The Dublin Hackerspace
We are super proud to have Dublin Maker return this year and be part of the organisations making it happen. The open call for this year’s virtual event is now open. The event will run on June 19th & 20th. We are hoping to bring a range of projects including something you can all control remotely All the details can be found via the link before.
This project is by our member Jeffrey Roe and is about saying goodbye to the default firmware on this smart plug.
The project started with a request from an artist for a device to turn on/off up to eight devices that are mains powered with a custom timing sequence. I decided to try out smart plugs as they have come down in price. It would also save building a circuit of relays as I have done in the past. Most smart plugs come with a firmware that connects the device to a private server and requires the internet to control it. The use case called for this unit to be used without the internet.
After doing a bit of research, the open firmware Tasmota seemed to have all the features the project needed and would cut down on the need to code up something totally from scratch. To flash the new firmware, some devices allow this to be done wireless but most require soldering wires to the microcontroller. The ease of soldering the wires varies from device to device due to the placement of the chip. The soldering job can be much harder on some devices.
Wireless flashing seemed the easy way to go as it required no soldering, so I purchased two plugs that the internet said worked with the TUYA-CONVERT. I went for two AOFO 4AC + 4USB Power Strip plugs ( Model C379 ).
This is when the problems started. After hours of work, getting PI ready, installing the flashing tool and nothing happens. It turns out the blog post that recommended this plug combination with using the flashing tool had a comment at the end of the post (Which I did not read before starting out). It warned people that a recent update by the manufacturer fixed the hole that allowed users to flash a new firmware over the air.
Plan B was now in operation and I knew a soldering iron would be involved. https://templates.blakadder.com/index.html is a great website with a list of devices that can be used with Tasmota, which pins to connect to, how to get access to the pins and the template to control all the features Unfortunately the two plugs I now had awkwardly required the chip to be completely removed in order to flash them.
Due to lockdown, all I had at home was a soldering iron, solder and solder braid. No desoldering tools. After some effort, I managed to desolder the chip and connect the five wires required to flash the chip. Using the great tool Tasmotizer, it is straightforward to flash the chip with the wires in place. You can even give the WiFi details and config template.
Then started the job of putting the chip back in the board, soldering it again and putting all the parts back together. With a quick test, all was back working but another plug was still left one to do. In the previous photo above, you might have noticed a black plastic cover on the board that covers each plug. That cover blocks access to a pin required to put the chip into flashing mode and hence the need for all this desoldering. The second time around I checked if I could remove this cover and to my surprise, it came off.
\o/. With the cover off I could just solder wires to all the pins and not remove the chip from the board. This speeded up the whole process and made flashing the chip much much easier. A few crocodile clips, an FTDI programmer and we were in business. Both plugs are now ready to be controlled via WiFi API call.
I have updated the page on https://templates.blakadder.com/aofo_C379.html so anyone else flashing these plugs can know about this shortcut.
The rest of the project involved adventures in writing code for esp32 & esp8266 and problems with WiFi but that is for another time.
If you would like to see more photos from the project check out our gallery.
The town of Abbeyleix, Co Laois launched an ambitious community climate action project that ran from October 2020 to March 2021. It had a number of elements that included a science communicator in residence Dr Niamh Shaw, a weekly Abbeyleix Almanac TV on Facebook live, lectures and workshops.
An early video (above) produced by the project called for ideas/projects that might help the team raise awareness and further the goals of the project. Our member Jeffrey Roe with family links to the town made contact and suggested the Sensor.Community project.
Sensor.Community is a contributor driven global sensor network that creates Open Environmental Data. Its mission is to inspire and enrich people’s lives by offering a platform for the collective curiosity in nature that is genuine, joyful and positive. We have worked in the past with their guides and software created by the project to deliver workshops in the past. This open community citizen science project is only possible with the contributions of the Sensor.Community at large.
The Abbeyleix team jumped on the idea straight away. They were keen to build on the experience that Tog has in running these workshops. One sensor that was already active in the town really showcased the potential for a local network to be created. A plan was drawn up with appearances on Abbeyleix Almanac TV scheduled to raise local awareness in the sensors and a date was set for the 28th of February to coincide with STEPS Engineers Week. Midlands science came on board to fund the event and remove the barrier for local people to get involved.
With the support of the local Tidy Towns committee, we found 14 participants for the workshop. To cut costs and to support the event being run virtually, glue guns and other tools required for the workshop were found locally and shared creating a real community feel to the whole affair.
Using Zoom and a host of other tools, the workshop ran for just under three hours. Participants flashed the firmware, connected parts, setup WiFi links and put together boxes.
A few weeks have now passed since the workshop and more and more people are mounting their sensors outdoors and getting on the map. All the data can be viewed on the Sensor.Community website.
To see more photos from the workshop do check out our gallery.
We would like to thank the people of Abbeyleix for being so welcoming to us during this project and especially the Tidy Towns committee, also Midlands Science for the funding to make it possible and finally the continued work of Sensor.Community.
Check out this letter published in the Irish Times about this project.
https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/letters/sensors-and-making-air-quality-a-priority-1.4540696
Arduino Day is a worldwide birthday celebration of Arduino – organized directly by the community, or by the Arduino team. It brings people together “online” to share their experiences and learn more about the open-source platform.
We are hosting a 2 hour live stream with a mix of demos, introduction lessons and contributions from our community.
We will kick things off at 11 am on Saturday the 27th of March on our Youtube channel. The event will be unconference style. We have the topics already (listed below) and would like to open the event to hear from you our community to talk about your projects. Drop us an email to present your project.
You can rewatch the event below.
We are delighted to be taking part in Engineers Week. We always like to take part in these national weeks to promote science and education. We have lined up a night of talks for you on Thursday the 4th of March from 7 pm streaming on our Youtube channel. This year we are teaming up with the Young Engineers Society to bring you a night of interesting lightning talks. The talks will be followed by a live Q&A. Check out the talks below.
Talk Title: Faking it in AI
Project Description: AI and machine learning in particular is a great technology for engineers to play with, adopt and apply in unexpected ways to see old problems in a new light. Even better, you can fake it until you make it and there is a long on-ramp of automated services, packages and tools available to the hacker willing to try out new things. With some experience and a bit of derring-do you can even get up to the front line of research in a field that is changing and developing incredibly fast if you carefully pick your battles. I will give a quick tour of my lab’s engineering journey in machine learning where we learned to fake it, then make it before finally faking again but this time for real. On that journey we will talk about fitness trackers, brain computer interfaces, self driving cars (sort of) and why in our latest work we just made up loads of fake data and yet no one got angry about it.
Speaker: Professor Tomás Ward
Bio: Tomas Ward is AIB Chair of Data Analytics at the School of Computing, Dublin City University. As a member of the Science Foundation Ireland-funded research centre Insight – Ireland’s Data Analytics research centre, Prof Ward studies how human health, performance and decision-making can be better understood through new ways of sensing and interpreting our physiology and behaviour. Tomas is a keen advocate of hacker spaces and is a co-founder of Dublin Maker – the showcase of the maker movement in Ireland.
Links: Website, Twitter
Talks Title: VCON – an Arduino with built-in remote firmware update and remote management
Project Description: Ever wanted to remotely OTA your Arduino without changing a single line of firmware code? VCON makes it possible.
Speaker: Sergey Lyubka
Bio: CTO at Netfort (now part of Rapid7), Engineering manager at Google, CTO at Cesanta
Links: vcon.io
There are lots of Engineers Week events happening all over the country you can find more of them listed here -> https://www.engineersireland.ie/schools/Engineers-Week
Our event will be hosted by our own CEO Jeffrey. On the team of festival makers for Dublin Maker, Council & Executive board member of Engineers Ireland.
Be sure to put any questions you have for our speakers in the Youtube chat.
This event is in collaboration with the Young Engineers Society
We are back and hosting a new live stream on Tuesday the 9 th of February from 7 pm. Tune into our Youtube channel to see makers showcase their projects in short 15-minute talks followed by a live Q&A. Check out the projects below.
Project Title: Conversion of Victorian Clothes Mangle to Printing press
Project Description: I’ll be talking through the process of converting a cast-Iron clothes mangle into a printing press for printing etchings, relief prints and letterpress. I’ll be giving a quick demo of my press in action and showing some work I’ve made on my press along and some experiments I’ve tried with 3D printed printing plates and some upgrades I’d like to make on the press in the future
Speaker: Louise Nolan.
Bio: I’m a multidisciplinary designer, artist and educator
Links: Twitter. Instagram, LinkedIn
Project Title: Handtooled leather bookmarks
Project Description: Join Crafty Nathan as he makes leather boom marks from scratch, hand-tooled dyed, stained and sealed. All the simple steps in making a leather product. This talk will be great for beginners who want to start in the hobby or just a fun project to enjoy!
Speaker: Nathan Wheeler.
Links: linktr.ee
Project Title: Fail it till you make it.
Project Description: A wander around the idea of failure and our occasionally poor relationship with it, from the perspective of a wood turner.
Bio: Tom Murphy is an occasional wood turner. He has competed and won several awards nationally and locally. His tear cure cancer and he writes his own bios.
Speaker: Tom Murphy
Links: Twitter
Our event will be hosted by our own CEO Jeffrey. Be sure to put any questions you have for our speakers in the Youtube chat.