Welcome to Technologia Incognita!
This is Amsterdam’s hackerspace. In Latin it means “Undiscovered Technology” — quite fitting for a hackerspace! It’s been around for about 2 years and has grown to a solid 50+ members, in fact, they are running out of room on the ever popular social nights!
They typically have a policy of no cameras but made an exception for us provided we didn’t photograph any projects or persons without permission, so while the gallery below may look like the space was empty… there was a good 20-30 people hanging out since it was the social night.
Before entering the hackerspace they have a geeky t-shirt quilt hanging on the wall entitled the 50 Shirts of Gray. The space itself is in an old industrial building that has been sectioned off for art studios and workshops. It’s on one of the outer rings of the city and is about a 30 minute tram ride from the central station of Amsterdam.
Beware indeed!
The space is one large room with a few smaller walk-in closet sized rooms for storage and more heavy-duty tools. Shelves cover most of the walls and are filled with projects, members belongings and other random hackerspace goodies.
This is their arcade machine that was brought back to life. It features a new LCD monitor and computer running all the original games via emulator.
The joysticks are all good old limit switches — easy to fix if anything ever breaks!
A bit messy but you can see the hacked together PS2 connectors that the joysticks utilize. The key stroke configuration and keyboard is saved as an external joystick on the system so that the regular keyboard can still be used for debugging/programming.
This tool label made us giggle.
A mandatory server photo.
They also have a bar code scanner inventory system, but most members prefer just paying into the tip bowl.
And what’s a hackerspace without a roaring LED fireplace? In the original location each LED array was mounted to glass cubes for a much larger and more impressive display — but for now it’s retired to the fireplace.
This space has several 3D printers, and one of the members is actually one of the original designers for the Prusa i3! This is a shot of one of their delta printers though — printing another delta.
More delta parts on the way!
One of the storage rooms — nothing too exciting to see here.
The workshop, complete with ventilation.
A key copying machine. Funny story about this. They once posted a picture of their hackerspace key online, and Hack42 (we’re visiting them tomorrow) was able to manipulate the image and extract the key pattern from it to make their own key copy. A prank in good fun, Hack42 gave them new keys after all the fun was had.
Another fun feature of this space is the member’s storage boxes. Look familiar? Yeah, those are safety deposit boxes! The space used to reside in an empty bank, and well, inherited quite a few boxes!
Did you know Serbian money has Nikola Tesla on it?
If you’re ever in Amsterdam, check out this hackerspace
Filed under: Hackerspaces
