Facilities

Our facilities

Our Space

Our Space is located at 2 St Johns Avenue, New Town. It’s on the corner of New Town Road and St Johns Avenue, between the Ogilvie Campus of the Hobart City High School and the Southern Tasmanian Netball Centre. The building is a convict-era Guardhouse (built around 1830) of the former St Johns Park orphanage and Government Farm.

Rooms in this old building are large enough to allow groups of people to work together, but small enough to allow separation of different activities without too much mutual interference.

Members can use the space at any time (24hr access), but we ask you to respect the vintage of the building and its inherent fragility in some aspects. Note, too, that our lease requires “that no intoxicating liquor is brought on to or consumed on the Premises”.

Our tools and equipment

We have some cool gear 😎.

For making, we have: several 3D printers, two CNC machines, a laser cutter/engraver, plasma cutting & welding gear and all the usual smaller tools.

For electronics we have an electronics workbench plus test & rework equipment.

And of course lots of tables set up so that you can bring your computers (or use the ones that we have).

We even have our own Amateur Radio station!

Floor plan and room names

Who needs boring utilitarian rooms names? Our spaces are named after inspiring people.

This is a plan of our rooms. To find out what’s what, check the interpretation guide below it.

The rooms:

• Margaret Hamilton room
  • Our smaller meeting and programming room. Set up for you to plug in your laptoop (or use one of our computers from the next-door Room of Requirement
    • Margaret Hamilton was the leader of the team that developed the flight software for NASA’s Apollo missions. She was a pre-eminent designer of safe, real-time system control software.
• Bertrand Russell room
  • Our withdrawing room. A place to sit and discuss things. No tech in here please.
    • Bertrand Russell was a prominent and prolific British mathematician, philosopher, logician, and public intellectual.
• Nikola Tesla room
  • The radio and electronics area. Our radio station is on one side and our electronics build and test area on the other.
    • Nikola Tesla was an inventor and electrical engineer. He invented the alternating current system that is the foundation of all electrical distribution today and his experiments with induction became the basis for Marconi’s development of wireless (radio) communication.
• Claude Shannon room
  • A projects area, with the 3D printers and laser cutter.
    • Claude Shannon was the engineering genius whose ideas established modern information theory. Not only that, but he was also a quirky inventor, who was assisted (in both his inventions and is professional work) by his wife, Betty Shannon. Their inventions included a calculator in roman numerals and the very first mechanical maze-solving mouse/robot.
• Ada Lovelace room
  • Our larger meeting and laptops space. Gather here if the Margaret Hamilton room is too small or already full.
    • Ada Lovelace (Countess of Lovelace) is regarded as the world’s first computer programmer. She developed and published algorithms for Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine.