Author: gary

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Capturing a Swarm…..

Bee Swarm

…..Of the beekeeping kind!

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. 

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Aquarium Automation

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.


You can view the live system status here https://hussamalhayek.com/aquaponics-status/
View the full code + WordPress integration and more details here https://github.com/Hussam424/Piponics


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!

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Another USB-C upgrade

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.

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Ebike BMS Upgrade

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.
 

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Free Seed and Plant Swap

Join us at TOG for a free seed and plant swap on Saturday 19th April from 2 to 5 PM. Many of us at TOG are keen vegetable gardeners and the coming of New Year makes us look ahead to Spring and Summer in the hope of a good harvest. We’ll be planting lots of seeds on the day and hopefully no one will go away empty handed. We have lots of pots and we’ll have a bag of potting compost too.

If you have anything surplus that you’d like to share, why not bring it along…. seeds? plants? cuttings? We’d love to hear your own stories of what you like to plant in your own garden or space. Tell your friends and family about the event. If you’re involved with any community gardens, then definitely tell them also. The kettle will be on all day with plenty of tea and coffee and biscuits. TOG is a non-profit space run by unpaid volunteers. Donations are always welcome.

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Another Repair Café Fix

We’re no stranger to Repair Cafés  here at TOG, having just run our biggest one ever in January. Repair Cafés are events where volunteers try to fix stuff to keep it in-service and out of landfill. We had about 90 fixes attempted on the day with much success, thanks to a fantastic pool of fixers. You can read about it in the Irish Times.

This particular fix was a simple one, but we also decided to upgrade the power socket to USB-C. A rechargeable work light from ALDI had become intermittent in charging. The charging socket (micro USB) seemed sensitive to touch. Some of the tiny surface mount pins on the charging socket circuit board had failed. These proved quite difficult to re-solder, even with our best hot air kit.

Checking the usual Chinese websites, there are many kinds of USB-C plugs and sockets available. We bought 3 types…. some chassis mounting ones, some on a small PCB similar to the original one, and some plain vanilla ones with just 2 flying leads. We decided to use the plain one. With a bit of enlarging of the hole to make it fit, and some 2-part epoxy, the new USB-C socket is now in place and connected up. These have just a red and a black wire so it’s just 5V, but that’s fine for this application.

Talking afterwards, most of the gadgets and gizmos that we’ve made at TOG have traditionally used some kind of barrel plug for 5V or 12V. Since USB-C is now the in-thing, it’s easy to use it for new projects. Drop in to our regular Monday night Electronics or Tuesday night Open House to see this and much more.

If you need something repaired come along to our upcoming repair cafes.

Fingal Makerspace, Blanchardstown Library 29th March 2025

Tog Hackerspace, 19th April 2025