Every week we send a postcard to some hacker or maker space somewhere in the world.
We’ve interacted with many spaces over the years, and it’s a right of passage for our members to visit the local hacker space whenever they visit somewhere new.
Sure you can email, and there’s all manner of instant social media and messaging apps, but where is the fun in that!
If you’d like a postcard from Dublin, let us know and we’ll add you to our list. Send us a postcard yourself!
TOG, Unit 1B Motor City, Kylemore Road, Dublin 12, D12 CF6V, Ireland.
Tog recently received a very kind donation of an 8mm movie Ciné camera, projector and other items. We still have all of our dark room equipment in the space, and several TOG members are still keen on film photography.
In the past, we have ran film photography workshops and processed film in the space. These formats are not dead. They still have a small but dedicated following. If film photography including Ciné and instant photography is something that interests you, why not drop in, see what we have, and have a chat with us.
When we moved into our current space here in Bluebell, one of the very first pictures that we took on the day was an instant photo on an original 1970s vintage Polaroid SX70 camera that’s still working like new!
Beekeeping is one of the many and varied interests of TOG members. Our member John is a keen beekeeper, and he recently captured a swarm to create a new colony.
As the number of honeybees in a hive increases, the usual natural way to prevent overcrowding is by swarming. A few scout bees will find a new location, and the old Queen will leave the hive with about two-thirds of the bees. They often cluster on a tree branch before settling into a new location.
One way to catch a swarm is to put a box containing comb frames in a tree. Drops of lemongrass oil act as an attractant because they resemble the pheromone of a Queen bee.
In this case, a swarm of honeybees have gathered under the box, rather than inside. These bees were removed by gloved hands and placed in the box. The Queen will start to lay eggs and establish a new hive. The bees remaining in the old queenless hive will raise a new virgin Queen who will fly out, get mated and return to lay eggs.
Taking some inspiration from our aquarium project in the space, John is planning a monitoring project for a hive, including some sensors and a camera to watch the bees remotely.
Check out this cool aquarium project by our member Hussam. This is an aquaponics project called ”PIPONIC”. The system can be monitored and controlled remotely. Aquaponics combines fish and plants in one self-sustaining setup. In this case, the fish and plants are goldfish and mint.
The system runs on a Raspberry Pi 3, with a few key components: • A light sensor that turns on LEDs in the dark • A 12V water pump that cycles on/off to keep the water moving; • A MAX31865 sensor that monitors water temperature for the fish (16–24°C); The system logs data to a CSV file and sends it to Hussams website via an API for real-time monitoring. A camera connected to the Pi allows a visual check the water level.
Hussam is currently working on automating the water level and would love to team up with others to explore new ways to expand the system and make it even more sustainable and smart. TOG has been the perfect place to experiment, learn and share creative ideas about projects like this. The aquarium is in our kitchen in the space. You can usually find Hussam at Electronics Night on Mondays. Feel free to drop by if you’d like to chat, share ideas, or collaborate on improving the system!
USB-C conversions are becoming a bit of a thing around here. We repaired a faulty work light earlier this year, and we took the opportunity to upgrade the charging socket to USB-C. A few other items have had the same treatment over the last few months. This latest one is an old-school light box for viewing film negatives and slides. We’re still keen on our film photography at TOG, and we still have all of our dark room equipment.
As-built, this particular light box came with with a foot-long fluorescent tube. Inside, there is a driver PCB for the tube, and a 6x D-cell battery compartment. It also has a 3.5mm power input socket if you want to run it from some kind of adapter.
The small driver PCB inside takes the ~9V battery voltage and bumps it up to the high voltage required to to run the fluorescent tube. The switching transistor on the driver has already failed once in the past, and its heat sink gets very hot during operation. Probably not a very optimal design or power efficient.
A bit of work with a Dremel and we have a nice oval hole for the new USB-C socket. A few touches with a soldering iron to melt the plastic, and the socket is now joined firmly to the case. The intention was to feed in 5v, and then bump it up to something closer to 12v to charge the batteries via a current limiting resistor. A cheap voltage converter sourced from the usual websites would look after that.
That was the intended upgrade, but a bit of feature creep came along last night. We thought that it would be nice to replace the fluorescent lamp with a more power efficient LED one. This would also allow us to eliminate that iffy driver PCB. Rummaging around the space, an old emergency light fitting had a nice LED strip ripe for harvesting. Check back in with us over the next while to see the finished article. If you have anything that you think might benefit from a USB-C upgrade, drop in to our regular Monday and Tuesday open nights.
An ebike battery from 2012 has given great service, but the balancing of some individual cells in this 16S Lithium Iron Phosphate battery started to take much longer than others. Eventually, some cells would not balance at all. Each cell has its own “channel” on the battery management system (BMS). A red LED on the BMS should illuminate when the cell comes up to full charge.
On closer examination, some of the sense wires to individual cells were found to have become disconnected. These were resoldered which brought some improvement, but still balancing was not happening consistently. Some damage and corrosion on the BMS circuit board was then found. In the world of ebikes, things have moved on quite a bit since 2012. So it was decided to replace the stock BMS with an up-to-date Bluetooth enabled one.
A “JK” BMS was chosen, which seems to be a popular brand from various online forums. The one page “manual” that came with the BMS isn’t the best, and would probably get a “could do better” if it was a school or college project. Thankfully, with a bit of help from a number of YouTube channels, the BMS was fitted ok and started up. With the matching smartphone app installed, it’s cool to see all the individual cell voltages in real time and the balancing happening before your eyes.
If you’d like to see these kinds of fixes and mods that we get up to, drop in to our Monday night Electronics or Tuesday Open House.
