Hackerspaces are creative places for geeks. They're workshops full of equipment, tools and materials, where people come together to work on projects, share ideas and collaborate. Ever wanted to use a 3D printer? Cut metal in a CNC miller? Need a soldering iron at 3am? Then hackerspaces are for you.
Robots & Dinosaurs runs a space for hackers in Sydney. It has a DNA sequencing machine, a MakerBot 3D printer, multiple CNCs, a furnace, a woodworking shed, two sewing machines, ADSL2 and a frankly unreasonable number of soldering irons. It's also a really open community: every geek is right at home. People work on a huge range of projects in a big communal space. There are active spaces in every capital city, which you can find at hackerspaces.org.
Hackerspaces embrace open standards, including the Open Hardware Definitions, open source software, and collaborative software sites.
A show and tell of some member’s projects will be done including 3D printers, quadcopters and animatronic squid hats, amongst others.
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Gavin Smith is the president of Robots & Dinosaurs, the Sydney Hackerspace. He built a MakerBot 3D printer, and runs it at the space alongside a CNC milling machine and ‘Mr DNA’, the DNA sequencing machine. He competed in Rocket Car Day XII, beating several other cars with his innovative 'big block of wood' design. Professionally he's a robotics and automation engineer, and worked on commissioning the storage ring RF system at the Australian Synchotron.
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