So from now on we have our social nights on the 1st Saturday of the month, and the 3rd Thursday of the month (just before the Hackathon). This means that our first Social Night in the new slot is Saturday the 7th August and the next will be Thursday the 19th of August. I have also added these new dates to our calender on the blog so you can also check there if you are unsure.

The suggested themes for these nights will be a food night where people can bring food to the space and share some nibbles and a laugh, and a movie night ( the first one was great ). These can of course change as more suggestions are made.

We watched Sneakers ( http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0105435/ ) last night with the projector on one of our newly painted walls and it worked quite well. We had 6 visitors to the space last night and it was great to show people around the space after so much hard work has gone into making it our new home.

Our Social nights are always great ways to check out the space as well as have a chat with a few of our members and get a feel for what we want to do with the space. As usual, we have events on in the space during the weeks ahead and the list is always growing. I even got a few ideas for some bi-weekly/monthly group nights and I’ll try ask about these on the list next week. RFID and/or lock picking anyone?

Please sign up again, it’s fun!

Edit This class is no full. Pleases use the contact form to show your interest for the next class.

The move into the new premises is going along well, and we are planing
to start the next PHP course for Beginners on Wednesday, the 7th of
July.

We would like to arrange a get together before: 7:00pm on 5th of July at Tog
so we would have time to get to know you, show you around and arrange the payment.

The course will run for 5 weeks always on Wednesdays, 7:00pm to 9:30pm
(if 7pm is so early for somebody please let me know, in this case we
would start at 7:30pm and end at 10pm)

The course will cost 50euro this time, for 2 reasons:
1. the feedback from the last course was, that 30euro is to cheap
2. now that we have moved to a bigger space, we have more to offer but
also more costs

Please let me know if you are interested in attending this course, just fill out the form.

More information on php.class.tog.ie

Week 1

• What is PHP?
• What is a webserver?
• installation and configuration

Week 2

• design a valid HTML file
• first steps in PHP
• usefull Firefox Add-ons

Week 3

• PHP theory
• introducing variables
• using built-in functions

Week 4

• Introducing arrays
• Manipulating arrays
• working with user input

Week 5

• introducing operators
• using constructs
• PHP challenge!

Because to an outages on tea and coffee all e-mail had to been vapourised.
Please sign up again!

After nearly 6 months of searching for a new home we finally have found one. Our new space is located on Chancery Lane, Dublin 8. It’s a large Industrial unit. With a number of large rooms. At 196sq meters it is over 4 times the size of our current space with a much wider scope of possible activities.

The new space has a shared courtyard with one other tenant. We will have 3 private parking spaces and on street parking near by. There is also a Dublin bikes station close by and many bus routes. Some photos of the outside and the inside.

We are currently in the process of renovating the new space. When it’s finished we hope to have a full size kitchen, class room, library, server room, common room, science lab, arts and craft room, and workshop.

Over the next two weeks we will be cleaning it up and moving all our equipment from Arran Quay over to our new space. We hope to be open to the public again for the next hackathon. Until then all groups nights will be cancelled until we have finished the move.

Some photos of the work being done here.

In the near future, we will be making a call for equipment and furniture. So if you have any thing keep us in mind. As always if you would like to get involved don’t hesitate to contact us.

Here are a few that some members will be working on:

Makerbot, its a 3d printer that prints ABS plastic into anything in 10×10 format. Bring along your cad drawings and print some stuff.

Building x0xb0x sound box

http://www.ladyada.net/make/x0xb0x/index.html

Home made weather station

And anything else you want to work on, come along just just contact us and let us know what day you are coming Contact Tog

Last weekend members of TOG headed off to Vienna, Austria for the Robot Challenge competition. This is the world’s biggest competition for self-made, autonomous, and mobile robots. There where over  600 robots from all over the world are registered for the competition.

A group of  eight left Ireland for the event, three from TOG and the rest from the Irish Robotics Club. With us we had 2 mini sumo and 3 line followers.

TOG enter a robot in the Linefollower category , named TOG BOT. There was stiff competition on the day. It turns out that the TOG BOT was very under powered. It was just too slow moving, coming in at 53rd out of 139. It was a great experience building the robot for all involved. We learned a great deal about robots. Hopeful we will be back next year with a better robot.

It was not all bad on the Irish front, robots from the Irish Robotics Club, did very well wining three rounds of the Mini Sumo competition and came 18th out of 139 in the Line follower. Congratulations to all involved.

For more photos check out our new gallery.http://gallery.tog.ie/v/2010_robotchallenge/

Over the past two weeks member’s of TOG have been giving talks on creating Hackerspaces around Ireland .

On the Saturday February 27th , members from TOG gave a talk to Skynet in University of Limerick.The talk was part of  day of talks orgained by Skynet and Ubuntu-ie.

On Wednesday 10th of March , a member gave a talk on Hackerspaces in general and TOG in Dublin City University. This talk was part of a week long series of events called techweek.

The notes from the UL talk are available  here.

The sides from the DCU talk are available here.

TOG in association with the Irish Robotics Club will be hosting an Electronics Workshop by Mitch Altman and Jimmie P Rodgers in the Science Galley on the 23rd of March.  Mitch Altman is a San Francisco-based hacker and inventor, best known for inventing TV-B-Gone remote controls, a keychain that turns off TVs in public places. Also Mitch is a co-founder of Noisebridge hackerspace. Mitch travels all over the world sharing his knowledge and love of microcontrollers and soldering. Some of you might not know this, but on a trip to 25c3 some of the founding members of TOG learned to solder for the first time with Mitch’s help. It was this trip that gave the spark to start TOG. If you look closely at the image on the right you might recognise some of them.