HackPittsburgh: The Creative Tinkers

Inside an Uptown garage, headquarters for HackPittsburgh, Gwendolyn Schmidt is sitting in front of a pile of iron pellets, steel shavings and blinking lights.

"I put out the word – everybody bring random stuff," says the South Side resident.

Everybody around the table seems to have done just that.

"I got sucked in …" jokes Doug Philips of the North Side, busy sorting colorful role-playing game dice, some with dozens of sides. Tonight's object: hack jewelry. Last week, the group was working on building wearable computers. Philips has been here on other nights recently to help the group construct its own weather balloon for a national contest to see whose apparatus can ascend to 100,000 feet and take pictures of the curvature of the earth.

The group is surrounded by shelves of parts and equipment accumulated since the space opened in June 2009: Oscilloscopes. Power supplies. Nuts. Wires. Speakers. A Roomba robot vacuum cleaner. Schmidt hands an elongated diamond die to another member, Derrick Brashear, who takes it to the other half of the hacker space, a workshop with two lathes, a miter saw and other equipment. After several passes of the drill press, he penetrates the die's tip for an earring.

Schmidt, who has been a HackPittsburgh member from the beginning. hopes next to learn how to make a garduino – an Arduino microprocessor that, set up properly, will measure soil moisture, the time of day and the amount of available light to automatically operate her garden's rain-barrel watering system.

"I learned how to crochet from people here," she says. "Come up with something you want to do or make and we can do it here."

The hacking community is as old as the term – picture model railroaders and ham radio enthusiasts, not computer hackers – and as new as the do-it-yourself Maker movement, which gained national attention in the last few years. There are now at least 152 such hacker spaces in the U.S.

"There's a lot of people in the hacker community who want to take the term back," says HackPittsburgh President Matt Stultz. "A hacker is someone who tinkers, who makes things, who quests for knowledge. The other idea of hacking is to take something and use it for an entirely different use.

"When you're a kid and you want to build that rocket shop to Mars …" Stultz adds. "Well, we still have those dreams. You go to a gym, you go once a month, you really build up your body. We're that. Except, for your brain."

About 25 members have gathered here tonight during their regular Friday open houses. Across from the working table are a white board, couches, a fridge for the group's beer coop and a stove – "for working on projects," Stultz says. Their Twitter feed posts onto a scrolling LED sign on one wall. A device below it reports the temperature inside the space, and whether lights are on, to their website, so people know whether the space is in use. It's open 24/7 to members, who pay $30 a month and help with maintenance.

Over the last few months, the group has held sessions on origami, parallel programming, intelligent robots, juggling, power supplies and multi-meters. But it's the camaraderie that really makes a hacker space great, Stultz emphasizes.

"They're a very important part of the ecology, what keeps the city vibrant and vital," says Golan Levin, who teaches in Carnegie Mellon University's School of Art and founded the local chapter of the art/tech presentation group Dorkbot. "If you want to support a population who can invent things, make things, fix things, to make sure your population is not just a bunch of consumers, the hacker space is the main informal channel where that sort of thing takes place."

Even a CMU education can't take its place, he says, since the classroom emphasizes theory, and the knowledge hackers exchange "is really coming too quickly for textbooks and institutions to catch up."

Nick Pinkston, who founded HackPittsburgh but is no longer involved, agrees. "I'm pretty skeptical of the education system in the U.S," he says. "We've removed ourselves from what we do day to day. This whole group together can make things and learn things from each other."

However, he adds, "I wish there was a higher rate of companies, nonprofits and open source projects coming out of this." Pinkston's own start-up, Cloud Fab, has developed a 3D printing platform.

Stultz has the same wish for the group. He points to New York City's hacker space, Resistor, as "the rock stars of the scene. Everyone who is a member there is doing amazing stuff," including inventions that have turned commercial. "They are leading a revolution. We see stuff like that and we say, we can do that. I think our shop needs to get people more inspired on that front."

Adds Levin: "Other cities have invested in their hacker spaces. These people here haven't felt the love from their local government yet."

Happily, they are still feeling the friendly embrace of their landlord, Dale McNutt, whose StartUptown building at 1936 Fifth Avenue, which supports young entrepreneurs such as CloudFab, housed HackPittsburgh for free at first.

"We've entered an age of entrepreneurial necessity," says McNutt, "where tools that used to be only in the hands of the trades are accessible to everyone. Understanding how things work demystifies them – it gives people power to create and participate in the entrepreneurial experience unlike any time in recent history."

More immediately, he adds, each of HackPittsburgh's Friday sessions "brings new people into the neighborhood. My front gate gets regular visits from fathers and sons in town for a college interview or others who have heard Pittsburgh has a 'hacker's space' … I see it as building … the collective genius of our culture on a local level. Pittsburgh is ripe for the experience!"

Main image: Matt Stultz at Hack Pittsburgh

Photographs copyright Brian Cohen