Category: Workshops/Events

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Abbeyleix Climate Action Project – Air Quality Workshop

The town of Abbeyleix, Co Laois launched an ambitious community climate action project that ran from  October 2020 to March 2021. It had a number of elements that included a science communicator in residence Dr Niamh Shaw, a weekly Abbeyleix Almanac TV on Facebook live, lectures and workshops.

An early video (above) produced by the project called for ideas/projects that might help the team raise awareness and further the goals of the project. Our member Jeffrey Roe with family links to the town made contact and suggested the Sensor.Community project.

Sensor.Community is a contributor driven global sensor network that creates Open Environmental Data. Its mission is to inspire and enrich people’s lives by offering a platform for the collective curiosity in nature that is genuine, joyful and positive. We have worked in the past with their guides and software created by the project to deliver workshops in the past. This open community citizen science project is only possible with the contributions of the Sensor.Community at large.

The Abbeyleix team jumped on the idea straight away. They were keen to build on the experience that Tog has in running these workshops. One sensor that was already active in the town really showcased the potential for a local network to be created. A plan was drawn up with appearances on Abbeyleix Almanac TV scheduled to raise local awareness in the sensors and a date was set for the 28th of February to coincide with STEPS Engineers Week. Midlands science came on board to fund the event and remove the barrier for local people to get involved.

Network in Ireland before the workshop

With the support of the local Tidy Towns committee, we found 14 participants for the workshop. To cut costs and to support the event being run virtually, glue guns and other tools required for the workshop were found locally and shared creating a real community feel to the whole affair.

Jeffrey on zoom during workshop

Using Zoom and a host of other tools, the workshop ran for just under three hours. Participants flashed the firmware, connected parts, setup WiFi links and put together boxes.

A few weeks have now passed since the workshop and more and more people are mounting their sensors outdoors and getting on the map. All the data can be viewed on the Sensor.Community website.

Sensor in Abbeyleix

To see more photos from the workshop do check out our gallery.

We would like to thank the people of Abbeyleix for being so welcoming to us during this project and especially the Tidy Towns committee, also Midlands Science for the funding to make it possible and finally the continued work of Sensor.Community.

Update

Check out this letter published in the Irish Times about this project.

https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/letters/sensors-and-making-air-quality-a-priority-1.4540696

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Arduino Day – Saturday 27th of March

Arduino Day is a worldwide birthday celebration of Arduino – organized directly by the community, or by the Arduino team. It brings people together “online” to share their experiences and learn more about the open-source platform.

We are hosting a 2 hour live stream with a mix of demos, introduction lessons and contributions from our community.

We will kick things off at 11 am on Saturday the 27th of March on our Youtube channel. The event will be unconference style. We have the topics already (listed below) and would like to open the event to hear from you our community to talk about your projects. Drop us an email to present your project.

  • Arduino 101 – Getting started – Declan Meenagh
  • Lorawan – Lower Powered communication – Jeffrey Roe
  • Hot Things – monitoring temperatures – Gary Cooke
  • Tree’s Projects twitter knitter/fabric cadaver/cycling distance vest. TriploidTree
  • Giant arduino development kit – Robert Fitzsimons⁩

You can rewatch the event below.

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Holiday Hack Challenge Redo (part 2)

Hello Everyone, we are about to join in ranks to battle the SANS Holiday Hack Challenge tasks again, today on dedicated Discord server. Please use the Meetup page for more details, ongoing announcements.

This post will summaries last Meetup progress and provides clues for further steps.

Let’s start we the recap. We started with:

12 years of TOG – a perfect time to do some hacking 🙂

Followed shortly by:

12 years of TOG – Holiday Hack Challenge Redo (part 1)

On the 23rd of January Meetup we have completed following tasks:

  • Objective 1 – Uncover Santa’s Gift List – clues in blog post video above
  • Objective 2a – Kringle Kiosk – clues in blog post video above
  • Objective 2b – S3 bucket – clues give at a Discord were: update the wordlist and add the searched bucket name, use ‘cat’ command to inspect the bucket. Copy and inspect in CyberChef the file. Start unpacking and remember to pipe the output whenever needed.
  • Objective 3a – Linux Primer – no clues were needed 🙂
  • Objective 3b – Point-of-Sale Password Recovery – clues give at a Discord were: download the package, no need to install the shop. Unpack the exe file, and poke around until you find app.asar and use 7zip to open Asar file.

Later today, 5-7pm GMT we will be focusing on following tasks:

  • all unfinished past tasks
  • Objective 4a – Unescape Tmux – no help needed
  • Objective 4b – Santavator operations – no help needed
  • Objective 5a – Speaker UNPrep – first clue: ‘strings door’ with some filters, more clues @Discord
  • Objective 5b – 5b: 33 Gkbps – no help needed
  • Objective 5c – Open the HID lock in the Workshop – no help needed
  • Objective 6a – Regex Toy Sorting – we will battle it together @Discord
  • Objective 6b – Splunk Challenge – clue: look for Bro.

See you later at Discord.

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12 years of TOG – Holiday Hack Challenge Redo (part 1)

So, as promised we are going to start SANS Holiday Hack Challenge Redo run by Counter Hack Team. We will start with the latest 2020 challenge . You will need a valid email to create user account, which is instant. You can start straight away on your own or watch a couple helpful videos.

The first video that I would like talk about, it’s Ed Skoudis 2020 Hack Challenge Intro. Video is a great overview of this year challenge.

Second video is aimed at Hack Challenge first timers, it’s walk through the login page and the starting interface.

And don’t forget to join discussion later today at a dedicated Discord Channel https://discord.gg/MqCQkSzG. We start at 5pm today 🙂

This month we are going to focus on 2 objectives.

To help with starting the first objective you can watch this video:

Or read this article with helpful techniques. The online photo editor can be found here.

Watch the video below for the start of the second objective overview:

See you at Discord after 5pm GMT today, we will try to finish Objectives 1 &2 together.

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12 years of TOG – a perfect time to do some hacking :-)

For the last five years I was getting more and more anxious the closer it was till the end of the year. Why so? The answer is very simple – the SANS Hack Challenge (https://holidayhackchallenge.com/2020/index.html) run online by Counter Hack Team (https://www.counterhack.com/expert-pen-testers). I have learnt plenty and had an immeasurable amount of fun while solving hacking challenges. This winter I found myself helping others with their tasks by giving hints and I discovered that I have learnt even more. The best part was seeing others to grow and to learn how to beat the tasks.

Unfortunately, SANS hack challenge is only once a year and I didn’t always managed to find enough spare time to solve all the puzzles. Luckily, there is a way to fix that.

So, this year to celebrate 12th birthday of Tog, there will be a pleasant surprise. A walk through a past SANS Holiday Challenges. We will start on the 23rd of January, all info will be posted online. So, keep an eye on our website and reserve time between 5 pm and 7 pm on the day to join the discussion on a dedicated Discord channel https://discord.gg/322Kw4bkQK.

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TOG’s Christmas Craft Online Show And Tell

This festive season will be a bit different, but we’d still love to see you all for TOG’s annual Christmas Craft Night, so we’re going virtual this year. Drop into Discord, show us some festive crafts you are working on or get some ideas for those last-minute Christmas gifts.

We will be meeting up on Wednesday 16th from 7 pm. For more information visit our meetup page. https://www.meetup.com/Tog-Dublin-Hackerspace/events/274864923/