Hack This

Join today's new revolution in creativity and community: hackerspaces. Stop letting other people build everything for you: Do it yourself. Explore, grab the tools, get hands-on, get dirty...and create things you never imagined you could. Hack This is your glorious, full-color passport to the world of hackerspaces: your invitation to share knowledge, master tools, work together, build amazing stuff-and have a flat-out blast doing it. Twin Cities Maker co-founder John Baichtal explains it all: what hackerspaces are, how they work, who runs them, what they're building-and how you can join (or start!) one. Next, he walks you through 24 of today's best hackerspace projects...everything from robotic grilled-cheese sandwich-makers to devices that make music with zaps of electricity. Every project's packed with color photos, explanations, lists of resources and tools, and instructions for getting started on your own similar project so you can DIY! JUST SOME OF THE PROJECTS YOU'LL LEARN ABOUT INCLUDE... . Kung-fu fighting robots . Home-brewed Geiger counter . TransAtlantic balloon . Twitter-monitoring Christmas tree . Sandwich-making robot . Interactive Space Invaders mural . CNC mill that carves designs into wood, plastic and metal . Telepresence robot that runs an Internet classroom . Toy cars that are ridden by people . Bronze-melting blast furnace . Laptop-controlled robot fashioned from a wheelchair . DIY book scanner JOHN BAICHTAL is a founding member of Twin Cities Maker, a hackerspace organization that has been collaborating for almost two years. Based in Minneapolis-St. Paul, Minnesota, Twin ities Maker has its own rented warehouse complete with a welding station, woodshop, classroom, and ham radio transmitter. Baichtal has written dozens of articles, including pieces for AKE, the D&D publication Kobold Quarterly, and 2600: The Hacker Quarterly. He has contributed to Wired.com's GeekDad blog for four years and blogged at Make: Online for two, publishing more than 1,500 posts during that time. He is now writing a book about Lego.