Had a go at making a hot wire cutter to cut plastic and polystyrene. Experimented with 2 types of wire. Tried a thinner wire which worked at about 8 amps, but used a thicker wire in the end, as the thinner one broke. It draws about 16 Amps. Managed to cut the tops from some bottles with it. Will experiment a bit more and fine tune it. Want to try some expanded polystyrene. More pics here….
Lemon Soap in Dublin
On June 16 1904 in the novel Ulysses, Leopold Bloom got a bar lemon soap from Swenys chemist in Lincoln Place, Dublin. You can still do that to this day. He never paid for his! On Oct 13th 2013, we made lemon soap at TOG…..or lemon and oatmeal to be precise. It’s our first go at soap making, so we’ll have to see how it turns out. Like a fine wine, it needs time to mature now, so we’ll update the blog in a few weeks time. We might want some testers. If it all goes well, we might even do some more. Contact us, if you’re interested in soap making.
More pics here…….
http://www.flickr.com/photos/100047873@N08/sets/72157636518667775/
Egg-Bot Alive and Well
On Saturday at the TOG open social, we built our eggbot kit. It went together quite easily, and within about 2 hours we were doing our first plots.
Video and more photos here.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/100047873@N08/sets/72157635116676244/
The Open-Social and the Egg-Bot
This coming Saturday 17th August, is TOG’s regular open social. It’s a great opportunity to drop in, hang out and meet some of the members and visitors. The space will be open from afternoon until late. Bring beer, food, gadgets!
We also have a egg-bot kit. An egg-bot draws on eggs and other similarly shaped objects, such as light bulbs and ping pong balls. We’ll be assembling the kit during the evening and trying to get it running. You can read all about the egg-bot here….. http://egg-bot.com/ Come in and give us a hand!
Electronics Bootcamp
Its time for our electronics bootcamp again. This is a quick, practical / hands-on introduction to electronics. Its suitable for complete beginners, as no previous knowledge is required. If you’re curious about electronics and don’t know where to start, then this is for you. No soldering required, as we build everything on plug-in breadboards. We’ll be building and testing circuits covering DC, AC, analog and digital electronics.
You’ll have a chance to play with components, multimeters, oscilloscopes, signal generators and other electronic test equipment.
This event will be run over 2 half-Saturdays, the first half on Sat 13th July and the second half on Sat 20th July, from 12:00 to 17:30 each day. Cost for the bootcamp is €50. To sign up, open this article and fill in the form. There are 8 places available.
4 Month Pinhole Photo
In Nov 2011 we left a pinhole camera taped to the drain pipe in TOG’s yard looking south. So its been up for 4 months. It’s just a beer can with a 1mm hole and a piece of b+w photo paper inside. We took it down today and scanned it in. The raw image is upside down and back to front. The “colours” are also inverted. You can see the track of the sun and how it gets higher in the sky, as the days get longer. The gaps are days where there was no sun. After a bit of trickery in GIMP, its right way around and inverted. We have lots of photo paper in TOG if you want to come in and make one. You can leave it in place from days to months and still get a good image. Click on the images for a closer view.
