Nottinghack

This coming Wednesday, on the 11th March, the radio team are dedicating their social evening to Meshtastic and Meshcore. 

After a flurry of excitement about the tech last year, many of our nodes have drifted out of date or need a bit of attention. Wednesday is the night for that.

There will be a discussion about what kind of practical projects we can use the mesh for, hopefully bringing the radio community closer together with a shared mission. Will we find a use for Mesh? Probably not…

This month we warmly welcome South Wales Neon for a guest post, who recently made an incredible neon sign for the space. We are incredibly excited about this and encourage everyone to support the craft – it looks so much better than LED tape. Thank you South Wales Neon!

When Nottingham Hackspace got in touch about bringing neon into their workshop, we knew it was the perfect match. Hackspaces are all about community, creativity, and making things with your own hands and neon belongs right…

One Shot Wonders is our monthly tabletop role-playing game meetup at the Hackspace. As it celebrates its third birthday, we look back at how our quest started and the friends we made along the way…

When I was younger, me and my friends would meet and play Dungeons and Dragons. It was the era of the satanic panic, with role-playing games seen as a gateway to the occult, which made it all the more appealing. We played for a few years, before everyone went their separate ways, to Uni or…

Can you remember where you were on Wednesday 12th February? I can! Along with a mate, I pitched up to take a pre-membership tour of Nottingham Hackspace. I had no idea what to expect…..

Right at the start I met a mumbling urchin and a very mouthy donation box, both living in a very comfortable room crammed with old technology (which, I hate to admit, I can mostly remember from when it wasn’t old) and some books covering many diverse subjects. Then the tour itself left me absolutely amazed at…

Not so long ago, walking through the hackspace at night was a dark and scary experience. Today, you’ll be guided by the hackspace equivalent of moonlight. You probably don’t know what I’m talking about… I am of course referring to the warm amber glow of an LED matrix display. Such displays have made many happy hackers all over the world. Early LED matrix displays were simple, typically built upon a string of shift registers – simple logic chips which take serial data and convert it to parallel…

Your very first evening at the Hackspace will probably be on a tour, and they all take place on Wednesdays at 7pm. (You can sign up for a tour here.) As you’re going around, you’ll notice a number of things going on as it’s also our most popular social night.

There are a number of events on Wednesdays, in no particular order:

Radiospace is our radio club who meet every second Wednesday of the month. The projects we’ve gotten into have been a mixture of things that have gone completely…

Lasers, lathes and leadership
When I first joined Nottingham Hackspace in October 2024, I was mostly looking for a place where my partner and I could build things without tripping over each other in our shared house. I’d heard great things about the space, but I didn’t realise just how much it would come to mean to me. Yes, the tools were impressive—giant laser cutters, an impressively stocked wood workshshop, even a metal lathe—but it was the people who really got me hooked. A community of…

Do you remember Robot Wars from TV? You might be surprised to know that the UK still has a vibrant robot fighting scene; it’s just got smaller and gone underground.

The Hackspace has a group of members who build combat robots at various weight classes. In addition to competing at events around the country we often run our own events in the space, ranging from tournaments to robot building workshops.

The robots you’ll have seen on Robot Wars or Battlebots are…

Since the hackspace was founded in 2010, membership fees have always been set by the member – whatever you feel the hackspace is worth, is should be what you pay. The minimum was effectively £0.01, and in quite a few cases, that’s what members paid, whether they used the space a lot or not. During that time, we’ve grown from a handful of members to over 650 members. However, in 2021, we accidentally went over our VAT threshold and incurred significant costs. To prevent this from happening again…

Do you long for the days of robot wars? Well, we aren’t Jeremy Clarkson or Craig Charles, but we are a hackspace, and we are excited to announce that we will be running its first public combat robotics event, this October on Saturday the 28th. You can sign up, which is essential if you intend to compete, using our Google Form. Hackspace members may attend as spectators without signing up, but will need to sign up if you intend to compete. There…