This Month in HeatSync May 2026

May was a big one. The space felt full again. Tables got cleared, projects got finished, new cardholders got voted in, a mobility scooter got a new spine, a violin got a laser cut bridge, and a TikTok of our wood shop pulled enough views that I felt obligated to put it in this post. Let's walk through it.

Chris kicked off May the right way on May 4th. Lightsabers on the tables, the projector going in the back, and a Millennium Falcon LEGO build that commands respect.

Thanks Chris!

Wednesday Arduino Night kept rolling through May. Smith pinged the list ahead of time asking what people wanted help with so he could prep, which is one of those small champion moves that makes a station feel staffed instead of just open. If you have a microcontroller project you want a second set of eyes on, that is the night.

On May 9 we had a proper tear apart day in the electronics area. Old gear came down off shelves, parts got pulled, and a lot of stuff that had been sitting in totes for a while finally got broken down into useful pieces or fed into the donation pile.

Big thanks to Robot Ambassador, David Flores, Linwood, and Jay for putting in the time on this one!

Mala organized a full weekend of storage adds, walking space clearing, donation runs, and friendship hacking. The kind of weekend that resets a space.

Thanks to Landon, Chris McLaughlin, flufferfish, Austin Townsend, Bryan Maamo, Robot Ambassador, monteslu, Rahul, Devansh, and Walter Mack for the labor. Brett Neese and Sofia Penabaz-Wiley showed up to raise the mood and talk things through. Cprossu summed up the vibe better than I could:

That is the goal <3

Separate from the reorg weekend, on Thursday May 21 I pulled together a table from some stuff upstairs to give the new laser cutter a proper home, and moved the bike repair drawers to make it fit.

I also dropped the white cubbies into the sewing and jewelry shelves in case they end up useful for someone's setup.

Cprossu shared one of my favorite stories of the month. His mobility scooter took a hit on the sidewalks of Pasadena at last Hackaday Supercon. The aluminum plate holding the tiller bearing assembly bent backwards, the front wheels started hitting the frame at full lock, and the whole thing was effectively unusable.

Rather than try to bang it back into shape without proper annealing tools, he bought a complete new frame and transplanted everything over. By his own count, this was the first project he had done for himself at the lab in over two years. Every other visit had been spent fixing or improving something at the space. That is a lot of unpaid maintenance to carry. It is good to see him build for himself again.

For the record, yes, we do have a pair of snap ring pliers. They are in a labeled little box now so we keep track of them.

I dropped off two donated violins by the music station. (Thank you Veronica from LycanLoot for securing them at auction for me). The purple one is set up and ready to go, the blue one was missing a bridge and a string. I left them as on loan, but said if anyone has a fun mod idea I will not stop you.

Robot Ambassador took the "fun mod" prompt and ran with it. He traced a copy of the bridge from the purple violin, laser cut a new one out of wood, and Claire installed it with the missing string. He forgot to add the notches in CAD so Claire cut those manually.

It came out perfect. The blue violin plays again.

Jay ironed out the wrinkles, literally, on his t-shirt heat transfer vinyl design and dropped a couple of pre cut copies at the vinyl station. These are bring your own shirt. You weed them, you press them at 305°F for 15 seconds, you peel the carrier while it is still hot. If you have never used the heat press before, grab someone who has.

Chris also brought in his hat press. Vinyl is having a moment.

David Flores and Walter Mack have been wiring up the HeatSync robot, our mascot(?), into a lit and circuit driven version of itself.

Milton Williams led an assembly of handicap accessible planter beds for a Community Garden in Tempe. The City donated $400 to the lab in exchange for the build. A bunch of folks came by to help put them together after the May 23 HYH.

Milton described the build as "a fairly simple project that uses way too much wood," which felt accurate watching it come together.

The Saturday HYH on May 23 made quorum and ran long.

Brett Neese is officially a cardholder!! Congrats Brett!!

Sofia was dubbed our new acting biolab champion and is working on getting the distillation apparatus running, with essential oils as a first target. Andre took over as wood shop champion after James Kehoe got the band saw back in service. James himself is the new metal shop champion. Chris is still rocking the vinyl station and is launching a board game night the second Friday of every month starting in July.

A few station notes from the meeting:

• 3D printers are all running. The bottom shelf is not great for SLA prints, so there is conversation about giving them more room.
• The Gweike has a new home on its own table. The bike station got moved to accommodate. Some firmware issues to chase down.
• Lathe class ran two weeks ago and another is on the calendar. Mill certification classes coming after June.
• A/V station is in early redesign with Rick and Landon. Threaded iron pipe is involved. May need to be a proposal.
• Welding is currently orphaned. If you have wanted to champion a station, gas restocking and best practice notes is a clear entry point.

The donated rack is under the stairs. The discussion in #operations is moving toward what we should do with all the new hardware, some discussion about on-prem vs possibly cloud hosting, and whether we should run a recurring homelab night for people who want to play with personal experimental servers. If that sounds like your thing, pipe up.

I did a proper pass on the main heatsynclabs.org UI. The mobile calendar should be a lot more usable now too. You might have to refresh once or twice to clear cache.

While I was at it, I spun up an instance of an open source publishing platform at heatsynclabs.io. Anyone can sign up and start posting projects, blogs, or learning courses and it federates out to the network. I put a t-shirt design contest up there and will commit to the prize.

A creator named briannalawnya posted a TikTok titled "Inside A Hidden Creative Lab" featuring our wood shop. We were not asked. We did not promote it. It just sort of happened.

Watch it here.

If you are visiting because of that video, the front door is open Tuesday through Saturday. Come build something.

A few things on the May to June handoff:

• Mesa Pride Night, Saturday May 30, 6 to 10pm at 204 E 1st Ave in downtown Mesa. Vendors, DJ Pootiecat, plant sale, live art, food trucks. Free.
• LEGO Day Tower Build, Saturday June 6 at noon. Free, popular, very fun. Robot Ambassador is collecting donations toward more LEGO compatible build plates. The current target set has 24 colors which would be extra cool.
• Browser Wars, Saturday June 13, 7 to 9pm. Eric is hosting. Bring your weird browsers, your bookmarklets, your kiosk hacks, your Lynx and your Carbonyl. Demo whatever hacky or interesting thing you can do with the web. Drop into the thread if you want a projector or a monitor reserved.
• Homelab Night, date pending. Help shape it in #operations if you want to run it.
• More Lathe, Mill cert, OrcaSlicer, and lockpicking classes coming. Watch the calendar.

Come hang out. The space is open, the projects are running, and the chaos is the good kind. Stop by during open hours, join us at a Hack Your Hackerspace on the second or fourth Thursday or Saturday, or hop into the lab Discord, Slack or Google Group.

If you build something this month, post it. I want to see it!

Hack the Planet!