Post courtesy of Inkfarm.com

When you walk into Metrix Create: Space in the Capitol Hill neighborhood of Seattle, it’s hard to know exactly what you’ve gotten yourself into. With long tables piled with electronics, 3D printers tucked in corners, a vending machine that offers Arduino shields alongside M&Ms, and a large, looming Pick and Place peeking out from inside a glass room, you’ve either stepped into the future or onto the deck of the Enterprise.

“Matt Westervelt, owner and founder of Metrix, considers it one part tech shop, one part hackerspace, one part coffee shop but 100% open to the public. As a public workshop with over 10 different “robots” at your disposal, the only limitation here is “What can you make?”

Projects here range from writing software to laser cutting; from casting 3D ducks to soldering; from designing Arduino boards to 3D printing. Inkfarm.com visited the shop last week for 3D Thursday to talk with Westervelt about Metrix’s roots, where it’s going and the ever-evolving technology it houses.

Tell me about Metrix; how did it start?
Metrix came about because I started a project called Seattle Wireless in 2000, and it had this weekly thing we called “HackNight”. We had a space back in the early 2000s in Georgetown, which had computers and couches and fast internet. It was kind of like this but not open to the public. It was more oriented towards hacking on Wi-Fi, mesh networking and computer stuff. Eventually we dropped that space and started hanging out every week at cafés. In 2004, I started metrix.net, which is the wifi business, and we started meeting in my office which over on Pine St. In 2009, I got a laser and thought “What am I going to do with this laser?” One thing was to build a 3D printer, the other one was to start asking people “What would you do if you had a laser?” It turns out that people all had different answers and really just wanted occasional access to laser – then I found this place.

I’ve heard the term ‘hacker’ and ‘hackerspace’ used a lot lately – what do they refer to?
Hacking means a lot of different things; it’s a pretty loaded term. Mostly, it’s I’m trying-to-get-something-to-work and I’ll hack at it. We’re all “pretendgineers” here; the people who work here aren’t real engineers. Some of us kind of are, but for the most part, we’re doing things we’re interested in and hacking on things. People come down and they want to make stuff – it’s like “Oh, I haven’t done that before but I bet you we could figure out how to do it with the stuff we have lying around.”

Hackerspaces are generally collective projects like this, where it’s a space where people come to make things, to collaborate. This one is different in that it’s a commercial space; it’s open to the public. It’s not a communal kind of thing. I think it has to be this way, simply because of where we’re located – I mean, we’re right on Broadway. Bills are high, and we have a lot of resources. To keep those resources, bills have to be paid. That’s a lot harder to do in the other methods of doing it.

Usually, when you look at hackerspaces, all the advice they give you is “Go find a place with really cheap rent.” We went the opposite way.

 

From L to R: Office Space at Metrix, the Soldering Room, and available extra materials.

How was it before you had a fixed space?
Before, hacknight was more of a group thing. We were hanging out, working on software projects, some hardware problems – it was mostly focused on how to build a Wi-Fi community. Although there’s a certain amount of hardware involved with that, it’s not the same. And we would just monopolize tables at coffee shops. We would generally show up at a place and take over. A lot of the coffee shops we used to go to – the Drink More, Online Coffee – they’re all gone. We would always find these places that were empty, and yet kind of interesting – and that we could just go in and take over. Unfortunately, a bunch of geeks sitting around using computers isn’t super conducive to the coffee business.

Clockwise from top left: Hi-res printer for photos and posters; the backroom workspace that holds the kiln, laser cutter and 3D powder printer; Metrix’s unique vending machine with Arduino shields, LED strips and candy; ink cartridges for the hi-res printer; the large-format printer available for use.

What was the initial response to Metrix?
People were excited. The Capitol Hill Seattle Blog got wind of it, and people were jazzed when we opened. At 12:01pm – we’re open noon to midnight everyday – on the first day, I signed up our first member – and I had never met her. I just showed up at 12:01, opened up the door and this woman standing there was like “Sign me up.” I said “I haven’t even told you how much stuff costs or should you what we have” and she was like “This is the coolest thing.”

Do you get a lot of walk-ins?
Yeah, we get a lot of people walking in from the street. They’re like “Hey, what’s going on here?” It says soldering on the sign, that doesn’t make any sense. Laser cutting, 3D printing – strange things, right? They’re going to restaurants, theatres, coffee shops and they see this.

So they come down: “What is this?” Oh, it’s a 3D printer. “What is this?” It’s a laser cutter. “What’s that?” That’s a Pick and Place. We have this really strange shop full of robots.

What is the hobotoken?
The hobotoken is just a piece of laser-cut coin. The idea behind it was that people felt weird about hanging out. In the beginning we had coffee, which we were only charging $1 for, but now coffee’s free because the robot is broken and we haven’t gotten around to fixing it. So now we just have French presses: if you want coffee, you make it and people do.

People felt really weird, because they’d come in, hang out and take up table space. They’re
writing software, or something, and they feel like they’re not contributing to the shop. So we said, “Well, you know, you could get something [laser cut].” But they wouldn’t know what to get.

So I figured out, we charge $2 a minute for laser cutting to make the hobotoken – which is pretty cool, it’s like this cool little coin thing, made of nickel. It [takes] three minutes of laser cutting, which would be $6, which is not too bad. So I charge $5 for it, and it is laser cutting for somebody who doesn’t know what they want. They can buy things off of Thingiverse, or whatever, but here’s a hobotoken; It’s a laser cut item you don’t have to think about – you could call it goodwill currency because that’s the whole reason you get them. If you want to figure out some greater meaning for them, go for it. Hehe. They’re worth nothing – they are cool though. I’ve even seen people swap them!

So what kinds of robots do you have here?
So we have a laser cutter, we have some large-format printers for paper and things, we have 3D printers – we have a bunch of different 3D printers. We have printers that print plastic and then ones that print different kinds of plastic. Mostly we print PLA and ABS, but we have some other types of plastic that we’ve played with. We have a powder printer, which gives us the ability to print not only in plaster, but to do slip castings and ceramics and porcelain. We can make glass molds. Once you’re printing in this plaster, you have the ability to take it to a foundry and put metal into it. But we don’t have any samples of it yet. I know someone with a backyard foundry, but there’s a lot of stuff we just don’t get to.

We have a kiln here so we can do glass, ceramics, things like that. We have a casting station to do a whole bunch of polymers. We do silicone casting, and urethane casting. We have a soldering room; we have an electronics counter – so we have a lot of different logic microcontrollers. We have a lot of different things in our vending machine, which includes Arduino shields and food.

We have maté on tap and a variety of sodas. We have microscopes. We have logic analyzers. We have oscilloscopes. We have all sorts of hand tools. We don’t have any big wood-working tools – we don’t have any table saws. We don’t have any welding capabilities – we don’t do metal. We don’t do big things, much more little things.

Tell me about the machine behind you – is it new?
Our newest tool is this Pick and Place machine. That will give us the ability to place electronic components on circuit boards. We got that one last week – it’s fresh, but I wouldn’t call it brand-new. It’s definitely new to us!

The large Pick and Place is the newest machine at Metrix

My goal is that you can walk in here at the beginning of the day with an idea or something really cool – whether it’s a product or it’s for your own personal gratification or a customized electronic – and make it, start to finish. You can sit here, use the Internet and figure out how to do it. Maybe take a workshop that says here’s how you do certain board designs, here’s how you make schematics, here’s how you play with electronics – and there’s generally somebody around that can help you with this sort of thing. To the point of “I want to make a prototype” for it and I want to populate it with electronics. With serviceable electronics, not stuff from 40 years ago but from 30 years ago.

People are scared of electronics in the U.S. It seems like a lot of the electronics knowledge disappeared with big, easy-to-use components. So when everything got small, people were like “I don’t know, it’s hard” and stopped paying attention and stopped trying to understand.

 

Read the rest of the interview at Inkfarm.com’s blog Take Back Your Printer!