MWR HackLab

A couple of weeks ago we ran our first internal HackLab.

Inspired by the recent spate of hackspaces, we decided to get a bunch of us together to hack around on interesting tech over beer and pizza. We asked around the team for ideas and got suggestions from all, from our senior researchers to some of our newest employees. We settled on four projects, and decided to run it in our new London offices because they are a great venue.

We got a budget for kit, so we had parts for fridges, some elastic cloud time, a few electronic doorbells and a lot of RTL-SDR dongles, some games controllers and a couple of massive LED ticker tapes. Then we got free rein to play with them, learn how they worked and what we shouldn’t be able to do with them. There wasn’t much structure to the day, people picked the project that sounded interesting and just settled into it. Everyone helped “quality test” the MWRcade project, and team members also donated or brought in some bits and pieces from home, so there was always something to look at or take apart.

We’ll be putting up a blog post about each of the projects:

• Chubby Data
• Root/Beer Fridge
• Getting Frequency with SDR
• MWRcade

The supply of Club-Mate designed to be kept in the Fridge went down pretty quickly, since our official Acquirer of Liquids, Caffeine and HYdration only brought beer for the event, but the munchables during the day and pizza in the evening kept everyone going. The day wound down with a film, but most of the guys just carried on hacking until it was kicking out time. I think everybody enjoyed themselves, we got a lot out of it (not least, motivation to carry on hacking on the projects, let alone the chubby data results) and hopefully next year’s will be even bigger and better…

If you think that sounded awesome and think you’ve got a better project, let us know by tweeting at @mwrlabs. If you come up with a good suggestion for a project you could get an invitation to the next event…