The Dublin Hackerspace
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.
Over the past few months, we have been working with brain waves. What started at Artek Circle hackathon last year has grown to be Spectral Forms. We have taken consumer-grade EEG wearables, and tried to see what is the potential and limits of these devices are. Available online and for only $50, it has opened up a whole new area to play with. These small devices claim to accurately detect and interpret the tiny electrical impulses our brains output. These impulses can be broadly categorised into four bands, representing four different ‘levels’ of thought.
We have created software programmes that takes in the brain data, then displays it in a number of different patterns. We also play back an audio representation back to the wearer via a bone conduction unit. You can hear a sample below.
We are now taking the project to the public to try out. From the 24th till the 29 March we will be in the Science Gallery as the Lab in the Gallery . We are hopping that people will drop into us and listen to their own thoughts for a while. During our time there, we hope to work more on the 3D printing of brain wave data and testing the accuracy of the sensors.
We are running our Skull Radio Workshop during our time in the Science Gallery where you get to make your very own bone conduction kit. For more information on the workshop and tickets visit here.
Spectral Forms forms was created by Sinead McDonald, Jeffrey Roe and Krzysztof Foltman with lots of help from TOG members.
This Saturday is our monthly Open Social. We are trying something new this month with having a talk on during the night too. We will have all the normal madness with project demo’s, beer tasting , pizza making and general chatting all round but with a short talk by Daniel Cussen.
Our doors will be open from 7pm with the talk starting at 9.30pm . The event is free and all our welcome.
Talk Title : Creating a Satellite Ground Station
Talk Description: This talk will be about the experiences of setting up a Satellite Station to talk to the International Space Station. From more information you can view an article in Echo Ireland on the project.
