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!

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

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.

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.

Update Oct 15, 2009.

Selection of parts and materials for the Electronic Fashion workshop. Top left electroluminescent wire. Bottom left electroluminescent drivers. Top center conductive wire. Top right sewing materials. Bottom right LilyPad controllers, sensors and transducers.

Some of the electroluminescent wire in action.

Getting to the space. The space is located above the Voodoo Card Club on Array Quay, which is on the north-side of the river approximately 15 minutes walk form O’Connell Street Bridge or couple of minutes walk from the Smithfield Luas stop. Also see the map for more details.

The building number is 40 and we are on the 2nd Floor. To gain access to the building please press the number 2 intercom, please speak up as the noise from traffic can make it hard to hear, but we can then buzzer you into the building. Then the fun begins.

As always non-members are allowed to come along , just contact us before hand using the contact form.

At this point I would like to ask, does any one have any ideas for other group nights ? What would you like to see? Please post a comment.

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.