The Dublin Hackerspace
We are proud to be hosting a meeting of the Dublin Maker organising crew and thought it would be nice to make a few name plates. We started off with the this great instructable by Matthew Beckler. Taking about 2 minute per name plate to cut and then a bit of hot glue to keep them together. Check out our gallery for some more photos.
This blog post is written by our member Jeffrey Roe about his Skull Radio Box Project.
The Skull Radio Box came out of the frustration demonstrating the bone conduction kits at the Big Day Out. The kits are great for workshops but in a show and tell type of stand they just are not user friendly. They need an audio source hooked into them and just not appealing to members of the public to bite on a metal rod with lots of wires hanging out of it.
I first found out about bone conduction from David McKeown at Artek Circle (Photographed right) and tried it out with a spoon in my mouth. Months later, I then worked with Sinead Mc Donald to create the Guzman Box. Internally, it used a Kitronik amplifier kit to create the bone conduction effect. During its stay in the Lexicon Library for Soundings, the TBA820M IC burned out twice. The main cause was due to heat. The IC had no heatsync and would burn if left on for too long. Jump forward a few months, I used bone conduction again during Spectral Forms a week long residence in the Science Gallery. We looked for a fun way to play back the audio of people’s brain waves, that we were capturing with an EEG unit. We again faced problems with the kits being too quiet for the loud gallery setting. Finally, we used them as a demo at the Big Day Out, people loved the demo but not the look of the device. All these led to creating a stand alone, demo dubbed the Skull Radio Box.
The case was the first part of the project. I started out with Maker case website to create the general box. I then moved into Inkscape to do all the other parts of the design. After a few prototypes in cardboard, I was ready to cut out the final box in 5mm plywood. As the project came out of the laser cutter it looked perfect but when putting together the box with the finger joints, it was clear it did not fit together. Two hours later, using a file, sand paper and just a little hot glue, the box was all together.
Our friends from Cheltenham Hackspace send us an envoy. The little fellow pictured below is already making good friends with our Howard.
The duck was cast in their Metalwork Casting Sessions, which sounds like a lot of fun.
Dublin Maker is Ireland’s biggest maker community showcase event. It gives a real opportunity for makers to excite and enthuse the general public about
the great making communities and their projects. This year, Dublin Maker takes place on the physics lawn, Trinity College Dublin on July 25th. They welcome all sorts of submissions in all shapes and sizes. It is a free to attend, community driven event. Apply here to submit your project.
If you missed last year or just want to be reminder about how much fun it was, check out the video below
Our Locking picking group are always busy saving the Ha’penny Bridge one lock at a time. By teaming up with DCC Beta, they are not only been helping to save the bridge but also to reduce the cost of removing the locks. One of the problems our LoveLockNoMore team face, is when people return to find their lock gone. They are left in a state wondering will their love disappear just like their lock.
We have come with the solution of leaving a calling card any time we remove locks. We hope people will find our twitter account and get in touch if they would like their lock back.
As we are a maker space too, we decided to make the calling cards ourselves. After a quick prototype drawn in Inkscape, we went to our Lasersaur to make it. Some photos of the build.
Last weekend saw Ireland’s first food focused hackathon, Beefhack. The event sponsored by ABP Food Group, was about coming up will solutions for the Irish beef industry. The a prize fund was over €22,500, it drew people from all over the county to participate. Over 100 people on Friday evening came together to form 13 diverse teams to build all sorts of different projects. At the end of the weekend, 11 projects were completed and demoed to the public.
Our own Jeffrey Roe was on a team called “Track n Trace”. Their project was developing a smart tracker that monitors and collects data of beef produce while in transit. The tracker provides real time data and shipment info ensuring that there is full traceability of the product from field to fork. For more information about the project you can view this slides or photos.
We are delighted to see team “Track n Trace” came second in the competition winning €5,000. This TOG’s second success in a hackathon this month after the Smart City’s event. For more coverage of the event and to find out about the other winners you can read the Intel round up or Silicon Republic.