Everything TOG in September: crafting, coding, lock picking, book club, Culture Night

September

Back to school and back to TOG this September…

Our members are over in the UK for EMF camp, follow @tog_dublin on twitter for updates on how the camp is going.

Lock Picking: Runs on Mondays, the 3rd and 17th of September at 7pm. Come down and try your hand at cracking open tumbler, tubular or warded locks.

Craft Night: Runs on Wednesdays, the 5th and 19th September at 7pm. Knitting? Crochet? Embroidery? Laser cutting? 3D printing? Join us and work on something you know, or learn something you don’t.

Electronics and Micro Controller Night: Runs on Mondays, the 10th and 24th September at 7pm. Arduinos, Raspberry Pis and Intel Galileos are just some of the things you can work on down here, or try our introductions to electronics worksheet. Recommended you bring your own laptop.

The Science Fiction Book Club will meet on Wednesday 26th September. This month’s book is The Shockwave Rider by John Brunner, published in 1975. Cake will be available.

Open Social: Runs on Saturday the 15th of September at 7pm. Join us for an evening of conversations, games and our glorious hand made wood fired pizza.

Coding: Runs on Mondays, the 3rd and 17th September at 7pm. Come down and work on a project or help others with theirs. Laptop of your own pretty much essential, and bring your own project.

Wikipedia Editing: Runs on Wednesday the 26th September at 7pm. Ever wondered how to get started editing Wikipedia? Come along and will get you adding to the world’s largest open collaborative knowledge project. All are welcome, no editing experience is necessary and the event is free, just turn up with a laptop to start editing.

We are taking part in Dublin Culture Night again this year, Friday 21st September. https://culturenight.ie/event/tog-hackerspace/

TOG will have a stand at this year’s EU Contest for Young Scientists, https://www.eucys2018.com, which runs from 14th to 16th of September at the RDS, Merrion Road, Ballsbridge.  We will be showcasing a range of projects and activities, including a constellation umbrella, bone conduction, boat models, wearables and interactive games.

Welder repair

An ancient proverb says that power tool failures occur in threes. During the same week that the lathe motor burned out and the compressor wire meltdown has turned it into a scary noise machine, we also had a mysterious malfunction in one of our welders. It didn’t release any smoke, didn’t make weird noises. It just didn’t weld. 0 volts across the output.

Inside of the welder (top view) before the repair attempt. Note that a large number of similar – but not identical – top boards can be found on Aliexpress.

This machine, a small 180A TIG/MMA inverter welder, has recently been repaired. It was not used heavily, as TOG has only so much use for welding. In fact, it was only used by a couple members to practise their welding skills.

On one hand, this machine was 5 year old, has been used extensively in the past and could have been written off as death of old age. The cost of a commercial repair would probably exceed the value of the welder. On the other hand – why not try to repair it ourselves before scrapping it?

Continue reading “Welder repair”

Electronic “Build-It” Workshop

*** just 2 places left ***

Join us at TOG for an afternoon electronic “build-it” workshop. This is a quick introduction to electronics. Participants get to build and take home a small electronic kit, which we’ve chosen as a good basic introductory kit. The workshop is suitable for beginners to electronics. If you’ve never built an electronics kit or soldered before, then this workshop is ideal for you. We’ll show you everything that you need to know.

We like this particular kit very much, and we think that it will provide you with great fun and mischief. To make it a bit more interesting, we’d prefer not to tell you what the kit is, but if you really want to know, contact us or sign up and we’ll tell you…. only if you promise to keep it to yourself!

In addition to building the kit, we’ll explain how the circuit works and you can test it with various electronic test equipment that we have at TOG. We’ll show you how to do that too.

The cost of this workshop is 30 euro and you can pay on the day. The workshop takes place at TOG on the afternoon of Saturday 5th November at 3PM. We should be finished by 5:30PM. You can sign up using the form below. That same evening we hold our regular open social event. You’re welcome to stick around for that, meet the other TOG’gers and visitors. As usual with our open socials, hang out, bring beer, food, gadgets etc!

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Electronics bootcamp SPACES open

We’re running our electronics bootcamp again. This event will take place
over 5 weeks on Tuesday evenings at TOG, from 19:00 to 21:30. First
session on Tuesday 9th August.

This is a practical / hands-on introduction to electronics. Its suitable for
beginners, as no previous knowledge is required. If you’re curious about
electronics and don’t know where to start, then this is for you. No
soldering required, as we do everything on prototyping breadboards.
We’ll be building and testing circuits right from the first night. We’ll
be covering DC, AC, analog and digital electronics.

Over the 5 weeks, you’ll have a chance to play with multimeters,
oscilloscopes, signal generators and other electronic test equipment.
There’ll be lots of circuits to build and test along the way.

Cost is €50 for non-members. If you’re interested, you can sign up
below. There are 8 places available.

Booked Out

Continue reading “Electronics bootcamp SPACES open”

Building it!

During this day-long workshop, you will be walked through the process of designing an interactive electronic device: from an initial idea right through to the working device.

We will start off with a presentation covering the whole design process. Next we will demonstrate the necessary steps and tools in more detail. And last but not least you will assemble the finished device.
The device we will be building will be a Mini Mood Light. Consisting of two multicoloured LED’s, a small micro controller and a number of buttons which will allow the user to selected a suitable colour which reflects their mood. We’ll be demonstrating each of the steps including schematic capture, PCB layout, PCB fabrication and programming the micro controller.

You should have a basic understanding of electronics and the C programming language. The workshop is targeted at makers and amateur inventors who want to use open source tools to create open hardware devices.

The workshop will be run three times over the period of Science Week and Innovation Dublin Festival. Each workshop will run from 11:00 through to approximately 17:00, with a break for lunch. Food will not be provided, but we have a full kitchen and there are shops/takeaways nearby.

The cost of the workshop will be 40€ waged, 30€ unwaged and 20€ tog members.

The numbers are going to be limited to eight adult/older teen participants per workshop, but we also hope to video stream and record some of the last workshop.

TOG does Electronic Fashion

We will be holding two electronic fashion workshops over the weekend of Innovation Dublin week.  These workshops will be hosted in our space on Arran Quay on Saturday 17th and Sunday 18th of October from 2pm to 6pm.

There will be a €15 (€12 students/unwaged, €10 TOG members) participation fee to take part in the workshops.  Non-members are welcome to participate in the workshops.

The participation fee includes a basic electroluminescent wire kit and an item of clothing from an Irish menswear fashion label which is a canvas for your creations.  A range of sewing materials (including conductive wire), extra el wire, LilyPad’s and other electronic devices will be available for use during the workshop.

No experience of electronics or sewing is required, though it would help.

The number of places in each workshop will be limited to 12, so please reserve a place by posting a comment to this blog post, giving details of which workshop you would like to attend.

Participants and visitors must be at least 18 years of age. Continue reading “TOG does Electronic Fashion”