On Wednesday, July 30, our friend and co-founder Brendan Schrader died of a cardiac issue. Brendan had lived with Wolff–Parkinson–White syndrome his whole life with occasional visits to the ER with a racing heart. On Wednesday complications from this syndrome took him from us. He is survived by his loving partner Elana, his mother Mary, and hundreds of family and friends. Details of the funeral service on Tuesday can be found on his obituary page. You can sign and read a guestbook there too with some wonderful sentiments.
Hive76 s a family in many ways, and that made Brendan the dad. He was a driving force in our hackerspace by pushing members to make awesome projects, sharing his knowledge with anyone that visited, and brightening the space with his unconventional sense of humor. In his honor, we will continue to live up to our motto: Make Things Awesome, Make Awesome Things! We hope you will as well.
We love you Brendan, and we miss you.
Restored on September 15, 2018 thanks to Archive.org!
When I was just messing around with a button with an RGB LED inside, it was Brendan who suggested that I make it a game. I was so grateful for all of these little pushes that help everyone who came in really do something valuable. I’m glad he got to play my game, but I’m embarrassed that it isn’t complete. I had lost the motivation to finish this thing recently, but no more. I’ll make something amazing for Brendan.
I remember when Brendan and u were working on the sailboat when it was still in Maryland. We would drive down every weekend for a month to clean it, add equipment, change the engine, etc and we always ate at this little Italian pizza place on the corner. One afternoon while waiting for our slices Brendan and I in our sweaty, overworked state of minds starting playing with his Nanobots, pushing them around the table and buying them into each other and such. When the waitress bought our slices over she laughed at them and joked about wanting one of her own. The second she walked away Brendan pulled out a ziploc full of Google eyes, Nanobot ‘feelers’ and random ICs and proceeded to build a Nanobots while his lunch got cold. We left it on the napkin dispenser for the waitress to find after we left.
Very saddened to learn of the passing of a very intelligent, gentle, and kind young man, Brendan Shrader. I met Brendan in the Fall of 2012, when I was planning my audio installation (“Illuminate Me”) with Las Gallas Artist Collective at the AsianArts Initiative. Brendan was President of local hackerspace Hive76 and his various audio-related projects, such as the creative transformation of everyday objects, like suitcases & books & slabs of wood, into audio speakers was very inspiring to me and led me to experiment with creating speakers from cabaças (gourds). Brendan welcomed me to Hive76 and encouraged the development of my project, even loaning me the tools I needed to complete my own project. My sincere condolences to his family and close friends. Brendan, you were an inspiration to many people! Thank you…
I’m so sorry to hear of Brendan’s passing. He joked with me about being the other guy with the beard two weeks ago. You are never promised tomorrow, love yr friends and family everyday. Im sorry i didn’t know him like you all at Hive. My prayers are with his loved ones and his friends.
Gruff, funny and kind, Brendan was quick to tease and quicker to help. Once he gave me a hand with a slightly outlandish audio project on a super tight schedule. With no hesitation, he jumped in, fixed a few things right off the bat, and taught me a couple of techniques that instantly made everything better.
I think he was vaguely aware that, by extension, he was giving a leg up to kids halfway around the world… He was helping me, I was helping a friend of mine, who was helping a friend of hers, who happened to be helping a school in a rural town in the Phillipines.
All in a day’s play for this sweet, talented leader and friend.
I will miss Brendan for his warm smile and friendly greeting as much as his prodigious technical talents. He was very helpful to me on the Make Magazine article volunteering both his advice and considerable amounts of construction help at my convenience. He was also a good foil for outrageous technical speculations as well as somewhat quirky jokes.
He was a good and talented person
Had several interaction with Brendan (Thanks to Eagleapex) and most of those were spent laughing and plotting. The fabrication community will miss this gentleman and his ideas.
When Brendan and I first met, I couldn’t tell if he was mildly annoyed with me, or extremely annoyed with me. I had just moved to Philadelphia and didn’t know very many people yet. But I soon learned that I had misread him. He may have appeared gruff on the outside, but he was one of the warmest, most caring people I had ever met.
We grew to be good friends, spending many nights in the space, working together on projects. The first night at PAFA: a hundred bristlebots, which he was soldering together 15 minutes before the event when I thought we weren’t going to make it. The job with William Labov and Temple University: a beautiful piece of art and technology that he designed to help demonstrate key points from a celebrated professor’s talk. Educational projects for local schools to try to get underprivileged kids interested in careers in technology. So many times, when one of us was ready to give up, panicked by the large degree of the work left to do, he pushed us on. He knew people were counting on us. And he always got the job done.
Being at Hive were some of the best years of my life. That was because of people like Brendan. I can’t count the things I learned from him. He cared immensely for the people around him–in the space, and in his neighborhood. And he never asked for any credit for anything. It’s ironic that he died of a heart condition, because I don’t know anyone who had a bigger one.