Epson Stylus Pro 9500 large form printer

Epson Printer

We, at tog, like to extend the usability of items for as long as possible. (Or at least that is our excuse for all the out-of-date tech laying about.) So back in May of last year when we were offered a very large format printer, it was hard to say no. (Stay with me sewists.)

Some members took it in, gave it some TLC, and we even found a roll of paper at ReCreate! But then we hit a problem. The last available drivers for it are Windows XP 32-bit. Which is not exactly commonplace anymore.

Then, a short while, and some internet searching, ago, we discovered that gutenprint-cups, the default printing facility on many linux distros actually supports this printer! It’s not hard to install; plug in the USB cable, open a browser, go to http://localhost:631/ and press the right buttons. Done.

Long story short; the printer lives again! And for you sewists out there; ever buy a digital pattern and have to spend hours taping together A4 sheets? Well, if you can also get a large form pattern, you won’t have to do that anymore! Just visit tog some Craft Night and we’ll sort you out!

TOG @ Epicenter 09

Barry at IrishDev.com has been kind enough to offer TOG a chance to show ourselves at the Irish Software Show Epicenter by offering us a stand so we can make people more informed about hackerspaces in Ireland. So between the 24th – 28th of August we will have a stand in the Hamilton Building in Trinity College (location), run by TOG members answering any question people may have about hackerspaces.

To coincide with this Rob have started on the first big project in the hackerspace and we are welcoming others to help. Given that we have a nice group of people within TOG interested in software and playing with LED’s he are starting to build a 8x8x32 LED cube (thats 2048 LED’s!!!!) that can programmed to display an interesting array of patterns and images. Software to make this structure do wonderful things will also be created in the future as a future show-case for the kind of things that can be done in hackerspaces.

We will also have Mousebots and a demo of the SpokePOV in action on the day. If you have any projects that you have completed, that show the type of thing us hackers like to do, get in contact as it would be great to show people the great things  that can be done in a hackerspace when we can put our minds to something.

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Canonical Visit

Yesterday was Microcontroller Monday and we had some visitors from Canonical pay our space a visit last night. Canonical are having their development meeting in Dublin this week and after a busy day of work, they popped in to have a look around and a chat. We also may have given a few of our visitors the hackerspace bug and we may have a new hackerspace in China some time soon. 🙂

Busy at TOG
Busy at TOG

Among our visitors we had Steve Conklin (sconklin to those of you in the interweb) who is a member of the Antitronics Hackerspace in Huntsville, Alabama and Hugh Blemings who, lucky for us, likes too play with arduinos and is in the process of co-authoring a book Practical Arduino: Cool Projects for Open Source Hardware. I can’t wait to read it when its finished.

Steve was good enough to post his pictures on his flickr which can be found here.

Antitronics

Hackers on the BBC

Our friends over at NYCResistor pointed this one out to me, the BBC catch up with some hackers over in London. Great to see my type of people in the media 🙂