By Anna Brett
The Columbia Missourian 

Columbia workshop brings together 'hackers and makers'

 

August 11, 2017



COLUMBIA, Mo. (AP) — Matt Little bought an old, motorized wheelchair online, detached it from its base, hooked it up to a remote controller and attached it to a lawn mower.

Now, he has a remote control lawnmower. In his first test, the motor control was backward, so the modified wheelchair base reversed straight back into the work table, he said.

He hopes to modify it so it can run autonomously, without a remote control or a person pushing it, and can be attached to other equipment like snow blowers.

To work out the kinks and test new ideas, Little takes advantage of the equipment, work space and a community of what members call "hackers and makers" at Columbia Gadget Works, a shared workshop and community group.

Columbia Gadget Works is a place where club members come together to build and create, Zach Zeman, president of the group, said. The projects cast a wide net, including technology, art, software, electronics, metal working and woodworking.

"It's about exploring curiosity," Zeman said. "It's DIY taken to the extreme — it takes all sorts of forms."

Zeman said that while some of the projects are inventing new things like the remote controlled lawn mower, some take on already existing products, like cameras, pens or even a metal foundry. The idea is to explore and understand how things work by taking them apart and building new objects from them.

"We're not trying to build something to sell," Ryan Raney, secretary of Columbia Gadget Works, said. "We just want to build something just for the sake of building something most of the time."

The Columbia Missourian reports the workshop has a wide variety of donated and borrowed equipment, including a laser cutter, vinyl cutter, electronics station, 3-D printer, welder, and various hand tools, machines tools and saws.

Raney said the community aspect is the most important.

"A lot of us work in various forms of tech, but we don't know everything," Raney said. "So the whole point of this place is that you have a little bit of expertise in something, and it may be something kind of strange or something way out of left field that not many people are interested in. If you get enough of those people together, then you can make some really cool stuff."

A couple of years ago, some eight to 12 members of Columbia Gadget Works collaborated to make a high-altitude balloon. Zeman said it was designed to go to "near space," an altitude so high above the Earth that it has only a little atmosphere. They attached two tracking devices and a camera that took photos at intervals.

After they let the balloon go, the tracking devices malfunctioned, and they couldn't locate the balloon. But mysteriously, one of the devices switched on a year later, and they found it in a field in Hermann, Missouri, covered in bite marks, as if a dog had picked it up and turned it on for them. The balloon and camera were never recovered.

Although it was disappointing at the time, Zeman thought the project was worthwhile.

"Sometimes even if you fail, looking back you see we did a lot of cool things," he said.

Dan Goldstein, a member and the owner of the space they rent for the workshop, has been taking things apart and putting them back together ever since he was a child trying to figure out how they worked. He passed down the habit to his son, Luc Goldstein, who has been a member of the group since he was 15.

David Vogler, treasurer of Columbia Gadget Works, has also been tinkering with things since he was a boy. He recalled that once he unwrapped a Christmas present containing a remote control car — which he assembled, then disassembled, then re-wrapped so his parents wouldn't know he had opened his present early.

The members often go to fairs where they show off things that they make; for example, they designed a kit for people to make their own cardboard robots, and they set up what they call Battle Bot tournaments, where two remote controlled cardboard robots fight cage-match style. They have a roster and designated repair times to get the robot ready for the ring again.

Raney said that kids are generally interested in the robots and competitions, but the cost for robotics is often prohibitive, which is why the Gadget Works guys choose to show people how to make their own robots out of cardboard.

Columbia Gadget Works started informally, with interested people meeting in living rooms, coffee shops and garages, but a larger space was needed — to meet, store tools, and work on projects.

In 2010, they adopted bylaws and established meetings, and they've been in their current space for the past two years, Zeman said. Anyone can attend Open Hack Nights, from 7 to 9 p.m. on Thursdays.

In the future, Zeman said, he would like to see a growth in membership and community, as well as more classes that teach people how to use various tools or certain skills like metalworking. Zeman said tools can be intimidating at first, so he'd like to show people how to use them safely and correctly.

"We'd like to be the ultimate facilitator in tools and expertise," Zeman said. "We want to be enablers of creation."

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Information from: Columbia Missourian, http://www.columbiamissourian.com

 

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