The downtown library is so much more than books anymore. Hong Lieu, the Central Library's "computer guy" and the testing lead on Call of Duty 3 back in the day, has opened a DIY factory on the main floor. Saddled up with laptops, a turntable, crates of 45s, and several 3-D printers, the do-it-yourself Tech Lab just needs people and their creativity to become Makerspace Santa Barbara on Mondays from 4-7 p.m., an offshoot of Santa Barbara Hackerspace.
Not long ago, Tacy Kennedy of S.B.'s Museum of Natural History brought in a downloaded model file for the lower jaw of Homo naledi, a new type of human ancestor found in South Africa's Rising Star cave system in 2013. The Homo naledi paper was published in eLifeSciences in September, and Kennedy decided to try out the library's new 3-D printer — donated by the Orfalea Foundation — to see how close it might come to a casting of the jaw, which would cost much more. "It's usable," she said of the 3-D model, for researchers or a class to compare to other hominid jawbones, though it lacks the fine detail of a cast.
But that "just try it out" ethic dominates Makerspace. At the library, kids fool around with the software program Tinkercad, often building things like "creepers" from the video game Minecraft to produce on the 3-D printers. Many had never seen, much less operated, a record player before, Lieu said. They reveled in learning how the scritching noise was made. The 45s from the 1950s through 1980s are introducing the kids to music new to them while they play around with beatmatching.