The Dublin Hackerspace
Event is now over.
Watch the live recording on this link:
Note you may want to watch the entire show from the start including the music, animations and build up.
Students of Glanmire Community College will get to have a live Amateur Radio link up with the International Space Station as it passes over Cork.
Continue reading “Students to contact space station as it passes over Cork, using Amateur Radio”
There will be a live video stream on youtube on Thursday 19th October at 12:30pm Irish time (11:30 UTC) here:
Event over now.
Recording here:
Continue reading “Live Amateur Radio Link up with International Space Station”
TOG members have been busy helping to organise a school contact using Amateur Radio between two schools and the International Space Station as it passes over Ireland.
The event is organised as part of ARISS, which is a working group that helps schedule live link ups using Amateur Radio Equipment on board the ISS.
While demand is high, and the waiting list long, TOG has been working for more than three years to get a date.
We have a possible date now of October 2017, and we are working on getting the radio equipment ready to bring to the schools so we can make the link up happen.
These events use radio to allow a live link up between six and twelve minutes long as the orbiting space station passes over Ireland.
The ISS is in low earth orbit which means its relative position over the ground constantly changes and it orbits the earth every 94 minutes.
It travels at 27,600 kilometres per hour about 400km above the ground in a micro gravity environment.
The ARISS group organises live link ups squeezed in between the astronauts very busy schedules, between scientific experiments.
The events give the students the opportunity to ask questions to Astronauts currently on board the ISS, and enable the astronauts to take a few minutes from the daily tasks of completing check lists, and running experiments.
We expect the Astronaut that will be available to speak to the students in October 2017 will be Paulo Nespoli.
This Italian born astronaut has been to space twice before. He is due to launch again for Space on July 28th 2017 and all going well, will be scheduled to speak with Irish students in October.
We will have more information closer to the event, but if you want to watch Paulo launch in his rocket follow this link:
https://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasatv/#public
Coverage starts 15:45 Irish Time/14:45GMT/10:45 Eastern Time on July 28th 2017
Launch Scheduled 16:41 Irish Time/15:41GMT/11:41 Eastern Time on July 28th 2017
ISS Expedition 52-53/Soyuz MS-05 Launch Coverage includes video B-roll of the crew’s launch day pre-launch activities at 11 a.m. ET;
You make like to view the inside of the space station as available on street view.
https://www.google.com/streetview/#international-space-station/
The Amateur Radio equipment is located in the Columbus Module, while there is more equipment in the service module.
This event is in conjunction with ARISS, European Space Agency, South Dublin Radio Club, Cork Radio Club and many other volunteers and partners included below
http://www.irts.ie
http://www.southdublinradioclub.ie
http://www.geocities.ws/ei5crc/menu.htm
http://cork.etb.ie/
http://www.sfi.ie/
http://esero.ie/
https://www.bco.ie/
http://nationalspacecentre.eu/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paolo_Nespoli
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soyuz_MS-05
This is a tale of going to TOG to do one thing, but ending up doing something completely different. The intention was to write some code to talk to some electronic hardware. Actuality was taking the lathe apart. You can’t get more different than that.
One of our members reported that the lathe was unusually noisy and also a faint burning smell. We thought that it may be splashes of oil burning on the hot halogen lamp, but soon ruled that out. We disconnected the drive belts from the motor. The motor turns freely by hand, but seems to be hesitant in starting. It’s also drawing way too much current. Needs a bit more troubleshooting. Hopefully just a bad capacitor or something else simple.
Update…. so its bad news. One of the motor windings is burnt out. But it’s no big deal really. We’re sourcing a new motor. They’re not that expensive. A nice project will be to add some overcurrent and thermal monitoring to it, as well as an RPM readout. Sounds like a job for an Arduino!
A few months ago we’ve mentioned a DIY build of a CNC router. The project turned out to be more complicated than we anticipated. The steel-based construction is not very forgiving, and the large size of the machine doesn’t help. Still, due to all the help from many members we managed to overcome a number of difficulties and do a few test engravings in MDF.
MDF is not a difficult material to mill – the most noticeable problems are the awful dust and the fluff around the edges of the cut. The furry edge is easily fixed using sand paper, but the dust will probably require some more drastic measures in order to protect our lungs. Eventually we’re planning to cut and engrave a variety of materials, many of which have interesting properties but are incompatible with our laser cutter.
Visit us during one of our Monday CAD nights to see the new machine in action or in the video below.
We are always doing upgrades and improvements in our space. Below are some of our latest.
We have added in extraction systems in each of our toilets. We have disabled the urinal and changed the toilets to be gender neutral.
More desks. We have added a new desk near our lathe and another one in the electronics room.
General clear out. We also filled a skip with building waste and general stuff left over from the move.
Check out our gallery for a full photo set of the changes.