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Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

The "maker movement" is alive in Shentzen, but mostly dead in Silicon Valley. TechShop is mostly crafters, not people building anything innovative. Hacker Dojo is appslaves. If there's a maker space in Silicon Valley with a pick and place machine, I can't find it.

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This is also true in Seattle. The "makerspaces" here are incapable of working with anything beyond PLA. There are some cool tool libraries, which can be useful for larger hardware projects, but there seems to be very little in the way of true hackerspaces. If you want to get into EE or circuitry in the US, there are plenty of good online resources, but you will be at a severe disadvantage to people living in parts of the world with active maker communities.

But I think there's a reason for that. Innovation faces a steep uphill climb in the USA.

1. I have a cool idea, but I don't have the capital to bootstrap it right away. No problem, I can work and draw a wage while doing my research on the side, right? Nope! This is America, and your employer likely claims to own everything that you create or think of, on or off the clock.

2. I have a cool idea, and want to play around with it even though I could use some help with some basic concepts. Well that's great, but I'm on my own. There are no incubators that specialize in electronics or circuitry, no groups of experienced hardware hackers to mentor newcomers, and no specialized training or local resources. You also cannot source circuit components locally when most cities seem to lack a single hobby shop. Often if you want to find out if a circuit will work, you need to wait a whole week for new parts, if you're lucky and can find them from a stateside retailer at a reasonable price.

3. You might think that academic institutions would make themselves available to their surrounding communities, offering night classes and/or access to facilities like machine shops or lab equipment which are typically beyond the reach of an individual. You would be wrong; this is America, and if you don't pay full tuition, you can fuck right off.

There are plenty of resources like the 400 MHz and Up Club. QST still publishes lots of projects.

1) Not in California, which is why attempts to copy Silicon Valley fail.

2) There's far more support online than there was a few years ago. There's good electronic CAD software for free. (KiCAD and LTspice are both free and useful.) Board fab is widely available and cheaper than ever. You can get overnight delivery from DigiKey if you order by 8 PM central time, but it will cost you. If you can wait a few days, no problem. They no longer have a minimum order. The 3rd edition of the Art of Electronics is out, so there's a good intro to modern electronics. (Although those old guys whine about tiny surface mount, instead of telling you how to do it.) There are good message boards. Usenet "sci.electronics.design" is surprisingly useful.

3) The machine shop situation is better than the electronics situation. I've been a TechShop member for years. Their machine shop facilities are good; their electronics facilities are about enough to do a blinking-light Arduino project.

I'm guessing by 'not in CA' you mean 'unbelievably shitty employment laws.' I feel like that's something we have some power to change, though.

And I agree that the online resources are fantastic, but to be fair, that's true no matter where you are in the world. KiCAD and group board buys like OshPark are amazing - I particularly like how KiCAD tries to prevent you from connecting traces that you shouldn't - but they do take ~ a month for your small batch of boards. You really can't complain for the price, but some smaller local fabs would be suh-weeeeeet. And sites like Digikey/Mouser/Jameco are expensive in small quantities, and the shipping adds up quickly if you go with small impulse orders. They also tend to be 5-10x more expensive than taobao for parts more complex than small discretes. The proven provenance is nice, but is it $1.50 vs. $0.20 nice? At those prices, it's worth just putting out several 20-50 piece sample orders and picking out the highest quality listing to grab in bulk.

As for machine shops, I guess you've had better luck than me. I've combed most everywhere North of downtown (couldn't even find anything in the industrial parts of Ballard,) but I'll have to look into TechShop, thanks.

>This is also true in Seattle

Especially with Metrix:Create completely abandoning hackerspacedom for blah structure. Extremely sad.

Metrix:Create...is that the place in Cap Hill with a laser cutter, poor lighting, unsupervised live-in children, a few tool drawers, a plastic mill, and a couple of 3D printers? Yeah, that place isn't even worth walking to when you're in the neighborhood. Surprised they're still in business.

Pretty much. What made it good was the open lab space and gathering area, then people would consume other services. I know I sure did when I was bootstrapping my startup.

The psuedo live-in children thing was kinda weird now that you mention it...

Their web site: "As of October 2016, we are focusing our resources on design, fabrication, consultation, and workshops. We are no longer offering an open lab work space, and we do not provide tools for rental/check-out or in-store use. Consultations are by appointment only." There's nothing wrong with running a prototype-making shop, but most prototype-making shops have much more capability than those guys.

Sudoroom and noisebridge are still alive.

The fact of the matter is that for all of the innovation you hear about there, it's really just romanticizing the margin thinning of existing products. Nothing wrong with that, but it's easy to romanticize.

That comment seems needlessly negative and requires everyone to fit within your definition of "making".

The hacker dojo events seem somewhat broad though many are more software based: https://events.hackerdojo.com/

I think we are lucky to have things like hacker dojo and techshop in our local area as well as meetups for diverse interests. Pretty sure you could find like minded folks in the area if you made the effort.

>The "maker movement" is alive in Shentzen

There is no Maker movement in Shenzhen- there are well-equipped spaces we show to tourists, there is no Maker Movement in the usual use of the word. Go check- no Github repositories, no posted projects anywhere. It's entirely fake- and the money well spent because people believe it despite there being no actual output.

What do you think of Seeed Studio?

"TechShop is mostly crafters, not people building anything innovative."

Techshop is just a place to learn and build things, not to showcase your commercial or innovative products. Those stay back home in the garage.

It used to be. I saw the prototype of WordLens at TechShop, long before Apple bought them. The case (but not the electronics) for Square's credit card reader was built at TechShop. There used to be startups renting rooms at TechShop for their workspaces. If you want a room at the Redwood City TechShop, they have lots of space available.

I'm a relatively new member - I don't doubt it's changed over the years, much like Hacker Dojo sadly did. In Redwood City I haven't sensed much community activity happening or a sharing culture - I chalked that up to Techshop being for-profit. Still very much enjoy my time there though.

Pick and place machines are used for volume pcb production - not the kind of thing one would expect to find in your average maker space AFAIK.

Sudo room just got one!

Theirs is a reel-fed machine. Those are how most of the world's electronics is made, but making a single board without reels of the same part is tough.

They're also used for low-volume prototyping or short-run manufacturing, not just high-volume manufacturing. They're especially useful for placing high-density components; it's not exactly easy to assemble a PCB with BGAs by hand.

There's one for $1799 intended for prototypes.[1] It's clever; it uses more vision processing and less tooling than other pick and place machines. Parts only have to be close to the right place; the vision systems do the fine adjustments.

Unfortunately, few people seem to have one working. There are two hacker spaces that got one, and there's even an unboxing video, but didn't get it assembled and working.

I could use one of those occasionally. The tweezers and microscope thing gets tiring, fast.

[1] http://www.liteplacer.com/

Use a hand held vacuum tool:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pdGSFc7VjBE

I have this cheap one.[1] It doesn't work. The "squeeze the rubber bladder to get vacuum" approach doesn't provide enough suction. Ones with a powered air pump might work, but cost much more.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01CCHFWL0

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