Hey all, Luke from hack.rva. The guys are really busy with filming and traveling all over the world, so they’ve asked me to write a quick update for them about the portion of their adventure that I shared with them.
They were staying in Washington, D.C. with Nick Farr, and he was generous enough to lend them his car so they could go to some hackerspaces in the area. They started off by meeting us at hack.rva around 3:00 PM or so. We gave them a tour, they filmed us and the space, we talked about what we thought the hackerspace movement was about, shared some projects, etc. Because neither Skylar or I had ever seen another hackerspace in person, they asked us if we wanted to tag along with them to Baltimore and D.C. to see a few. After some deliberations about school work that needed to be worked on, we said sure, and were on our way around 5:30 PM.
We arrived at our first stop, Harford Hackerspace in Baltimore, around 9:15. It’s run out of a member’s (huge) garage. They were great guys, and had some really fun projects. My favorites would have to be the non-Newtonian fluid machine and the pneumatic low-rider car. We couldn’t stay for long there because we had two more spaces to visit that night, and by the time we left Harford, it was close to 11 PM already.
Baltimore Node was about a 10 minute drive away. We got there, and we were starved, so we met the guys at a great pizza place across the street. We walked in, and there was a full fledged break dance floor going on, with the actual restaurant portion in the back. We got an Irish Pizza (caramelized onions, potatoes, mozzarella, swiss, and corned beef) and it was amazing. After we finished eating, Bilal challenged Mark from Node to a dance battle, and craziness ensued (pictures forthcoming).
We hung out at Node for a while, got the interview, the tour, checked out the awesome graffiti alley in the back of the space, and had a ton of fun. Around 2:00 AM or so, it was time to leave. We had to head back to D.C., then back to Richmond. We all hopped in the cars, got to HacDC, got to see the space for about 5 minutes, but not talk to anyone from the space because it was so late. We got our bumper stickers that they’ve been hauling around to all the other spaces, said our goodbyes, and headed back to Richmond.
The crew are great guys, lots of fun, extremely busy, and very hardworking. Hopefully you enjoyed this post. Also, you now know they exist, they aren’t dead, and they’re just all over the country.
Co-founder of hack.rva. Computer engineering senior at VCU. Tinkerer, maker, brewer, UAV tech.