Daniel's prompt this week is a good one, because it's about a feeling that sneaks up on you. He spent most of his life convinced hardware was a closed door, a thing for other people with soldering irons and oscilloscopes and some kind of mystical training. He was a software guy. That was the box. Then Home Assistant happened, and a few ESP32 builds, and an unexpected move that forced a pile of do-it-yourself repairs on him, and suddenly he's swapping out failed components on a home server and realizing... wait. I just built a computer. I can do this.
And the thing he's noticing is that the joy of it, the actual adventure of making a light turn on when the alarm goes off with a few cheap parts, that's not a kid feeling. It's a human feeling. He's thirty-seven. He wants to know if there are clubs for grown adults who want to build and learn together, or all-ages spaces, because he misses the collaboration. He points out the obvious economic benefit too: sharing the cost of a parts room, tools, components. None of that is cheap alone. And he's got a story about working with a nineteen-year-old at his last job, a kid headed for one of the IDF's technological units, and how they taught each other despite the age gap. So his question is: do these clubs exist, and if they don't, what's the pattern for starting one? And how do the successful ones handle age mixing and safety?
The short answer to the first question is yes, they exist, but they're fragmented in a way that's actually really interesting. And the second question, how to start one, has a more concrete answer than most people expect. But before we map the landscape, I want to sit with the thing Daniel actually said, because I think it's the key to the whole episode. He said he doesn't feel collaboration in software the way he feels it in hardware. That's not a personality quirk. There's a structural reason for it.
Software is a solitary sport with a chat window attached.
Right. You can build an entire software career from a laptop in a room by yourself. The collaboration happens through pull requests and code review and Slack, and it's real, but it's mediated. Hardware has this physicality that drags you into the same room as other people. When your LED won't light up, you can't just paste the error message into a search engine. Somebody has to look at the board, wiggle the wire, put a multimeter on it. That's a fundamentally social act.
And the components themselves resist remote work. I can't email you a soldering iron. Well, I can, but it's not the same.
So let's map what's out there. The landscape breaks into roughly three categories. There are hackerspaces, which started in the nineties as places for people to work on computers and electronics and later expanded into everything from 3D printing to metalwork. There are makerspaces, which are more recent, often tied to libraries or schools, and they tend to be more structured, more educational. And then there are repair cafés, which are the lightest-weight version: people show up at a community center, somebody fixes their toaster, they learn a little, they leave.
And then there's the Israeli kids' club culture Daniel mentioned, which is its own thing entirely. Those clubs are not hobbyist spaces. They're preparation pipelines.
That's the distinction that matters. In Israel, those computer clubs for kids are often explicitly aimed at getting into the IDF's technological units, which are highly competitive and prestigious. The kids are doing programming, networking, cybersecurity, sometimes hardware. And the interesting thing is that those units themselves are intergenerational learning environments. A nineteen-year-old conscript sits next to a thirty-year-old career officer and a forty-five-year-old civilian contractor, and they're all working on the same problem. Daniel saw exactly that dynamic with his coworker.
So the thing he wants already exists in a military context, but not in a civilian hobbyist one. That's the gap.
And the civilian spaces have their own weird sorting problem. Most hackerspaces and makerspaces cater to adults. They're membership organizations, you pay monthly dues, you get a key to the building, you can use the laser cutter at three in the morning. London Hackspace, Noisebridge in San Francisco, they're the famous ones. Noisebridge has been all-ages since it started, which is unusual. Most spaces have a minimum age, often eighteen, sometimes sixteen with adult supervision.
And the youth-focused spaces are almost all educational. They're after-school programs, summer camps, robotics competitions. The adults in the room are instructors, not peers. So you've got this odd split: kids learn in one kind of space, adults build in another, and almost nobody designs a space where a twelve-year-old and a forty-year-old are both just members.
Which is strange, because the benefits of mixing ages are not subtle. Daniel's anecdote about the nineteen-year-old is a perfect example. The kid had probably been programming since he was ten, so he had a decade of experience. Daniel had a different decade of experience. Neither one was the teacher. They were both teaching.
I think the phrase Daniel used was that he's not convinced segregating by age makes any sense. And he's right, with a caveat. The caveat is insurance.
We'll get to insurance. Let me first paint the picture of what these spaces actually do, because I think there's a misconception that they're just rooms full of tools. The real value is not the tools. It's the person standing next to you who says, oh, you've got the ground and the signal swapped on that pin. That's a thirty-second fix that would have taken you three hours alone.
And the tools are not nothing. A decent oscilloscope is a few hundred dollars. A good 3D printer, same. Soldering stations, reflow ovens, bench power supplies, logic analyzers. A well-stocked parts room with resistors and capacitors and connectors and microcontrollers. Individually, that's thousands of dollars. As a club, it's twenty people paying forty dollars a month.
The economics are transformative. Let me give you a concrete example. Daniel's ESP32 projects. A single ESP32 dev board is maybe five or ten dollars. But the ecosystem around it, the sensors, the relays, the displays, the wire, the connectors, the power supplies, the enclosures, that's where the cost accumulates. A club parts room means you don't buy a pack of fifty resistors when you need two. You walk over to the drawer, you take two, you put fifty cents in the jar.
And there's a subtle benefit that doesn't get talked about enough, which is that shared parts rooms change what projects you attempt. When you've invested your own money in a specific sensor, you feel obligated to use it. When the club has a shelf of random modules, you can grab something weird and just try it. The cost of failure drops to zero.
That's the thing that makes hackerspaces feel like playgrounds. The barrier to a bad idea is just the time it takes to have it. And bad ideas are how you learn. I'd say half of what I know about electronics comes from building things that didn't work and then figuring out why.
The other half is from watching somebody else build something that didn't work and feeling superior for ten minutes until you realize you would have made the same mistake.
So let's talk about how these spaces actually operate, because the mechanics matter if Daniel's going to start one. A typical hackerspace has a membership model. You pay monthly dues, somewhere between twenty and a hundred dollars depending on the space and the city. You get access to the physical space, usually twenty-four seven if you're a keyholder. There's a board or a steering committee, sometimes formal, sometimes just whoever shows up to the Tuesday meeting.
And the Tuesday meeting is the real engine. Most spaces have a regular open night, a weekly or biweekly thing where non-members can show up, see the space, meet people, work on something. That's the front door. If Daniel's thinking about starting something, the open night is the first thing to copy.
Repair cafés are worth mentioning as a different model, because they solve a problem hackerspaces have. Hackerspaces can feel intimidating. There's a culture, there are in-jokes, there's a guy who's been there since the beginning and will tell you at length about the time they rewired the whole building. Repair cafés are lower commitment. You show up, you bring your broken thing, somebody helps you fix it, you leave. No membership, no dues, no key.
And they're intergenerational by accident. The person who knows how to fix a toaster is often seventy. The person who wants to learn is often twenty-five. The person who's just curious is often nine. Nobody planned it that way. It just happens when the activity is the point.
That's the insight I want to underline. The spaces that successfully mix ages don't do it with a policy document. They do it with an activity. When the focus is on the thing being built, the ages stop mattering.
But the policy documents exist, and they exist for a reason. Let's talk about the age question directly, because Daniel asked it directly. What do successful clubs say about safety and supervision across ages?
The most common policy I've seen is a tiered one. Under sixteen, accompanied by an adult. Sixteen to eighteen, can be there independently but with some restrictions, usually around the dangerous tools. Eighteen and up, full membership. That's the Noisebridge model, more or less, and it's the model most spaces converge on because it balances two real concerns.
Which are?
The first concern is legal liability. A twelve-year-old burns themselves on a soldering iron, and the parents sue the space. That's not hypothetical. That's why insurance exists, and it's why the under-sixteen rule is almost universal. The second concern is that some tools require judgment. A laser cutter can blind you. A table saw can remove fingers. A reflow oven can start a fire. These are not toys, and a nine-year-old doesn't have the judgment to use them safely.
But here's the thing. A nineteen-year-old and a thirty-seven-year-old are both adults. The age gap between them is irrelevant to safety. Daniel's point about the nineteen-year-old coworker is exactly right. The supervision question is about maturity and training, not about age as a number.
And the research on this, such as it is, backs him up. Intergenerational learning environments work well when there's a clear task and clear expectations. The kid isn't there to be taught. The adult isn't there to teach. They're both there to build something. The teaching happens sideways.
Sideways is a good word for it. I learned more from watching my brother mess up a breadboard than I ever learned from a tutorial.
Wait, when did you watch me mess up a breadboard?
I'm speaking hypothetically. You've never messed up anything. You're perfect.
That's what I thought.
So let's get to the practical question. Daniel wants to know what a success pattern looks like if he's starting from scratch. I think the answer is: start smaller than you think, and start with a project, not a space.
The biggest mistake people make is trying to rent a building and buy a 3D printer and set up a legal entity before they've ever had a single meeting. That's backwards. The first step is a meetup. Book a room at a library, a community center, a co-working space. Tell people to bring whatever they're working on. ESP32 boards, broken toasters, half-finished robots. It doesn't matter.
And the room matters more than people think. Libraries are ideal because they're free, they're public, they're already intergenerational, and they have tables and power outlets. A library meeting room is the minimum viable hackerspace.
The second step is to make the project collective. Daniel mentioned a shared ESP32 build. That's perfect. Pick one project that everyone builds together, something with enough flexibility that people can customize it but enough structure that nobody's lost. A sensor node, a weather station, a smart light controller. Everyone buys the same kit, or the group buys kits in bulk and sells them at cost.
Bulk buying is one of the first concrete benefits a new club can offer. If ten people each need an ESP32, a sensor pack, and a power supply, you can buy them for thirty percent less than individually. That's a real incentive to join.
The third step is the parts room. Start with a plastic bin. A literal plastic bin with dividers. Resistors, capacitors, jumper wires, LEDs, a few sensors, a couple of spare boards. Everyone contributes a little, everyone takes a little. The honor system works fine at this scale.
And the fourth step, which is the one people skip, is documentation. Take photos. Write down what you built. Share it on a group chat or a forum. That's how you recruit. Nobody joins a club they've never heard of, and the way they hear about it is seeing a photo of a cool project and thinking, I want to do that.
Social media is the recruitment engine. Local tech meetups, Facebook groups, Reddit. Daniel's in Jerusalem, and I know there are tech communities there. He could post in a local group and find ten people who've been waiting for exactly this.
Let me ask you something, Herman. You've been around these spaces. What's the failure mode? What kills a club?
The most common one is founder burnout. One person does everything, gets tired, and the club dies. The fix is to spread the work from day one. Someone runs the meetings, someone manages the money, someone maintains the parts room, someone handles social media. If it's a one-person show, it's not a club.
The second failure pattern is the opposite of burnout: a club that becomes a social hangout and stops building. That sounds fine, but it's actually a slow death. The building is the point. If the building stops, the people drift away.
And the third one is the tool hoarder problem. Someone buys an expensive tool, feels possessive about it, and starts making rules about who can use it and when. That poisons the whole space. The cure is to write down from the beginning that tools are communal, full stop.
That connects to something Daniel said about sharing the costs of a parts room being prohibitively expensive for one person. The flip side is that shared ownership changes your relationship to the stuff. You don't hoard it. You use it.
Let me talk about the psychological benefits for a minute, because Daniel was honest about the joy thing, and I think it deserves more than a passing mention. He said he finds the same joy and sense of adventure he imagines kids do. And he's right, but not because he's accessing some childish part of himself. It's because making a physical thing work is a fundamentally satisfying human experience. It's not regression. It's completion.
There's a word for it that gets overused, but it fits here. Agency. When your light turns on because you wired it, you caused that. In software, the cause and effect is abstract. In hardware, it's a wire. You can point at it.
The intergenerational piece amplifies that. When you teach a nineteen-year-old something and he teaches you something back, you're not just exchanging information. You're validating that the thing you know has value, and you're being reminded that the thing you don't know is learnable. Both of those are good for you.
I want to pick up on something you said earlier about the IDF technological units. You called them intergenerational learning environments. That's a real thing, and it's worth spelling out, because it's a model that works. Nineteen-year-olds with cutting-edge skills, working alongside officers and civilians with decades of experience. The military does it because it has to. The mission matters more than the age.
The civilian world could copy that without the uniforms. The mission in a hackerspace is the project. It doesn't have to be a national security thing. It just has to be something everyone in the room cares about.
Let me try to answer Daniel's question directly. Do adult electronics clubs exist? Yes, but they're called hackerspaces and makerspaces, and they skew adult. Do all-ages spaces exist? Yes, but they're rare, and they tend to be either repair cafés or spaces like Noisebridge that made an explicit choice to be all-ages. Is there a gap? Yes. The gap is intentional intergenerational building, where a twelve-year-old and a forty-year-old are both just members working on their own projects.
The success pattern, if he's starting one, is: meetup first, project second, parts room third, documentation fourth, and spread the work from day one. Under-sixteen with an adult, sixteen to eighteen with restrictions, eighteen and up full membership. That's the policy that works.
The thing I keep thinking about is the parts room. Daniel mentioned it as an economic benefit, and it is, but it's also a social one. A parts room is a physical manifestation of trust. You put things in, you take things out, and the system works because everyone believes everyone else is acting in good faith.
That's the thing that's hard to replicate online. A GitHub repository is a kind of parts room, but you can't walk into it. You can't pick up a resistor and feel it. The physicality is the point.
The physicality is what makes it intergenerational. A seventy-year-old who's been soldering since the seventies and a fourteen-year-old who's never held a soldering iron can stand at the same bench, and the seventy-year-old can say, hold it like this, not like that, and the fourteen-year-old can say, why don't we use a heat gun instead, and they both learn something.
That's the dream, anyway. The reality is usually messier. Someone's hogging the oscilloscope. Someone left the solder spool out. The laser cutter is down again. But the mess is part of it. A clean hackerspace is a dead hackerspace.
I want to flag one misconception that Daniel's prompt implies, which is that hardware is harder than software. He said he boxed himself in as a software guy because he thought hardware was too difficult. And I understand why. Hardware has a physicality that software doesn't. You can't undo a bad solder joint with a keyboard shortcut.
But the modern hobbyist ecosystem has made hardware dramatically more accessible. ESP32 boards are five dollars. Arduino is fifteen. The sensors are cheap, the libraries are mature, the tutorials are everywhere. A decade ago, getting a microcontroller to talk to a temperature sensor was a real project. Now it's an afternoon.
The skills transfer more than people expect. Daniel's software background means he already understands logic, debugging, state machines. The hardware is just a new input and output layer. He's not starting from zero. He's starting from a very strong foundation and adding a physical dimension.
That's the thing I'd tell anyone who's listening and thinking, I could never do that. You probably can. The barrier is not technical. It's psychological. It's the belief that hardware is for other people.
The belief gets reinforced by the way these spaces present themselves. A hackerspace with a laser cutter and a CNC mill and a wall of tools can look like a professional workshop. It's intimidating. But the people inside were all beginners once, and most of them remember it.
Let me add a practical note about insurance, because it's the thing that kills most attempts to start an all-ages space. Liability insurance for a space with minors is more expensive than for an adults-only space. Not impossibly expensive, but noticeably. And if you're renting a room in a library or community center, the venue's insurance may already cover you. That's another reason to start in a library.
The supervision policy is not just about insurance. It's about the culture of the space. If a kid is there with a parent, the parent is responsible for the kid. That's not segregation. That's just clear expectations.
The thing I want to make sure we say is that mixing ages is not a safety problem if the policies are clear. It's a cultural choice. Some spaces choose to be adults-only because they want to swear and drink beer and work on projects at two in the morning. That's fine. Other spaces choose to be all-ages because they want the intergenerational thing. That's also fine. The mistake is pretending one is objectively better.
Daniel's preference is clear, and I think it's the right one for what he's describing. He wants a place where he can learn from a nineteen-year-old and teach a fourteen-year-old and not feel weird about either. That's a specific thing, and it requires a specific kind of space.
Let me talk about the future for a second, because I think there's a larger trend here. The DIY and local manufacturing movement is growing. 3D printers are in homes. CNC machines are getting cheaper. The tools for making physical things are democratizing the way software tools did in the nineties. And the natural home for those tools is a shared space.
Community workshops used to be common. Every town had a woodshop, a metalworking class, a ham radio club. We dismantled a lot of that infrastructure in the late twentieth century, and now we're rebuilding it in the form of makerspaces. It's not new. It's a return.
The return is being driven by the same thing that drove the original: people want to make things, and making things is better with other people. The technology changes, but the impulse doesn't.
The open question I want to leave hanging is whether the lack of adult hardware clubs is a gap in our social fabric or just a niche that hasn't found its form. I lean toward the second. The form is emerging. It's the hackerspace, the repair café, the library makerspace. They're all versions of the same thing.
The thing is older than any of them. It's the workshop. The place where people gather to make things and teach each other. We've had it for thousands of years. We just forgot how to build it.
I want to hear from Hilbert on this, because he's been suspiciously quiet, and I have a feeling he's got a story about a club.
Hilbert: The adults were more dangerous than the kids. They knew enough to be confident but not enough to be careful. I ran a microcomputer club at a community center in Dublin, supposed to be for children, and it ended up more adults than children because the adults wanted to build things too. This was the era of the Z80, the eight-bit machines, people soldering their own memory boards. We had a man in his sixties, retired, built a burglar alarm for his shed. Took him six weeks. When it worked, he stood there looking at it like he'd invented the transistor. Prouder than any kid I ever saw.
Hilbert: The insurance was the real problem. Not the children. The children did what you told them. The adults would open a power supply while it was plugged in because they'd done it before and it had been fine. One of them shorted a capacitor and blew a fuse, took out power to half the building. The kids just watched.
That's the thing about supervision that people get backwards. The risk isn't the novice. The novice is cautious. The risk is the person who's just confident enough to be careless.
The retired man with the burglar alarm is exactly the joy Daniel's describing. It's not about the age. It's about the thing working.
Hilbert: I still have a box of Z80 chips from that club. Forty of them, maybe. Been waiting for an excuse to do something with them. They're in a cupboard.
Forty Z80s. That's not a parts room, that's a museum.
It's a very specific museum.
Hilbert: The point is, the club worked because nobody was there to be taught. They were there to build. The kids helped the adults with the new software, the adults helped the kids with the soldering. The age thing sorted itself out.
That's the pattern, isn't it. The activity is the organizing principle. Everything else follows.
The parts room, the shared resources, the thing Daniel flagged as an economic benefit. Hilbert's box of Z80s is a parts room with one member.
Hilbert: The box is fine. They don't make them anymore. Somebody should use them.
There's probably a hackerspace somewhere that would take forty Z80s and build something gloriously unnecessary.
A Z80 cluster. A retrocomputing wall. Something that blinks.
Hilbert: As long as it blinks.
Here's the thing I'm left with. The clubs exist, but they're fragmented. The joy Daniel's feeling is real and worth pursuing. The age mixing works when the activity is the point. And the parts room is both an economic and a social institution.
If there's nothing local, the pattern is meetup, project, parts room, documentation, spread the work. Start in a library. Keep it small. Let the building be the glue.
I think the open question is whether we're watching the early days of a resurgence in community workshops. The tools are cheap, the knowledge is available, and the desire is clearly there. Daniel's prompt is one data point, but I suspect it's a common one.
If you've found a club like this, or started one, we'd love to hear about it. What worked, what didn't, how you handled the age question.
Thanks to Hilbert Flumingtop for producing, and for the Z80 inventory update.
This has been My Weird Prompts. Email us at show at my weird prompts dot com, or find us at my weird prompts dot com.
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