Tog Hackerspace – Page 87 – The Dublin Hackerspace

28/01/2017

TOG Brewday (Saturday 4th February 10am)

TOG members and Capital Brewers return to TOG HQ this coming Saturday (4th February). Hearty brews are on the menu, in both brewing with guidance and instructions from the experts, and tasting craft beer made at previous brew days!

A very rough time-line of a brew day is as follows (a little earlier than usual to be finished before AGM):

9:00am – 11pm: Heating water, water treatment and mashing grain
11pm – 1pm: Boiling & beer tasting from previous brews and visitors beers
1pm – 3pm: Cooling and clean up

Every brew day is slightly different with a mix of brewers, recipes and techniques. The long term goal would be to get a full set of brewing equipment that TOG members can use themselves at the space and make your own beer, cider or wine whenever you like! All you need are the ingredients. We are already well on our way to achieving that goal with several sets of equipment for members to choose from.

Its always a fun and engaging day, the cost is free (donations are welcome) so come along, ask questions and even help with the brewing!

25/01/2017

Workshop Improvements

We have been improving our workshop a lot lately. Check out some of the work below.

We have found a new home for our air compressor and mounted it on our metal shelves. We also mounted a air hose reel. It makes using air tools in our workshop very easy.

Label all the things. If you have a lot of stuff, soon you find yourself in a situation where you can’t find anythings. We have done a big sorting job of our stuff. So now most things have their own box.

We have long things like pipes hat need to be put somewhere but they don’t fit in our current wood storage area. Long things now have their own area . aka Long things storage.

Drop by our upcoming Birthday Party to see a host of changes we have made to the space since our opening last year.

19/01/201719/01/2017

TOG 8th Birthday Party

Well we’re at it again. Once a year we all have our birthday and TOG is no different. This month we have reached the ripe old age of 8 years. We’ll be celebrating in style on Saturday 28th January in Blackpitts. Last year we combined our January Open Social, birthday party and grand opening, into one monster bash. It didn’t disappoint. It was our biggest social event ever. The craic was so mighty, that we’ve decided to do it again this month for our 8th birthday party. So note that time and date….. Saturday 28th January from 7PM. There are strong rumours of cake, TOG beer and pizza.

If you’ve never been to one of our shindigs, you’ll find it a great alternative Saturday evening in town. Come in and look around. Kick the tyres. If you’ve never been in before, we’ll give you the grand tour of the space. Talk to members and visitors about projects or things you’d like to do. Ask about our plans for 2017. If you like what you see, ask about joining as a full member. What a great New Years resolution that would be!

Last year, we invited just about everyone that we could think of, and most of them came. Now if you’re one of the few who were invited last year and didn’t come, well we know who you are, and we won’t be taking any excuses this year. The dog ate your homework, the cat was sick, or you’re washing your hair just won’t do 🙂 So get yourself in on the 28th. 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. No need to book…. just turn up. You can drop in for 10 minutes, or stay the whole night. We have parking available. Bring beer, food, gadgets! Our doors are open from 7PM. Hope to see you there. Expect mighty craic.

https://www.meetup.com/Tog-Dublin-Hackerspace/

https://twitter.com/TOG_Dublin

https://www.facebook.com/togdublin

https://lists.tog.ie/mailman/listinfo/tog

17/01/201726/01/2017

Laser Cutting Pencil Jig

Last weekend a bunch of our members visited the annual BT Young Scientist & Technology Exhibition. It’s always great fun to walk around and to chat to all the students about their projects. It’s fantastic to see how Arduino’s and Raspberry Pi’s have just become tools for the students to carry out their project.

Also at the exhibition were the Stem Module. It’s a mobile truck filled with all sorts of scientific and fabrication equipment to help delivery education programs to school kids. While getting the tour of the truck, we spotted a laser cutting jig for making custom pencils. We really liked the idea, so we decided to give it a go.

So we started off with testing if cutting pencils would work on our Lasersaur.

After this successful test, we tried out a single line font from Robert McNeel and a jig to cut ten pencils in one go.

We are mostly happy with the results. Below you can see the side by side comparison. I think with a better quality pencils and raising the lens of the Lasersaur would get better accuracy. You can download our design here.

15/01/201712/05/2018

Ultra Reliable Electronics?

sanyo tv Once upon a time, TV repair shops were everywhere. Now there are hardly any left. There are reasons for that, probably based on a mix of cost, reliability of electronics, and a throw-away culture. Even in the few TV repair shops that are left, would anyone actually take a scope, schematic and a soldering iron to a TV these days? Maybe they would just replace the circuit board or display.

This is a tale of a Sanyo TV, made in the UK in ~1992, based on the date codes of the components inside. It has worked continuously since then. Lately the picture has gone a bit red-ish. The TV was recently replaced by a new flat screen TV, so we’ve had a chance to take a look inside. This is the first time that the back has been off since manufacture….. ~25 years ago. Depending on your point of view, you might think that 25 years isn’t that long, but it’s not too bad either for a CRT-type TV, considering also that it has never needed a repair. If you have some other electronics that has been working without repair for a very long time, we’d be interested to hear.

Inside it is remarkably clean. Apart from the one on the tube, everything else is on a single circuit board. If the tube is not the cause of the reddish picture, then this TV is probably repairable. Some further investigation is pending. If you’d like to take a look, drop into our regular Electronics, Microcontroller and IOT evening which takes place every 2nd Monday.

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