The Dublin Hackerspace
As Christmas approaches, the festive spirit is alive and well at Tog Hackerspace. Embracing the joy of creation, we extend the warmth of the season to all our friends by sharing handcrafted(by robots) Christmas decorations. This year marks a special milestone for our space – we’re turning 15 next month, and we owe our longevity to the incredible support from our members and the wider community.
It has been a long process to bring back laser cutting to the Tog 4 space. We have an open-source laser cutter called a Lasersaur. A 100W co2 laser with a bed size of 1220mm by 610mm.
To start off with the laser itself needed a complete service. That involved a deep cleaning by removing all the bits or leftover wood, hovering it all out. Next is a srub of all the rails, lenses and parts, residue from cutting plywood sticks to everything.
The final steps were to refill the chiller with boiled water and to carry out an alignment of the lens. Check out this video of our first test fire.
You can check out other photos of the laser cutter service in our gallery.
Next up was the modification to our space. Our new unit has no inbuilt ventilation. Our walls are made up of blocks with an outer metal cladding. We used a core drill to make a hole in the wall to allow ventilation.
A fan was also installed to help with airflow and wired to auto turn on with the laser cutter.
You can see more photos of the vent installation in our gallery.
The first big job given to our laser cutter in the new space is making badges for our friends at Dublin Maker. Check out the video below. If you are interest in laser cutting keep an eye out for our upcoming CAD nights.
We wanted to share a bit of Festive Cheer, fresh from our Laser Cutter! Hand-made by Robots. Check out our gallery for all the build photos.
The year started off great with our 11th birthday. Just as we finished hosting Science Hackday weekend hackathon in March the world changed. We’ve done our best to keep making alive and our doors open when restrictions allowed. Unfortunately, it has meant our normal programme of outreach events has not happened this year. We have moved many of our regular events online and host monthly live streams showcasing our member’s projects.
We hope next year will see a return to in-person events, talks, workshops and collaborating with the wider maker/tech/STEM community.
We wish you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.
We love spreading a bit of winter cheer in Tog. This year we have gone for a two-piece star design for our annual Christmas Baubles 2019.
Check out all the happy people below on twitter or a timelapse on how they are made.
A few weeks ago we ran Ealaín Solas (Light Art) a workshop where visitors got to learn about polarisation and made their own polarisation box. It was a great workshop with lots of good feedback. People loved their little boxes. With Dublin Maker only a few weeks away Jeffrey decided to make a scaled-up version.
The box follows the same design as the one created by the phablabs project. Two polarizer sheets, one being static and the other mounted on a turntable that can spin around. In this model, the turntable comes from a lazy susan. A device used for cake displays.
Continue reading “Polarisation Box”