The Dublin Hackerspace
Got an IMAX B6 mini charger to play with. Pics here. This charger will charge and discharge lots of different battery chemistries. We recently acquired some 6-volt lead acid sealed lead acid batteries….believed to be from a UPS.
Two of them powered our buzzer game during the recent Dublin Maker. We’re using the discharge function to test their capacity. It will be interesting to see what capacity they have left.
Drop in if you’d like to try the charger or some other electronics.
Following the build of our 1978 Metal Detector, next up in our Vintage Electronics series will be a Digital Bicycle Speedometer. In the March 1977 issue of Popular Electronics, they published an article for a digital speedometer complete with red LED displays. This will be a build from the original magazine which we have in TOG.
You can get an LCD digital bike speedometer nowadays for as little as 5 euro. These multi function devices can do much more than speed. Back in 1977 however, this thing must have been space age….. red LED displays and all!
We think it will look suitably retro on a modern carbon fibre road bike 🙂 We will be building the speedometer over the next few weeks. Come in and join in the build, or keep in touch with the build online.
More progress with our vintage metal detector today. Fired up the oscillator section of the PCB and its working away at 126kHz…. very close to design frequency.
We’re going to continue to work on it, with the intention of having it ready for Dublin Maker in less than 2 weeks time. Pics of the ongoing build here.
In
recent weeks, a few of our board game fan
a
tics have met on Friday evenings in Tog. We have played some games, we laughed & decided to utilize laser cutter to make extra sturdy Acrylic tokens for a game called Androind: Netrunner. A good bit of graphical artwork was already online (thx for a great design) and after some manipulation it was ready to be cut. Other designs had to be done from scratch. So far we have designed & prototype cut all the regular size tokens. There is a plan to cut large size Credits Sets as well.
Android: Netrunner is an asymmetrical Living Card Game for two players. Set in the cyberpunk future of Android and Infiltration, the game pits a megacorporation and its massive resources against the subversive talents of lone runners.
Corporations seek to score agendas by advancing them. Doing so takes time and credits. To buy the time and earn the credits they need, they must secure their servers and data forts with “ice”. These security programs come in different varieties, from simple barriers, to code gates and aggressive sentries. They serve as the corporation’s virtual eyes, ears, and machine guns on the sprawling information superhighways of the network.
In turn, run
ners need to spend their time and credits acquiring a sufficient wealth of resources, purchasing the necessary hardware, and developing suitably powerful ice-breaker programs to hack past corpo
rate security measures. Their jobs are always a little desperate, driven by tight timelines, and shrouded in mystery. When a runner jacks-in and starts a run at a corporate server, he risks having his best programs trashed or being caught by a trace program and left vulnerable to corporate countermeasures. It’s not uncommon for an unprepared runner to fail to bypass a nasty sentry and suffer massive brain damage as a result. Even if a runner gets through a data fort’s defenses, there’s no telling what it holds. Sometimes, the runner finds something of value. Sometimes, the best he can do is work to trash whatever the corporation was developing.
The first player to seven points wins the game, but likely not before he suffers some brain damage or bad publicity!
More about the game: https://www.fantasyflightgames.com/en/products/android-netrunner-the-ca
rd-game/
Would you like to try to laser cut your own designs? Come along to our ongoing (every second Monday) CAD workshop in Tog. Looking forward to see you here – 6th of July 2015.
Our pizza oven was built as a bit of a hack over Christmas and New Year. After 5 months of operation, a bit of maintenance and a few minor mods were in order. A better flue, some re-jigging of insulation and foil and some re-pointing of bricks were done.
On Saturday 20th June, we fired it up for our regular open social event. It all worked as good as usual and everyone got fed! We had plenty of first time visitors to TOG too, who got the grand tour of the space. They’ve been keeping in touch with us on meetup and twitter. Pics of the maintenance here.
ETI Electronics, February 1978, IB Metal detector Mk2. This is the first in a series of ‘vintage’ electronics projects that we hope to build at TOG. We have the original magazine, so why not get building. There are some amazing projects in the electronics magazines from the 70’s and 80’s.
Update…. The build is in progress. Pics here.
We hope to be doing the PCB assembly for this project on 6th July, as this date is the 6th anniversary of TOG’s first electronics night. In the run up to 6th July, we’ll be preparing and gathering all the parts. As well as everything we need to do the electronics build, we have our workshop to do all the mechanical assembly and search head too.
We’re talking pure analog electronics here….. there won’t be an Arduino or line of code in sight 🙂 Although this project was first published in 1978, all of the components are still readily available. Come in if you’d like to see the build. Visitors are welcome and there’s no charge to attend. Even if you don’t know much about these kind of projects, you can still learn a lot by keeping in touch with the build. Should be great fun.