Most of the year you can walk the north end of Broadway barely hearing a peep from Metrix Create:Space — a DIY haven for robotic tinkering — outside of the occasional churning of machines and project chatter but last Friday  the business celebrated its fifth anniversary of being with a rambunctious crowd of makers, geeks and the people who love them filling the subterranean space.

Illuminated with green laser tubes — and free booze — the crowd included Boeing and Google employees, the DIY techs, students and a couple of noobs.

“I’ve met a lot of really great people… seeing them through a portion of their life, being a part of that is the most rewarding thing,” owner Matt Westervelt said. Over the past five years he’s seen a shift from clientele simply exploring, to those utilizing the space as a work station while at the same time promoting exploration and learning.

“We’ve gotten a lot of really cool projects over the last five years… people are really, really creative, and we need to be a part of their project,” said Westervelt. The increase in public visibility — “economic activity is crazy around here” — over the years has allowed the owner to expand the workshop varietals and staff while retaining several of the staples that have come to define the business – such as the vending machine with $60 parts and emergency water, to their rental of a bottomless tool boxes and 3-D printers, to name a few. But as the owner of a shop focusing on DIY technology, naturally, it fits to evolve side-by-side.

“This place kind of changes every six months as it stands,” said Westervelt. One of the space’s employees is hoping to focus on projects surrounding musical equipment and the various circuitry needed to create sounds, and will lead a course in the coming weeks on how to create your own optical Theremin – just in time to spook your neighbors on Hilloween with eerie tones.

“I don’t know what it be like in a different neighborhood. I don’t know if it could exist,”Westervelt said. “It would certainly be hard to start it somewhere else.” He says Capitol Hill’s dense and creative population are big factors in the viability of Metrix and that his business neighbors all look out for each other. “It’s like the best neighborhood in Seattle.” Westervelt, who lives near the shop, has called the Hill home for 20 years.

The origins of Metric Create:Space stretch back through about 14 of those years.

A 2000 project under the name Seattle Wireless holding private weekly “HackNights” in Georgetown is where it began, according to an interview with Westervelt and the SunBreak in 2012. “It was more oriented towards hacking on Wi-Fi, mesh networking and computer stuff. Eventually we dropped that space and started hanging out every week at cafés,” said Westerfelt. The bolts of a business began tightening into more concrete form in 2004.

…I started metrix.net, which is the wifi business, and we started meeting in my office which [was] over on Pine St. In 2009, I got a laser and thought “What am I going to do with this laser?” One thing was to build a 3D printer, the other one was to start asking people “What would you do if you had a laser?” It turns out that people all had different answers and really just wanted occasional access to laser – then I found this place

CHS first introduced the neighborhood to Metrix Create:Space in October 2009 – noting the shop’s coffee, vending machine with electronics parts and their MakerBot that serve as staples of the business to this day.

“We’re Capitol Hill people,” Westervelt said Friday night. “It’s really nice to be kind of a thing in the neighborhood.”

Metrix Create:Space is located at 623 Broadway E. You can learn more at metrixcreatespace.com.