Category: News

Posted on

Trip West to 091labs

Last weekend members headed west to visit the new 091labs hackerspace in Galway. They moved into their space only four weeks ago. They’re making great progress growing their members and setting up their new space. They have a community night on Tuesdays and a projector night on Sundays. They have loads of ways to contact them, on their website 091labs.com, on boards.ie and there twitter feed. While in 091labs the TOG members helped out running two soldering workshops for the people of Galway in the space. The workshops were well received with all involved learning to solder to a reasonable  level. If your in Galway check them out, they’re a great group of people.

Posted on

Open Social – 1st July – Huge Success :-)

A big thanks to everyone who came to last nights social night. We discovered during the evening (Thanks Rob) that we have officially had the keys for our new home for 1 month and what better way to celebrate that by having a few drinks and watching a movie.

We watched Sneakers ( http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0105435/ ) last night with the projector on one of our newly painted walls and it worked quite well. We had 6 visitors to the space last night and it was great to show people around the space after so much hard work has gone into making it our new home.

Our Social nights are always great ways to check out the space as well as have a chat with a few of our members and get a feel for what we want to do with the space. As usual, we have events on in the space during the weeks ahead and the list is always growing. I even got a few ideas for some bi-weekly/monthly group nights and I’ll try ask about these on the list next week. RFID and/or lock picking anyone? 🙂

Posted on

TOG v2.0 – We are Moving

After nearly 6 months of searching for a new home we finally have found one. Our new space is located on Chancery Lane, Dublin 8. It’s a large Industrial unit. With a number of large rooms. At 196sq meters it is over 4 times the size of our current space with a much wider scope of possible activities.

The new space has a shared courtyard with one other tenant. We will have 3 private parking spaces and on street parking near by. There is also a Dublin bikes station close by and many bus routes. Some photos of the outside and the inside.

We are currently in the process of renovating the new space. When it’s finished we hope to have a full size kitchen, class room, library, server room, common room, science lab, arts and craft room, and workshop.

Over the next two weeks we will be cleaning it up and moving all our equipment from Arran Quay over to our new space. We hope to be open to the public again for the next hackathon. Until then all groups nights will be cancelled until we have finished the move.

Some photos of the work being done here.

In the near future, we will be making a call for equipment and furniture. So if you have any thing keep us in mind. As always if you would like to get involved don’t hesitate to contact us.

Posted on

Synchronicity Hackathon

We will be having synchronicity hackathon on 15th and 16th of May. Starts around 12ish, please come along and check it out what projects people are working on.

Here are a few that some members will be working on:

Makerbot, its a 3d printer that prints ABS plastic into anything in 10×10 format. Bring along your cad drawings and print some stuff.

Building x0xb0x sound box

http://www.ladyada.net/make/x0xb0x/index.html

Home made weather station

And anything else you want to work on, come along just just contact us and let us know what day you are coming Contact Tog

Posted on

Robot Challenge

Last weekend members of TOG headed off to Vienna, Austria for the Robot Challenge competition. This is the world’s biggest competition for self-made, autonomous, and mobile robots. There where over  600 robots from all over the world are registered for the competition.

A group of  eight left Ireland for the event, three from TOG and the rest from the Irish Robotics Club. With us we had 2 mini sumo and 3 line followers.

TOG enter a robot in the Linefollower category , named TOG BOT. There was stiff competition on the day. It turns out that the TOG BOT was very under powered. It was just too slow moving, coming in at 53rd out of 139. It was a great experience building the robot for all involved. We learned a great deal about robots. Hopeful we will be back next year with a better robot.

It was not all bad on the Irish front, robots from the Irish Robotics Club, did very well wining three rounds of the Mini Sumo competition and came 18th out of 139 in the Line follower. Congratulations to all involved.

For more photos check out our new gallery.http://gallery.tog.ie/v/2010_robotchallenge/

Posted on

Hackerspaces Talks

Over the past two weeks member’s of TOG have been giving talks on creating Hackerspaces around Ireland .

On the Saturday February 27th , members from TOG gave a talk to Skynet in University of Limerick.The talk was part of  day of talks orgained by Skynet and Ubuntu-ie.

On Wednesday 10th of March , a member gave a talk on Hackerspaces in general and TOG in Dublin City University. This talk was part of a week long series of events called techweek.

The notes from the UL talk are available  here.

The sides from the DCU talk are available here.