The Inside Culture team dropped into our space to learn about maker culture in Dublin and further afield. Our members Jeffrey Roe and Louise Nolan chatted to them about the projects Tog created for Dublin Maker and why they got into making.
Our lathe is finally getting some good use! This time, a small part was made from aluminium, a coupling for connecting two pieces of tubing for the water cooling system in the upcoming CNC router project. It will replace the existing temporary hose-and-clamps hack.
A piece of bar stock was clamped in a 4 jaw chuck, made into a cylinder and turned down to about 16mm diameter. Next we turned half of it down to about 6mm and drilled a 4.5mm hole through it, using a drill chuck. Lastly we smoothed the edges slightly and parted the whole thing off.
The end result is more functional and looks a lot better!
The whole operation went smoothly in overall retrospection. However, we had few small issues to deal with on the way. Firstly, it wasn’t obvious how to set gearing for the power feed, as the manual wasn’t very clear. Another problem was that the square shape of stock, required the use of a 4 jaw chuck, which is not self-centring. That adds a couple of extra steps to set up, as centring of the stock has to be done manually in such a case.
There are many ways to take an electrical audio signal and turn it into something you can hear. Moving coil speakers, plasma domes, electrostatic speakers, piezo horns, the list goes on. Last week at the Electromagnetic Field festival in the UK, we encountered another we hadn’t experienced directly before. Bite on a brass rod (sheathed in a drinking straw for hygiene), hear music.
The TOG Skull Radio demo box
This was Skull Radio, a bone conduction speaker courtesy of [Tdr], one of our friends fromTOG hackerspace in Dublin, and its simplicity hid a rather surprising performance. A small DC motor has its shaft connected to a piece of rod, and a small audio power amplifier drives the motor. Nothing is audible until you bite on the rod, and then you can hear the music. The bones of your skull are conducting it directly to your inner ear, without an airborne sound wave in sight.
Read the full story over on their website. https://hackaday.com/2016/08/17/bone-conduction-skull-radio/#comment-3139160
Our August Open Social takes place on Saturday 20th August at 7pm. If you fancy doing something different on a Saturday evening, why not drop in and see us.
If you’ve never been in before, we’ll give you the grand tour. You can chat to members and fellow visitors, and see whats going on.
The space stays open until the last member is left……usually the small hours of Sunday morning. The evening is free to attend for members and visitors alike. Our doors will be open from 7pm. No booking is required…. just turn up. You can drop in for 10 minutes, or stay the whole night. We have parking available. Bring beer, food, gadgets! Hope to see you there.
A bunch of us headed to an event last weekend called Electromagnetic Field in the UK. EMF is a 3 day camping festival held every two years with over a thousand people attending. The weekend is filled with talks, workshops and lots of crazy art installations. We teamed up with other hackers from Ireland to form our own little village to have a place to call home for the weekend. Our members kept themselves busy over the weekend by adding to the lineup with their own talks and workshops check out below.
Receiving live video from the Space station – Daniel Cussen
EMF had a full program of events to keep all the kids entertained. We ran our bridge building competition with the young hackers of EMF. Congratulations to the hope bridge on their win.
Nothing much to see here! A quick weekend afternoon hack. The ebike power supply died, so time to knock up a cable to charge the battery from a variable power supply.
A 3-pin XLR socket, a fuse holder with a 5A fuse and a diode for reverse current protection. A bit of soldering and heatshrink and we’re up and running. Checked it out. Set the power supply to 60v (same as the old charger) with 3A current limit, and we’re charging ok.
The Inside Culture team dropped into our space to learn about maker culture in Dublin and further afield. Our members Jeffrey Roe and Louise Nolan chatted to them about the projects Tog created for Dublin Maker and why they got into making.
was made from aluminium, a coupling for connecting two pieces of tubing for the water cooling system in the upcoming CNC router project. It will replace the existing temporary hose-and-clamps hack.
unctional and looks a lot better!
