“I’ve always done a certain amount of work with my hands, but my whole career was in software.”

Rich Pekelney (pictured above) is standing in front of one of many mammoth machines in San Francisco’s TechShop, a DIY paradise full of industrial equipment for makers of all kinds.

The space is intimidating at first glance. Loud mechanisms tower and sprawl around the workshop’s several stories; people in welding masks and heavy protective gloves quietly bustle from one corner to another.

But after a few minutes in the shop, its aura of mystery quickly disappears. After all, people come here to learn, to weld, to screen print, to indulge their hobbies and acquire new skills. It’s a bit like a gym: Anyone can join as long as they want to do the work.

At TechShop’s San Francisco location, a $125 monthly membership fee gets you access to more than $1 million dollars of industrial-grade machinery, industry-standard design software for 2D and 3D projects, unlimited workshop hours, and coaching from experts in given techniques and materials. You can purchase additional classes for equipment or skills, and the pricing isn’t prohibitive. For example, you can get trained on working with sheet metal for $75 in a two-hour class.

Pekelney came here at first because, like so many other TechShop members, he needed to make something that couldn’t be bought. In this particular case, it was a perfect replica of a trashcan for use on a restored World War II submarine, the USS Pampanito.

“Twenty years ago, when I started working on [restoring] the ship, there were so many really talented guys who could make you anything you needed,” he said.

“Now, they’re gone. … They aged out or they moved out of the city. They’re 80, and they can’t see, or their hands shake.”

So Pekelney became part of the maker renaissance, a growing movement of women, men, and kids who want to make cool stuff. They come to places like TechShop for access to state-of-the-art equipment you’d be hard-pressed to find outside of a heavy industrial facility (as Pekelney tells me, “I would not be using a $15,000 machine if it weren’t for TechShop”); but they stay for the classes and the community.

And many of them end up doing more than learning a new skill; more and more, part-time tinkerers are turning their TechShop experiences into full-time, self-owned businesses.

“Oops, I started a business”

Today’s maker movement includes a huge range of arts, crafts, and fabrication, and at least as many fascinating types of humans. You’ve got the steampunk/Burning Man crowd who build robotic art cars to drive around the desert. You’ve got radical lesbian feminist knitters and quilters who are reclaiming the “feminine” arts. You’ve got kids young and old turning a deep Lego obsession into huge, intricate projects for display, and you’ve got even younger kids tinkering with mass-produced starter kits to nurture an early obsession with electronics. And you’ve got would-be entrepreneurs just trying to crank out a prototype for a product that might disrupt the market.

Accidental entrepreneurship, I learn during an extended TechShop tour, is a not uncommon outcome for folks who walk through its doors seeking to simply finish a one-off project. The lady behind Better Off Wed, an Etsy store of statement cake-toppers, first came to TechShop to do a single piece and ended making a business out of it. Another founder was doodling around with the shop’s laser cutter and ended up turning that into Yes & Yes Designs, a jewelry store.

There are dozens of stories like this from TechShop’s San Francisco store. The Bosavi headlamp came from a guy who walked into TechShop in September 2011 with no maker experience whatsoever. Now, he’s an inventor, entrepreneur, and TechShop instructor. A former ad copywriter sitting in the shop’s airy upper floor tells me that social media killed the advertising business; now, he makes and sells jewelry instead.

In fact, as maker advocate and Autodesk employee Jesse Harrington Au tells me during our tour, around 60 percent of TechShop members end up looking at starting their own businesses. Accidental entrepreneurship, he says, “happens more than I would have thought,” in no small part due to the fact that all kinds of makers, from sewers and designers and papercrafters to welders and carpenters and painters, under a single roof. The cross-pollination effects are huge.

Making’s roots

Dan Woods is a TechShop exec and was also part of another important cornerstone of the maker renaissance.

“When we co-founded Make, we thought we’d have maybe 10,000 people, old farts like us, from the ’60s,” he tells me as we meander through the shop’s panoply of machinery. “But there’s all these upstarts from Brooklyn with metal in their faces — and they get it.

“For some reason, it has become very trendy to express yourself physically,” says Woods, “and it is showing off.”

Woods has an aeronautics degree and used to work for Lockheed. I ask him point-blank what his job was. “I was helping pilots drop off — things — very accurately. … It was very cerebral.”

After that, Woods started working on Make with O’Reilly co-founder Dale Dougherty. At first a simple quarterly magazine, Make was first published in January 2005 as a way to explore and encourage DIY and DIWO (do it with others) culture. Dougherty originally envisioned the publication as “Martha Stewart for geeks.”

Maker Faire was born out of Make magazine. First held in San Mateo, Calif., it was billed as the world’s largest show-and-tell and included more than 100 exhibitors, DIY workshops for learning new skills, and competitions. Nowadays, the Faire has exploded into a chain of events around the world, drawing in makers and spectators by the tens of thousands.

At the very first Maker Faire, robotics instructor and MythBusters science advisor Jim Newton showed up at the San Mateo fairground in a huge Army truck looking for a place to park it. Realizing that Maker Faire was leaving enthusiasts with a warm glow but no outlet for future DIWO/DIY action, Newton decided that people needed a slice of Maker Faire all year ’round. He opened the doors of the first TechShop in late 2006, hoping that Maker Faire would be not just a show-and-tell but a gateway experience that would democratize making and hacking.

The birth of the hackerspace

Hacker spaces were a relatively new — or at least relatively unheard-of — idea in 2006. One of the first such spaces, c-base was founded in Berlin in 1995. Its primary focus was on hacking computer hardware and software, and it developed a large following and mythology around itself.

But the hackerspace revolution didn’t really take off until Metalab popped up in Vienna in 2006. The revolution in this case wasn’t the idea that hackers should hang out and hack together; rather, the revolution was around the mechanism that would make the whole enterprise work: money. As an open space for technical creatives, Metalab was funded from membership dues; the funds allowed the collective to rent a physical space, purchase materials, and hold events. This model proved to be an important catalyst for what followed.

Starting around 2006, the concept of hackerspaces experienced a small, underground explosion. In 2007, Bre Pettis and a handful of East Coast hackers started NYC Resistor, also with a membership-based model. Noisebridge, another leader in the scene, opened its doors in San Francisco in 2008.

Noisebridge was co-founded by Tor Project and Wikileaks hacker Jacob Appelbaum and hardware hacking legend Mitch Altman. “He’s a kind of Johnny Appleseed for hackerspaces,” says Woods. “But hackerspaces are for … people who are already comfortable with technology.”

While the hackerspace forefathers succeeded in bringing knowledge to noobs, first-time visitors to hackerspaces — non-nerdy consumers — can end up feeling more intimidated than welcomed.

Plus, these spaces tend to focus on the thrilling anarchy of hacking computer systems, whether bundles of circuits and storage or collections of data. There isn’t as much opportunity for, say, the guy who wants to weld a new consumer snowplow prototype or the lady who wants to screen-print a band T-shirt design.

A cleaned-up, commercial hackerspace for everyone else

As these Matrix-reminiscent spaces and groups popped up around the globe in the mid-2000s, the idea began to catch on with the less technically advanced, as well.

“You go to a job, sit at a computer, maybe you design things, but you never get to see it through,” said Harrington Au, pretty much summing up the mid-career ennui anyone over the age of 25 has experienced. Without the ability to see your work in its immediate, physically complete form, you can end up feeling less connected to it, less aware of its impact on others.

“There’s very little opportunity for those little successes,” he says.

And the little successes one experiences at TechShop might be nifty toys, one-off playthings made for one’s own amusement. But more often than not, the TechShop staff say the projects are immediately useful; they have a purpose in the real world and often fulfill a legitimate need in the marketplace.

That’s the kind of accidental entrepreneurship TechShop fosters. If these kinds of stories are any indicator of the organization’s future direction, it’s shaping up to be a casual incubator for the next generation of hardware and consumer goods companies.

Woods tells a great story about a Stanford undergrad student who was at TechShop working on a problem with polymers. The student expressed some frustration aloud about the particular problem; as fate would have it, a professor with 30 years of experience in polymers overheard him and offered help. The project is the Embrace Infant Warmer, a small, reusable sleeping bag for babies that keeps at-risk infants warm during medical emergencies. The project is funded by GE and was recognized at the annual Silicon Valley Tech Awards.

As we finish our tour in the textiles section of TechShop’s enormous warehouse, Woods waves his arm around the room, his gesture taking in the wildly diverse group of tinkerers intently bent over their projects.

“The most valuable thing is this,” he says. “It’s the members — their encouragement, their knowledge, their experience. … And they are dying to share what they know.”

All photos courtesy of TechShop, Flickr

Hardware hacking is super trendy right now, and Circuits.io is the latest trend-surfer to ride that wave.

The simple web-based tool lets you design and share circuits from inside a web browser. The site has been around for a couple months but has started to pick up steam since the team’s trip to New York for Maker Faire.

Circuits.io was created earlier this year by Karel Bruneel and Benjamin Schrauwen, two academics and tinkerers specializing in electronics design. The general concept behind the site was to make hardware/electronics design as easy as making software.

Ergo, Circuits.io’s goals are threefold: To help you design circuits based on pre-designed electronics modules; to hide the software’s complexity behind simple, easy-to-use interfaces; and to fully embrace the open-source hardware movement.

Here’s a quick video clip:

Circuits.io may launch paid accounts in the future, but for open hardware projects, the service will remain free of charge.

The open hardware movement has picked up quite a bit of steam lately, thanks in no small part to Open Compute, a Facebook-led crusade with tons of industry support from hardware vendors and web titans alike.

Other online hardware-design tools do exists; one of our favorites is Upverter, a one-year-old company that’s focused on collaborative and open hardware design.

Image courtesy of Mark, Vicki, Ellaura and Mason

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

OpenROV, a mini submarine developed in a Silicon Valley garage, has been hailed by the world’s media as the key to unlocking the earth’s last frontier.

No pressure, or anything.

The 20-something creators, David Lang (pictured, above) and Eric Stackpole, did not anticipate that their open-source robot would infatuate the press or be viewed as the low-cost alternative to subs like the Deep Sea Challenger, which took filmmaker, James Cameron, to the deepest, darkest recesses of the western Pacific.

“At the outset, we thought this might be a great project to discover underwater caves that are too small for divers,” said Lang when I met up with him at open-access workshop TechShop in San Francisco, where he and Stackpole make their parts. “Our ideas for what we wanted to use it for were dwarfed by the community.”

Environmentalists and marine archeologists already say they plan to use OpenROV to discover shipwrecks in Cuba and spotlight pollution in the high seas. Treasure hunters can use the mini sub to look for gold in unchartered waters. In November, Stackpole will be headed to Antarctica as an under-ice pilot in a larger-scale, commercial grade ROV.

“We don’t want to be the wealthiest mini sub builders in the world,” said Lang. ”Our goal is to have a high return on adventure.”

TechShop, the site where Lang and Stackpole solder the submarine’s parts.

On popular crowdfunding platform Kickstarter, OpenROV took on a life of its own and far exceeded its funding goal by netting $111,622 from 484 backers.

It didn’t hurt that Stackpole was profiled by the New York Times’, and OpenROV was credited for its potential to transform underwater exploration.

Lang told me no one has used OpenROV to successfully discover any buried treasure in the ocean’s depths, yet.

The founders’ singular focus is to keep up with the demand for the kits. At TechShop, Lang and Stackpoke laser cut electronic material and plastic and hand-pack and mail the kits. Lang told me that the most common purchasers are tinkerers and hobbyists, who add their own flourishes like robotic arms, payload equipment, and additional cameras.

The TechShop chain is a recent addition to the Bay Area, and is a paradise for hardware geeks. For $100 per month, anyone can access high-tech equipment such as 3-D printers. Classes taught at one of the TechShop hacker spaces include Welding 101, and are available for a few extra dollars. At TechShop, Lang learned how to build robots and work with machines in less than six months.

OpenRov, a mini submarine, can dive as deep as 100m.

The basic prototype has been through 35 iterations and is designed to be portable and cheap. At the basic level, its open-source, remotely operated robot that can be deployed underwater and navigated in 3D using a laptop.

The little robot is elegantly simple, but the real innovation is its inexpensive parts. OpenROV is available for $750, and anyone with a knack for DIY can use it to scale the depths of the ocean, as far as 100 meters.

But if you want an underwater robot of your own, you’ll need to be a dab hand with a soldering iron, as the robot is sold in a kit filled with parts.

To keep tabs on how the robot is being used, the pair launched a company blog and discussion forum. It is already proving to be a powerful tool for small-town environmentalists.

OpenROV can be fitted with video equipment to highlight the pile-up of junk in lakes and ponds. It can go in tiny crevices, where a diver can’t. One user plans to search for evidence of plastic pollution in the unchartered, murky depths of a seabed.

“At a tiny un-touristed cove in southern Maine, I’m finding hundreds — sometimes thousands — of bits of plastic wreckage washing up weekly,” he wrote.

At TechShop, where Lang spends the bulk of his time, he tells me that these findings are the tip of the iceberg for OpenROV. “Our story is just the beginning,” said Lang, who animatedly points out a number of other cool projects that are in development.

“We do know that deep sea exploration, space exploration, drones, 3-D printing are now something that anyone can do,” he said.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

LittleBits is a maker/hacker startup through and through, and it’s just taken a sizable round of venture funding from a few of the bigger names in Silicon Valley.

Its product is half building block, half circuit board, and it’s intended both as a toy for kids and as a prototyping tool for hardware hackers. The “bits” each have a distinct function, whether it’s a blinking LED, an eight-bit beep, or a functional button; they snap together with magnets to make larger, interactive electronics projects.

LittleBits products are relatively affordable ($89 for a starter kit), and they don’t require a background in electronics, engineering, or computer science.

The funding, a $3.65 million round, is littleBits’ first institutional money; it was led by True Ventures with participation from Khosla Ventures, O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures, and Lerer Ventures.

As part of today’s announcement, LittleBits also revealed it is working with supply chain management company PCH International to put LittleBits products into mass production starting August 2012.

Here’s a video showing LittleBits in action:

“We spend more than seven hours with technological devices every day, yet most of us don’t even know how they work,” said LittleBits founder and MIT Media Lab alum Ayah Bdeir in a statement today.

“LittleBits aims to break the boundary between the things we consume and the things we make, and make everyone into an inventor. We want LittleBits to be an affordable educational tool that is used in schools everywhere, and our new funding and new relationship with PCH means that we can now expand our team of super stars and reach even more people around the world.”

LittleBits received its first funding in the fall of 2011 from a small group of angel investors, including Joi Ito.

“Open-source software lowered the costs of innovation for software and Internet services and pushed it from big companies to startups,” said Ito in a release today. “The same thing is now happening in hardware, and LittleBits is one of the companies leading the way.”

Prior to the seed round from Ito et al., LittleBits’ founding team bootstrapped the product development for three-and-a-half years. The startup is based in Manhattan.

Here are a few that we’ve found that would make you the coolest computer user since Linus Torvalds created Linux.

The cigarette computer

Alas, this case already sold on eBay. But it was made from recycled materials (!) and included a special “foil backed paper lining” which may or may not “stop your weirdly small computer from bursting in to flames.”

Suggestion: don’t give this to your smoker friends.

The Lego computer

Not everyone can say they have a computer built by a 12-year-old kid.

Biz is a young German girl with mad computer skillz and serious Lego talent.

She’s even provided the instructions so that you can make your Raspberry Pi computer actually … look … like … a Raspberry.

Far, far too cool.

Going very, very pro

If lego is not your style and the cigarette case is just a little too James Dean … you can hardly beat this Apple-esque case by Marco Alici.

Alici made this virtual prototype with design tools Blender and Yafaray, and is getting a prototype 3D-printed by Shapeways … after which he intends to make it available to others.

Alici is an Italian design engineer, and it shows.

All fruity colors of the rainbow

ModMyPi has come out with a colorful array of cases that users can mix and match.

The case comes in two parts that snap together, and they’re both fully tested and fully shipping … unlike some of the other cases in this gallery.

ModMyPi touts that they are “made of highly robust, drop and splash resistant ABS plastic.”

Not quite (Product) RED

This case, featured by Wired magazine, looks both sleek and functional … even professional.

There’s no cost or ordering information, or any sourcing of the image itself, so it’s possible this image exists only in the mind of Wired designers … and you.

Until you 3D print it, of course.

The original gumdrop iMac see-through version

This case mod by AdaFruit reminds me of the the original iMacs.

But instead of Bondi blue, these are clear as ice, revealing the hardware beneath in all its gorgeous electronic complexity.

The top opens and snaps back into place, and — a bit of a shocker in the case mod world — the ports are actually labelled.

Uber-industrial chic

Looking like a filing cabinet or a mini rack-mounted server, this Built to Spec laser-cut acrylic case looks like serious business.

You can order the components for only $12.50, and the same case is available in translucent purple for a few dollars more.

Some assembly will be required, but it’s an incredibe looking case.

Poetry in wood

This might be the most beautiful of all the cases.

Stephen at Single Lens Reflections hand-crafted this wooden case  from 3 millimeter layers of plywood sandwiched together and trimmed with a scroll saw.

The Pi fits neatly inside the sandwich, and the ports peek out the sides. This case makes the Pi almost look like a miniaturized concert grand piano.

Honorable mention: ugly but geektastic

This is ugly but it is also undeniably cool: modding the brains of the PC right into its fingers, in a sense.

Ben Heck took a Raspberry Pi home from a Maker Faire and decided to create this: an all-in-one computer (well, minus the screen).

More details on how to do it here.

Some companies cater lunch on Fridays. Some throw in gym memberships or childcare or chair massages. Not Ford.

These guys are going big: They’re giving invention-focused employees TechShop memberships so they can tinker and make to their hearts’ delight.

TechShop is a space for those immersed in the maker/DIY movement and hardware hacking. It gives members tools and equipment for prototyping, classes in relevant topics, large workshop spaces, industry-specific software and computer stations, storage space, and plenty of hot coffee.

Ford’s newest employee perks program is intended to beef up the company’s investment in inventions and patents as well as bring more fuel to Detroit’s sparks of creativity. The memberships will be available to any Ford workers who submit inventions to the company’s Patent Incentive Award program.

The auto maker estimates around 2,000 Ford employees will benefit from the TechShop partnership this year alone. Already, dozens of Ford-employed inventors have taken advantage of the TechShop perk. The ideas they’re working on, Ford said, “may be incorporated into future Ford vehicles or licensed to other companies.”

“Ford has a portfolio of more than 17,000 patents around the world and, as a technology company, needs to be at the very forefront of automotive innovation,” said Ford reps in a release. “With TechShop in close proximity, Ford’s employees in Dearborn will be able to easily and quickly build prototypes for almost any inventive solution they can conceive.”

The brand-new TechShop facility in Detroit is located in a Ford-owned business park. The new TechShop includes 17,000 square feet of workshop space as well as classrooms, a brainstorming lounge, and a store full of materials. Check it out:

Top image courtesy of Nomad Soul, Shutterstock

General Electric set up a hands-on “garage” area at SXSW Interactive this year to get technophiles up to their elbows in hardware, including laser cutters, 3D printers, injection molders, and more.

Linda Boff, the company’s executive director of global digital marketing, took some time to chat with VentureBeat about how GE is partnering with some of the strongest forces in the maker movement to boost creativity and entrepreneurship and to celebrate the importance of making and manufacturing. The GE Garage at SXSW was just the first of its kind; the company plans to have more of these mobile pop-up garages in Houston and San Francisco during the first half of 2012 and will set up permanent GE Garages in Houston and Cincinnati later in the year.

Check out the clip above, and stay tuned for lots more from SXSW.