Reading Hackspace

Reading Hackspace Visit

On Wednesday the 23rd of November a group of members from RADARC headed down to find out more about the Reading Hackspace, known as “rLab”.

Upon arrival at the small industrial area in the centre of Reading, a small unit with nothing more than a door and a couple of windows sits quietly in the otherwise dead industrial area.

It is 8pm and we approach the door to be greeted by a member of rLab. They led us up the stairs and told us that there would be someone around to give us a tour. My first thoughts… WOW…

The first room we came to was the electronics and desk area. People are sat working all around the room on everything from CAD designs and soldering through to Hard disk recovery and coding. We instantly started asking questions and getting to know a little bit about the group.

Once someone became available we were led around the building being shown all of the awesome equipment, tools and machinery they have there. It was one hell of an eye opener to see that this whole community runs off membership donations and kindness. There were lathes, laser cutters, 3D printers and much more.

We then went back upstairs to the electronics/workbench area and “mingled”. There were some people playing around with LED light boards, clocks, Raspberry Pi’s, Arduino’s, Hard disks, coding on (very) old hardware and much more. We got a demo of the laser cutter which was seriously cool too!

All in all it was a very nice evening and we all look forward to getting to know the hackspace community. We hope that they will also come to find out more about RADARC in the near future. As always, everyone is welcome!

Stay tuned for more posts about our events in the future!

Written by James 2E0JPM