More Hacker Spaces! Techshop coming to Pittsburgh

Techshop is coming to Pittsburgh.  This will be a great addition to Pittsburgh’s DIY / Hacker culture–which has a slightly different flavor in Pittsburgh because-unlike the big coastal cities that are ‘rediscovering’ the idea of building stuff-Pittsburgh is a city that never stopped thinking of itself as working, industrial city.   On a personal level, I’m excited that Techshop is coming to Pittsburgh with a focus on veterans.

I’m not sure how we should view these kinds of DIY/Hacker spaces in terms of the robotics ecosystem.  Off the top of my head, I can’t think of any successful start-ups that got their start in these kinds spaces.  If you look at the hacker space websites, the kinds of projects that they tout as commercial successes are more in the consumer device space (e.g. artistic iPhone docks)  as opposed to commercial robotics.  On the other hand, they seem to be a good marker of the kind of culture that builds robots.  So whether this is indicative or causative of a great robotics scene, welcome to Pittsburgh, Techshop.

As an aside: I’ve updated the cluster comparison with a few of these developments and more DIY/Hackerspaces.  There are links in the cluster comparison to several resources in this arena.