Category Archives: milwaukee

Featured on Hackaday

Posted on by Pete Prodoehl

Hackaday

The fine folks at Hackaday stopped by for a tour recently, and they made this fine video so you to can see the awesome power that is Milwaukee Makerspace all the way across the Internet-Tubes in your own home or workplace.

And if you’re in town for a visit and want to see the place, Tuesday or Thursday night at 7pm is a great time to stop by. (Those are the “open” nights.) Otherwise, hit up the mailing list and find a member who might be available some other time, like the weekend, or Wednesday at 2:45am. Or something like that.

(And yes, we do have a giant robot arm capable of crushing innocent metal chairs.)

Vote for us in the Hackerspace Challenge!

Posted on by Pete Prodoehl

2013 Hackerspace Challenge!

As we mentioned back in July, Milwaukee Makerspace was selected to take part in the 2013 Hackerspace Challenge put on by RadioShack and Popular Mechanics, and now we can reveal it all, and we’re also asking for your vote!

Head on over to www.popmechnow.com/radioshack, watch the videos, and vote for the best project. I mean, we’re pretty confident you’ll prefer our project, but check out the awesome stuff that the guys from Inspiration Labs did. Hey, it’s got a TARDIS so those guys must be alright! ;)

I know you really want to see the Milwaukee Makerspace Morgifying Marble Manipulation Machine (aka: M6) mark your calendar for October 19th, 2013 because Milwaukee MakerFest will feature the M6 as for you experience in person!

(Oh yeah, we’re also running a Kickstarter Campaign to help make Milwaukee MakerFest ever more awesome. Help us out if you can!)

Bay View Gallery Night

Posted on by Pete Prodoehl

BVGN

It seems like just four months since the last Bay View Gallery Night… oh wait, it was!

We’ll once again have a group show, this time titled: More Awesome Things From the Makerspace, which is our way of saying “come check out all the crazy things we do!”

It’s all happening Friday, September 27th, 2013 from 5pm to 10pm. And as always, we’ll have some sort of magical surprise to knock your socks off!

(Or who knows, maybe it’ll be something that gently removes your socks and then carefully places them into the nearest laundry basket…)

Fix It Milwaukee ReCap

Posted on by Pete Prodoehl

Fix It Milwaukee

On Saturday, August 10th, 2013 Milwaukee Makerspace hosted the first “Fix It Milwaukee” event. We invited the people of Milwaukee to bring in their broken things, and we did our best to fix them.

The idea for the event came from Milwaukee County District Supervisor Jason Haas, and we partnered up with the Milwaukee Area Time Exchange to make it happen. We really didn’t know what to expect, but it turned out great, and we’ve already got members interested in doing it again.

Fix It Milwaukee

So what did we fix? There were lamps, computers, printers, furniture, a bird feeder, musical instruments, gardening tools, zippers, a battery charger, a dog’s chew toy, clothes, and even bikes. (Speaking of bikes, we should also thank Truly Spoken Cycles who sent over Sam, one of their expert bike fixers.)

Did we fix everything? Nope… some things are either too difficult to repair, or made so cheaply that they are not worth repairing, but percentage-wise we did really good, and I’d estimate an 80% success rate for fixing things.

Fix It Milwaukee

Throughout the event we probably saw about 25 people bring in items, and we had about 20 members helping fix things. At few members mentioned that it was a lot of fun troubleshooting things and working in teams to determine the best method of repair, and at least one member picked up a few new skills along the way, which is what we’re all about!

Keep an eye out for our next Fix It Milwaukee event… The more items we can keep out of the landfill, the better!