The 3-foot-talL ROBOT

 The 3-foot-talL ROBOT looks like a Roomba vacuum cleaner with a cardboard tower on it, a small electronic tablet for a head. The face is a video of me, watching the thing roll up, then reverse back toward the work table, where Gerald Knight sits in front of a laptop with the same video playing on it.

“Normally, robots like that are like $10,000,” Knight, a middle-aged African-American guy in a ball cap and glasses, says. “This is $350. The tablet is from Walmart.”

We’re at the Baltimore Hackerspace on a Wednesday night. The location, on Landay Avenue, between the Player’s strip club and a business that seems to involve moving a lot of empty pallets around on forklifts, is not indicative of the nation’s glorious and soon-to-be resurgent high-tech manufacturing future. The building itself is like a tall garage, with a big overhead door in front that looks out on cracked pavement, and a semi truck parked on wood blocks.

But looks deceive. All around us, cool things are happening.

There are guys playing with a big speaker filled with corn starch mixed with water. There are guys working on computer code, and guys—key guys, actually: Paul King and David Powell, two of the founders of this hackerspace—messing with an amplifier kit. There is a guy putting the finishing touches on a scratch-built model helicopter with eight rotors.

This is Knight’s second trip to the Baltimore Hackerspace. He says the men here were central to getting his robot built. Ten weeks ago he started the project. It is perhaps indicative of the progress he made working by himself that, two weeks ago, he brought a pile of parts to Landay Avenue. “The guys have been wonderful,” Knight says. “Paul said, ‘Let’s crack this thing open,’ and boy, did he. We certainly voided the warranty.”

Baltimore is awash in DIY spaces where tinkerers can gather and share ideas and tools, sip beer, and void warranties. Called “makerspaces,” the concept started in Germany in the mid-1990s, when a group called the Chaos Computer Club founded an open-membership space in Berlin called c-base. MIT expanded on the concept in 2001, snagging a National Science Foundation grant for its Fab Lab, which then spread to 34 countries. Baltimore has seen an explosion of new spaces in the past few years. Besides the Hackerspace, founded in 2009 and now on the far east side, there is The Node in the Station North Arts District, and last month The Baltimore Foundery [sic] opened on the 200 block of South Central Avenue. All offer tools for metalworking, wood, computers, and robotics, but each has a slightly different focus.

And they’re not the only choices. For two-and-a-half years the Community College of Baltimore County in Catonsville has offered an MIT-affiliated Fab Lab with similar amenities and then some. Security-minded programmers founded the Unallocated Space out near BWI airport, and in late 2012 Dr. Tom Burkett founded BUGSS, the Baltimore Under Ground Science Space, at 101 N. Haven St. That bio-tech-focused group teaches how to build genes and make new organisms.

There is even a roving kid-centered makerspace bringing instruction to middle and grade school kids and their parents throughout Maryland, D.C., and Northern Virginia. “There is a big confluence of high-tech people in Baltimore,” says Matt Barinholtz, founder of FutureMakers.

“Baltimore has got the progressive families that want to see their young people have genuine experiences.”

“Part of it is there’s a resurgence in the whole notion of making,” says Jason Hardebeck, the landlord and co-founder of The Foundery—so named because it aims to develop business founders, in part, by literally shaping and casting molten metal. “My little brother—he’s 40—asked me what a makerspace is. I said it’s what the hipsters call workshops.”

But unlike grandpa’s workshop, makerspaces are explicitly collaborative. The open collective model allows—almost forces—collaboration among people who might not otherwise have met, and the tool-sharing promotes multidisciplinary competence.

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