It’s thanks to the efforts of so many that the space continues to grow and improve but it has long been a bugbear of mine that plans are not well communicated and it’s difficult to know how to help without the visibility of what’s going on.
So I’ve put together a document to capture the plans for the space (thank you @Garlicbread for transferring this to the Forum as a Wiki page):
By giving this transparency, it should encourage discussion and allow people to see which tasks their interests or skills align with. As tasks are completed, they should be removed from the list so that this document remains as concise as possible. I believe that changes made to the space are recorded somewhere? - I recall at one point seeing an overwhelmingly massive log of entries, possibly electrical in nature. This could continue as it is.
I’m aware that some attempts have been made in the past to implement other systems. It could be interesting to hear about them, what worked and what didn’t, etc. It might be that there are aspects that could be incorporated into this document. Otherwise the document uses a simple bullet point structure that can be sub-divided down an many times as necessary. For the short terms goals, this allows tasks to broken down into small manageable chunks ready for a person or small group to tick off.
Should anyone wish to be given editing permissions, please contact me with the email address of the account you would use to log in and make edits.
For the ceilings in the main area, they’re mostly painted but we’re still working on them usually on a Monday evening.
I think there’s around 1 more arch to paint in that area.
This does leave the visual arts / large project storage area but we’ll have to see if we can work around it with all the stuff in there.
For the laser cutter we did have a 2nd chasis for a while that could have been adapted for a Co2 tube, but it was gotten rid of as nobody wanted to work on it.
The big orange one we have now we originally sourced from China on a boat (I think it was cheaper that way for delivery)
Bob was involved at the time and I think replaced the electronics on it to the current form as is.
Current specs for the orange laser are - Laser Cutter - Hackspace Manchester Documentation so 60W / A2 sizeish
For something new I’m not sure what to recommend, this one seems to be shipped from Poland so avoids delivery costs https://www.aliexpress.com/item/4000206858462.html
This one on the other hand has massive shipping costs as it’s from china
There’s also stuff like the chiller for water cooling / air assist (which blows crap away) etc to think about as well
Also what type of electronics to shove into it (since the control boards they come with tend to be a bit crap)
There may be other bits, but I’m not one of the laser maintainers myself
I like the idea of a log for actions, with who did what so we can priase people for their work on the space, and ambitions so that new joiners can get stuck in knowing whether what they’re doing contributes towards a goal or not.
I agree with Garlicbread that it should ideally live on the documentation system, rather than create a new system or require logins. The documentation system is history logged so we can see each edit that’s been made step by step.
If this document is maintained by the community as a whole rather than a subset of people, I reckon it’ll be really powerful.
We need to set some expectations, such as not adding in wild divergences without discussing on the forum first. Ideally discussion goes here, and output goes on the documentation system.
So yeah, looks great to me! Happy to get it imported into docs and do a runthrough of how to get started with docs if you’re not familiar
For github you’d need to setup an account there.
Then get someone to add you into the Members group - Teams · HACManchester
You don’t have to use the git command line to add / edit stuff (git was originally designed for maintaining source code)
You can just edit / create files in the github web page in the docs directory
