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April Live Stream

April is almost at a close but we have just scheduled this month’s live stream. We have lined up a night of talks for you on Wednesday the 28th of April from 7 pm streaming on our Youtube channel. We will have talks about electro-mechanical Uilleann Pipes, the Sharepair project and the electronics that go into an escape room. The talks will be followed by a live Q&A. Check out the talks below.

Link To Live Stream

Talks

Talk Title: Musical NAND gate oscillators and electro-mechanical Uilleann Pipes
Project Description: A demonstration of analogue synthesisers that I’ve made, a look at their schematics, and how this might lead to a new electro-mechanical musical instrument.
Speaker: Brian Leach
Bio: Brian is a Maker, Sound Artist, and Musician inspired by the cross-over of ancient tradition and contemporary technology. Brian currently works as a musician with traditional Irish band ‘Torcán’, as a Luthier at his own business Cork Guitars, and also as a Woodworker. A fascination with new notes and sounds leads him to design and build one-of-a-kind musical instruments with unique character. He completed his studies in Musical Instrument Building at St. John’s Central College Cork in 2017. Drawing on a degree in Astrophysics, and a Masters in Music Technology, he designs his instruments with a solid scientific understanding, technical intuition, and an artist’s eye. Brian is a maker from Benchspace.
Links: www.corkguitars.ie

Talk Title: Sharepair: Digital Support Infrastructure for Citizens in the Repair Economy
Project Description: The project addresses the increasing amount of waste from electrical and electronic equipment (WEEE). WEEE is one of the fastest-growing waste streams in the EU, growing at 3-5% a year. Consumption of electrical and electronic equipment (EEE), and therefore production of WEEE, is very high throughout the NWE region (Eurostat 2016, EEE products put on the market). At the same time, NWE is home to a growing citizen repair movement (10,000+ volunteers), attempting to fight back against this upsurge in waste. However, their impact remains small, even though consumers indicate a high willingness to repair. Hence, there is a large gap between intent and actual behaviour, due to a lack of convenient and accessible repair solutions.
Speaker: Bobby Comerford
Bio: Bobby Comerford is a multimedia designer currently working on digital tools to aid repair and data collection in the citizen-led repair initiatives across Europe. He has a background in design research, education, and industrial design
Links: Website, Sharepair

Talk Title:  Bringing an Escape Room To Life
Project Description: The talk will outline the design and craft process in creating an escape room experience. Louise will cover the theme to puzzle design and concerts. Jeffrey will give an example of the electronics that go into a puzzle.
Speaker: Louise Nolan, Jeffrey Roe
Bio: Louise is a multidisciplinary designer, artist and educator. Links: Twitter. Instagram, LinkedIn

Our event will be hosted by our own CEO Jeffrey. On the team of festival makers for Dublin Maker, Council & Executive board member of Engineers Ireland.

Be sure to put any questions you have for our speakers in the Youtube chat.

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Dublin Maker 2021 – Open Call

We are super proud to have Dublin Maker return this year and be part of the organisations making it happen. The open call for this year’s virtual event is now open. The event will run on June 19th & 20th. We are hoping to bring a range of projects including something you can all control remotely All the details can be found via the link before.

Open Call

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Project: Fun with Smart Plugs and Tasmota

This project is by our member Jeffrey Roe and is about saying goodbye to the default firmware on this smart plug.

The project started with a request from an artist for a device to turn on/off up to eight devices that are mains powered with a custom timing sequence. I decided to try out smart plugs as they have come down in price. It would also save building a circuit of relays as I have done in the past. Most smart plugs come with a firmware that connects the device to a private server and requires the internet to control it. The use case called for this unit to be used without the internet.

After doing a bit of research, the open firmware Tasmota seemed to have all the features the project needed and would cut down on the need to code up something totally from scratch. To flash the new firmware, some devices allow this to be done wireless but most require soldering wires to the microcontroller. The ease of soldering the wires varies from device to device due to the placement of the chip. The soldering job can be much harder on some devices.

Wireless flashing seemed the easy way to go as it required no soldering, so I purchased two plugs that the internet said worked with the TUYA-CONVERT. I went for two AOFO 4AC + 4USB Power Strip plugs ( Model C379 ).

This is when the problems started.  After hours of work, getting PI ready, installing the flashing tool and nothing happens. It turns out the blog post that recommended this plug combination with using the flashing tool had a comment at the end of the post (Which I did not read before starting out). It warned people that a recent update by the manufacturer fixed the hole that allowed users to flash a new firmware over the air.

Plan B was now in operation and I knew a soldering iron would be involved. https://templates.blakadder.com/index.html is a great website with a list of devices that can be used with Tasmota, which pins to connect to, how to get access to the pins and the template to control all the features Unfortunately the two plugs I now had awkwardly required the chip to be completely removed in order to flash them.

Due to lockdown, all I had at home was a soldering iron, solder and solder braid. No desoldering tools. After some effort, I managed to desolder the chip and connect the five wires required to flash the chip. Using the great tool Tasmotizer, it is straightforward to flash the chip with the wires in place. You can even give the WiFi details and config template.

Then started the job of putting the chip back in the board, soldering it again and putting all the parts back together. With a quick test, all was back working but another plug was still left one to do. In the previous photo above, you might have noticed a black plastic cover on the board that covers each plug. That cover blocks access to a pin required to put the chip into flashing mode and hence the need for all this desoldering. The second time around I checked if I could remove this cover and to my surprise, it came off.

\o/. With the cover off I could just solder wires to all the pins and not remove the chip from the board. This speeded up the whole process and made flashing the chip much much easier. A few crocodile clips, an FTDI programmer and we were in business. Both plugs are now ready to be controlled via WiFi API call.

I have updated the page on https://templates.blakadder.com/aofo_C379.html so anyone else flashing these plugs can know about this shortcut.

The rest of the project involved adventures in writing code for esp32 & esp8266 and problems with WiFi but that is for another time.

If you would like to see more photos from the project check out our gallery.

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Abbeyleix Climate Action Project – Air Quality Workshop

The town of Abbeyleix, Co Laois launched an ambitious community climate action project that ran from  October 2020 to March 2021. It had a number of elements that included a science communicator in residence Dr Niamh Shaw, a weekly Abbeyleix Almanac TV on Facebook live, lectures and workshops.

An early video (above) produced by the project called for ideas/projects that might help the team raise awareness and further the goals of the project. Our member Jeffrey Roe with family links to the town made contact and suggested the Sensor.Community project.

Sensor.Community is a contributor driven global sensor network that creates Open Environmental Data. Its mission is to inspire and enrich people’s lives by offering a platform for the collective curiosity in nature that is genuine, joyful and positive. We have worked in the past with their guides and software created by the project to deliver workshops in the past. This open community citizen science project is only possible with the contributions of the Sensor.Community at large.

The Abbeyleix team jumped on the idea straight away. They were keen to build on the experience that Tog has in running these workshops. One sensor that was already active in the town really showcased the potential for a local network to be created. A plan was drawn up with appearances on Abbeyleix Almanac TV scheduled to raise local awareness in the sensors and a date was set for the 28th of February to coincide with STEPS Engineers Week. Midlands science came on board to fund the event and remove the barrier for local people to get involved.

Network in Ireland before the workshop

With the support of the local Tidy Towns committee, we found 14 participants for the workshop. To cut costs and to support the event being run virtually, glue guns and other tools required for the workshop were found locally and shared creating a real community feel to the whole affair.

Jeffrey on zoom during workshop

Using Zoom and a host of other tools, the workshop ran for just under three hours. Participants flashed the firmware, connected parts, setup WiFi links and put together boxes.

A few weeks have now passed since the workshop and more and more people are mounting their sensors outdoors and getting on the map. All the data can be viewed on the Sensor.Community website.

Sensor in Abbeyleix

To see more photos from the workshop do check out our gallery.

We would like to thank the people of Abbeyleix for being so welcoming to us during this project and especially the Tidy Towns committee, also Midlands Science for the funding to make it possible and finally the continued work of Sensor.Community.

Update

Check out this letter published in the Irish Times about this project.

https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/letters/sensors-and-making-air-quality-a-priority-1.4540696

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Arduino Day – Saturday 27th of March

Arduino Day is a worldwide birthday celebration of Arduino – organized directly by the community, or by the Arduino team. It brings people together “online” to share their experiences and learn more about the open-source platform.

We are hosting a 2 hour live stream with a mix of demos, introduction lessons and contributions from our community.

We will kick things off at 11 am on Saturday the 27th of March on our Youtube channel. The event will be unconference style. We have the topics already (listed below) and would like to open the event to hear from you our community to talk about your projects. Drop us an email to present your project.

  • Arduino 101 – Getting started – Declan Meenagh
  • Lorawan – Lower Powered communication – Jeffrey Roe
  • Hot Things – monitoring temperatures – Gary Cooke
  • Tree’s Projects twitter knitter/fabric cadaver/cycling distance vest. TriploidTree
  • Giant arduino development kit – Robert Fitzsimons⁩

You can rewatch the event below.

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Engineering a Cleanroom Power Tool

This project has come about because of the need to use cordless power tools in a cleanroom. Large numbers of screws and fasteners need to be removed and reinstalled on equipment during preventative maintenance. The proposal is to use power tools to speed up the process and reduce operator fatigue. You might think that a brand new or well maintained power tool would not give off any airborne particles, but that’s not the case. Airborne particulates are a big problem in a cleanroom. They can damage equipment and ruin product.

There’s a huge range of cordless power tools available from all the big-name manufacturers that you know well. Testing some of these tools with a particle meter highlights the problem. Background airborne particle readings are zero, down to 0.1 micron.

When the tools are brought near the meter however, the results are off the scale. This is hardly surprising, given that these tools are not specifically designed to be cleanroom compatible. This particular tool was a reversible ratchet with a brushless motor, so the particles were not carbon dust from the motor brushes. They were more likely from bearings, grease, and the reversible ratchet head.

Having discussed with TOG members, the proposal is to build some kind of enclosure around a tool…. a second skin….. with a connection to a vacuum line. That way, any particulates generated by the tool get drawn away. The tool must still be usable obviously, so the enclosure cannot be so clunky as to make it hard to use. An enclosure or covering that is conformal & flexible rather than rigid might be best. It must not collapse under the suction force. Silicone rubber has been suggested and there are some suggestions around vacuum forming, heat shrinking, 3D printing and silicone molding. If you have any comments or suggestions, feel free to drop us a line.