THE INVENTABLES WORKSHOP

With the recent move, we had an opportunity to dispose of some dated machinery, and in the process found out about FreeGeek Chicago. FreeGeek is a non-profit occupying a unique niche in a few American and Canadian cities, serving as a computer recycling center, a technical training center, and a source of free computers to the community.

The premise is simple, but clever: the facility takes donations of old computers. The computers are disassembled and their components tested by a team of volunteers. Broken components are shipped off to a recycling facility in Lombard, IL, and functional ones are put together to make fully working computers.

Volunteers give 24 hours of service, during which they are trained in taking apart, testing, and building computers. At the end of their hours, they are given a computer built from donations, running Xubuntu.

The service educates, recycles, finds a use for older machines, and successfully operates with limited budget all at once. Volunteers g…

Inventables is giving away 1 gift certificate worth $250 to our store.


To win, submit your idea for what you would build to @inventables on Twitter. We'll post it to the poll on the right side of our blog and we'll let the world decide who wins the site credit. Voting closes on 12/17/10 at 5pm. We'll post pictures (and maybe video) of what the winner did with the prize.

You might be wondering, why are we doing this? At Inventables, we believe that it is currently too difficult for designers, artists, and inventors to source materials. We've set out to solve this problem by building an online store that will streamline the process of innovation by making previously hard to find materials available to purchase. We think of our store as "the innovators hardware store," and our goal is to inspire everyone—regardless of profession—to explore what’s possible. We think we can accomplish this by leveling the playing field of materials research.

The first step we to…