log scale, summary statistics are given as linear), is that:

• There are more than 400 projects on Hackaday.io which got more than 2,000 pageviews each, have more than 39 followers and more than 22 skulls
• The “elite” group of top 40 projects each got more than 16,000 page views, 230 followers, and 138 skulls!
• Most importantly – the *average* project on Hackaday.io got more than 170 views, 10 followers, and 4 skulls.

So even if you’re just starting, don’t have a groundbreaking idea or amazing execution, your project is still very likely get you some love and start collecting feedback.

15 Minutes of Fame?

Another big question we wanted to look at is the long-term aspect of all this. Sure, we all know how great it feels when the project on our blog gets featured somewhere, and we get that magical spotlight for a day or two. But then it’s gone, and all forgotten. It’s just how the Web works.

In order to get a better sense of this dynamics on Hackaday.io, we analyzed top 400 projects and their evolution of the number of followers/skulls over time:

We were very excited to see this result! It shows that, though big events like getting featured somewhere will definitely result in the short-term boost of interest for the project, most of the projects continue to maintain interest over time and never really die out. Hopefully, this will result in extra motivation for project creators to keep improving their builds for a long time after that initial demo day.

Another interesting thing you might notice on careful examination of the graphs above is the lag between the growth of number of followers and number of skulls. It turns out that a lot of people might “follow” the project if they find it promising, but it will take a while for you to impress them enough to earn that precious skull. It’s a valuable commodity around these lands.

Global Feed

One last thing we wanted to look at was the Feed. Since the introduction of this feature (and especially after its redesign), it became a part of the daily routine for a lot of people who are now using it to enjoy the flood of daily activity on the site.

We thought It would be nice to quantify the level of this activity, so we have analyzed the frequency of Global Feed events (projects created, comments, profile updates etc.) for every hour over the course of last year. Here are the results:

What this tells us is that, even in the darkest hours of the night, on the slowest day possible, there will still be something new popping in the Global Feed every 5-10 minutes. And on a busy day, during work hours, several new items will be streaming through the feed every single minute.

Not as fast as Twitter’s global feed, but still pretty damn cool.

So what’s next?

“The future is already here – it’s just not evenly distributed,” goes the clichéd [William Gibson] quote. Growing up on all the Cyberpunk literature and spending a more-than-healthy amount of time obsessing over [Fred Gallagher’s] Megatokyo series, I always imagined Japan to be at the very tail of this distribution. The place where the Future lives. Though it has been decades since the Bubble burst, and there’s no way this could still be the case, there was something romantic about believing it just might be. Thus, I opted for keeping the dream alive and never actually visited the place.

Not until a few weeks ago — [Bilke], one of our crazy sysadmin guys that keeps Hackaday.io alive, made me do it. He found these cheap tickets from LA, and the next thing you know – we were flying out for a 48-hours-in-Tokyo weekend. With no time to prepare, we reached out to [Akiba] from Freaklabs and [Emery] from Tokyo Hackerspace for some tips. By the time we landed, emails were waiting for us, with our full schedule completely worked out. It’s great to know that no matter where you are, there’s always a friendly local hacker willing to help.

Past the immigration, we took the JR Narita Express line into to the City that Friday evening. From there we grabbed a taxi because we couldn’t understand a word in katakana but then we hopped the JR Yamanote Metro line once we had figured things out. We checked out all the major places we had ever heard of (Shinjuku, Shibuya, Roppongi, Ginza…) because the jet lag was not letting us sleep anyway.

Sometime way past midnight, it hit me – Future Shock. But this was the kind I never expected…

It’s as if you were hoping to land somewhere on the opening pages of Neuromancer, but ended up in the middle of a Studio Ghibli movie instead. While all the neon and tech gimmicks seemed to be there, the future they’re portraying feels strangely anachronistic — like a dream from the distant past. Something straight off Nintendo or Sega Corp drafting tables from the mid-80s and decades later, still showing no signs of decay. Everything is perfectly tight, clean, well-preserved, and smiling with a distinct Kawaii touch. A retro futuristic utopia.

It’s certainly not what I had hoped for, but the whole thing quickly grew on me. I began to feel at home…

Akihabara

The next day, we got on the Metro and went straight to a place we intentionally skipped the night before – Akihabara Electric Town. There we met with [Emery], [Taylan], [James], [Shingo] and [Mariko] from Tokyo Hackerspace and they gave us the grand tour. It was spectacular.

The place is a sort of Geek Wonderland where every corner hides a place you never came looking for but can’t resist getting in. You might come to Akihabara searching for electronic components for your latest project but leave as Train Otaku, 1998 Sega Dreamcast owner with a bag full of games, or falling in love with yet another obscure Manga, which will end up consuming a better part of your life.

Cosplay characters are roaming the streets and moe girls are advertising all sorts of maid cafes. Electronics are everywhere, across a large number of small places, each with a slightly different focus. One of the shops we came into was specializing in electronic components and books about the occult!? Cthulhu loves the smell of burning silicon.

Hopefully, our video with the amazing Tokyo Hackerspace crew will give you a better sense of what it is like to be a hacker living in a place like this.

Shingo & Mariko’s Home Studio

Having spent most of the day navigating the Akihabara maze and feeling depleted by all the sensory overload, we were more than excited when [Shingo] and [Mariko] invited us to visit their home studio for some downtime and beers. It’s located in Akihabara, walking distance from all the main attractions, and it’s a hacker’s dream. The apartment doubles as a mini fabrication lab, with husband-and-wife science-geek team relentlessly working on new projects and ideas.

We already knew about [Shingo’s] Levistone box, but the place was packed with a history of hacks… from his early aerospace work, to more conventional projects such as random Arduino shields, all the way to his latest DNA Amplifier hardware project based on OpenPCR. They’re incredibly friendly, and their place is always open for local hackers in need of some fab gear.

Tokyo Hackerspace

The last stop for the day was Tokyo Hackerspace. It was late Saturday night, and the place was closed, but we still wanted to take a glimpse. So we hopped on the JR line to Nogizaka station with [Taylan] and [James], and they opened it up for us. It’s located in the middle of a residential neighborhood in Central Tokyo and given the rental prices and a relatively small hacker community, it’s a pure miracle such a thing exists in the first place.

We quickly recognized the famous membership fee/donation machine and had some fun with it. Our favorite piece of gear was a cool laser cutter obtained as a stretch goal for their Indiegogo campaign. Our favorite project was a Kit Vending Machine – an old cigarette machine converted into a kit and project dispenser.

Regular, weekly “Open House” meetings are on Tuesday evenings, so if you plan on visiting, that’s the time to be here.

3331 Arts Chiyoda

Sunday came quickly, but we still had a bit more time on our hands, so we picked another item from [Akiba]’s list – 3331 Arts Chiyoda and hit the JR to Yushima station. It was totally worth the trip.

3331 is an abandoned school converted into a “creative” space that “brings together cutting edge art with the familiar everyday.” Rarely would you find such a diverse mix of interesting things in a single location. On the first floor, we attended what turned out to be a theatre play for children (in Japanese, of course), resembling the real-life rendering of Dragon Ball Z. Right next to it was a big contemporary art exhibition featuring an interesting installation art piece, controlled by relays triggered by the vision module processing a revolving sheet of paper with Enso-style drawings on it. On the same floor, a massive Dream House-style sound art installation called “DJ John Cage.”

The third-floor hides a cool little place called “Soldering Café,” an open space where people interested in electronics can share tools and work on their projects. It’s also a great place for hackers to meet and collaborate with all the crazy artists who are roaming the halls of 3331. Next to it is the SoftBank Robotics Corp. Workshop, where developers can have endless hours of fun, writing the control code for SoftBank’s humanoid robots.

In the basement, a long line of Anime Otaku, patiently waiting to enter the Sakka Zakka new artist showcase.

Club Mogra

The clock was ticking, and it was almost time for us to leave, but I felt bad we didn’t get a chance to sample the famous Akihabara nightlife. [Akiba] recommended checking out Club Mogra, supposedly an electronica/chiptunes otaku/nerd culture central, but we were supposed to leave the town that night, and there was no way we could make it happen. Still, I looked up the club’s website, and it turned out there was a show starting at 3PM. I couldn’t fathom what kind of party starts that early, but we decided to check it out anyway.

Sometime around 4PM, we reached the location. An unassuming little entrance with nothing more than a door with a “Mogra” sticker on it and a security guard. Not expecting much, we got in and went downstairs to the basement. At the end of the staircase was a girl in a manga cosplay costume. She smiled and opened the door for us.

I was blown away.

The place was packed. DJs were playing some sort of chiptune/jungle with anime theme songs layered on top, and everyone was dancing and partying like crazy. The walls were covered with projections of 8-bit intros and random anime footage. I saw a Ghost in the Shell clip whiz by and was completely overtaken by the experience. This, finally, was the kind of dystopian future I was hoping for – Sunday afternoon, deep underground, people dancing into oblivion lamenting over distant 8-bit worlds that never existed.

At 6PM we had run out of time and had to head out, grabbing the Narita Express back to the airport. As the city faded in the background, I realized that even though Tokyo might not seem as futuristic as it once was, it’s something even more unique – a place where future arrived prematurely. And in a unique Japanese way, they have found a way to live with it in harmony.

For a geek building hardware, there’s hardly a better place to be.