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Fitout Update – Doors & Fobs

We will be opening our doors in just a few weeks. Our first event will be the return of our lock picking group. Be sure to check out our meetup page for updates.

In the mean time we have been adding more walls and last weekend doors. Did you know all the wood panelling and doors have come from our old space. We are doing our best to reuse building materials as much as possible. It certainly creates a lot more work for our volunteers but we think its good to strive for reuse as much as possible.

We are also glad to say our new access control system is in place. Members can now once again the space 24/7. It is an importance part of our space being able to support the different available of our members and being a fully 24/7 space for our members.

As always there are plenty more photos on our gallery.

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Maker Faire Rome 2021

Maker Faire Rome takes place from Friday 8 – Saturday 9 – Sunday 10 October. A mix of 250 exhibitors in person in Rome and over 300 makers via the online platform. The free to sign up digital platform will allow everyone to explore the projects present directly from your home and meet and interact with makers and innovators from all sectors. Sign up with the following link https://digital.makerfairerome.eu/

Our own member Jeffrey Roe will be online to showcase his project. “Kill The Dots – Remote LED Game“.

The project mixes Raspberry pi, Arduino, LED display and IoT all in one. It uses remote.tv to allow the player to remotely control all the buttons of this fun arcade-style LED game. The user tries to kills all the red dots in order to stay alive to see hot pink. The game is a total mash-up, using a robotics platform built for using the pi camera mixed together with an Arduino drawing cool animations on a 32 by 32 LED display.

To find out more visit https://makerfairerome.eu/en/exhibitors/?edition=2021&exhibit=200260#

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Fan Table at Octocon 2021

Octocon is the national Irish science fiction convention running from the 1st till the 3rd October 2021. A weekend celebration of our favourite stories from books, comics, TV, films and games; from science fiction, fantasy, horror and beyond; attracting artists, writers, film-makers and fans from across the human sphere of influence.

Going virtual again this year, the programme is split across Twitch, Zoom and Discord. It is packed with panels, interviews, talks, workshops, fan chats, readings, games and guest chats (aka kaffeeklatsches). See the full programme here.

The event is free you can sign up following this link. https://registration.octocon.com/

Tog will have a fan table at the event. We share a lot in common with the Octocon community, the love of bringing iteas to life in various forms. Jump on the Octocon Discord where you can chat to Tog members, ask advice about making things and just hang out.

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Casio SK-1 Repair

A story of repair by our member Jeffrey.

I do like the chance to repair things every now and again. It allows me to get away from coding and try something.

This Sunday I had a look at this broken Casio SK-1. A classic small sampling keyboard made by Casio from 1985.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casio_SK-1

From the owner, they didn’t have a plug for it and it was no longer working with batteries and the last time they played it the sound was a bit off.

I got the unit to power up with an adjustable voltage supply but taking care of the odd centre pin negative configuration. It can certainly make noise.

Finding the service manual online, made opening it up fairly straightforward. I can see some type of liquid had stained the area around the battery compartment.
A good while cleaning contact points and spraying it with a load of compressed air it looked a lot better. Now testing with five AA batteries the unit came to life.

Now for the odd sound. It seems when the volume is about 40% and a few of the bass notes are played distortion comes to visit. Thinking it might be just the inbound speaker, a line out was plugged in and it had followed us there.


The demo mode and other instruments at higher volume seem to be free of this distortion. A visual inspection of the caps and parts on the board, I saw no immediate signs of damage.
I called it a day before reaching for the oscilloscope and began probing singles and that’s all the time on I had on a Sunday morning.  For more photos check out our gallery.