New toys in TOG Spot Welder

As always at the BBQs at tog there is fire and dismantling of stuff involved. Group of us on Sunday during the BBQ took apart an old welder that was quite useless and converted it to a spot welder check out the video down below.

 

We also put up a few more pin hole photos of which will be posted in a few weeks.

How to Build a Time Machine in 12 Easy Steps:

 

A Tachyonic Antitelephone is a theoretical device, a thought experiment from physics history which allows the user to send messages back to his or her own past using faster than light particles called tachyons. A while back I decided to build a receiver. Being a fine art graduate however and lacking all but the most basic knowledge of physics and electronics, I required more than a bit of help. For the benefit of my past self, I’ll now outline how it’s done so I can send this message back in time and know how to do it:

 

Tachyonic Antitelephone from Sinead McDonald on Vimeo.

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Bubble Birdhouse

We have been working on projects that all went down really well at Maker Faire this year and will be working on over the coming months to improve as we go along.

One project that I worked on with another member is the Bubble Birdhouse.

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It all started with some messing/science trying to make bubbles from washing up liquid and seeing what components are needed for a good bubble. Then trying to replicate what the commercial machines can do but build your own. Once we had this almost cracked we worked to scale up the project as we did for street performers event. We learned that children like to stick fingers into every bubble that comes out of the machine, so we came up with solutions for this.

We put it 6 foot off the ground, this was a really amazing experience to see how children and adults are drawn to bubbles.

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Next stage is to take it all apart and redesign it from scratch like every project; rebuild and improve as we go along.

If you want to see the Bubble Birdhouse in action check out the end of this news piece.

Maker Faire Newcastle 2013

TOG went to Newcastle last weekend for Maker Faire UK. We got to see lots of great projects and met many more Hackerspaces. UK Hackspace Foundation did a great job promoting Hackerpaces in UK and Ireland with this GIANT map.

UK Hackspace Foundation

All our projects got a great response from visitors, including the giant Arduino, flashing LEDs, sewable curcuit projects etc.

To our benefit we met loads of people who where willing to swap Ducks for schwag. First swap was with Knitic.com, for our logo done up with their automated knitting machine.

Update: Made a mistake this was very kindly made by Sally Bitmap Machine Knitting check out website, very nice people and really very good machine www.kentfield.co.uk Over the weekend they used a hand scanner to get children to scan in their designs and print. Our design was from bitmap.

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