The Dublin Hackerspace
Dublin Maker is hosting a festive gift exchange for makers of all kinds! Building on the success of the 2023 Maker Secret Santa, we are bringing it back for 2025!
We loved taking part in the last Secret Santa. You can read about it here.
Find all the details here -> https://dublinmaker.ie/Santa/
When you think of fairgrounds or arcades, you often picture the classic “hammer strength” game – swing a mallet, ring the bell, prove your power. For Dublin Maker this year, I wanted to flip that idea on its head – literally. Instead of smashing something down, players pull upwards against a resistance. That’s how the Reverse Hammer Machine was born.
It’s part carnival attraction, part engineering challenge, and part community experiment in building something a little quirky, a little geeky, and a lot of fun.
The idea was simple:
Rather than brute force through a mallet, the machine measures grip and pull strength. It’s surprising how competitive people get once the numbers are up in lights!
The machine looks like a cross between a fairground attraction and a maker project gone wild. Here’s what’s inside:
Players grab the rope, pull upwards, and watch their strength measured in real time. The numbers shoot up on screen while the LED strip glows higher and brighter – instant feedback, instant bragging rights.
I built the frame tall and sturdy, with enough presence to attract attention across the room. The whiteboard-style front not only holds the LED strip but also doubles as a canvas for signatures and doodles from players.
For more photos of the build, check out our gallery.
Some key features of the build:
The artwork – a cheerful duck in a top hat – was added to keep things light-hearted and tie in with the playful Dublin Maker spirit.
The Reverse Hammer Machine made its public debut at Dublin Maker, where visitors of all ages lined up to test their pulling power.
As with any maker project, there were a few quirks and challenges along the way:
By the end of the day, the board was covered in names, the LED strip had seen plenty of action, and the duck mascot had overseen countless strength contests.
The whole point of Dublin Maker is to share creativity, curiosity, and the joy of making. The Reverse Hammer Machine isn’t just about strength – it’s about turning an idea into something physical that makes people smile.
It blends hardware hacking, coding, design, and a touch of carnival silliness into one interactive exhibit. Best of all, it gets people talking, laughing, and competing in the spirit of fun.
I’d love to refine the project further:
The great thing about projects like this is they never really finish – there’s always another upgrade waiting to happen.
The Reverse Hammer Machine shows what can happen when you take a familiar idea and twist it. By hacking together a Bluetooth crane scale, some microcontrollers, and a splash of creativity, you end up with something that feels both retro and futuristic.
It’s a reminder that engineering doesn’t have to be serious – sometimes the best projects are the ones that make people grin.
Dublin Maker is back! 🎉 This year it’s taking place at Leopardstown Racecourse on Saturday 30th & Sunday 31st of August 2025, running from 10 am to 6 pm on Saturday and 10 am to 5 pm on Sunday. Best of all – it’s completely free to attend.
Tog Hackerspace is delighted to be both a community sponsor of the festival and to have our own stand packed with projects from our members. We’ll be showcasing everything from interactive carnival-style games you can try out to amateur radio demos, and plenty more hands-on creations from our makers. It’s the perfect chance to see what our community has been up to and maybe even get inspired to make something yourself.
We’re also bringing a special edition of our Repair Café to Dublin Maker on Sunday, 31st of August, from 10:30 am to 1 pm in collaboration with Creatie Spark.
Do you have broken items at home – clothes, small appliances, toys, electronics?
No need to throw them away!
Bring them along and our team of skilled volunteers will help you fix them. We’ll have tools, materials, and plenty of expertise on hand. Together we can give your items a new lease of life, save you money, and keep waste out of landfill.
At our Repair Café you can:
If we can’t fix your item on the day, we’ll do our best to advise you on sourcing spare parts or the best recycling options.
Dublin Maker is always a highlight of the year – a huge celebration of creativity, invention, and making. We’re thrilled to be part of it again and can’t wait to meet you at our stand or at the Repair Café.
👉 Mark the dates in your calendar: Saturday 30th & Sunday 31st August, Leopardstown Racecourse.
See you there!
No need to throw them away!
Save your things from the landfill and your wallet from having to replace them.
Bring them to our repair café and learn how to fix them together with our volunteers. We have tools, materials, space to work on your item, and repair experts who will help you with your repair.
We have a special edition of our repair cafe that will take place at this year’s Dublin Maker.
Dublin Maker is a free to attend, community run event, which will be held on Saturday August 31st & Sunday September 1st 2024 in Richmond Barracks from 10 am until 6 pm.
Dublin Maker takes the form of a “show and tell” experience where inventors/makers sourced through an open call, will have an opportunity to showcase their creations at individual booths in a carnival atmosphere.
Makers range from tech enthusiasts to crafters, educators, tinkerers, hobbyists, engineers, artists, science clubs, students, authors and commercial exhibitors. They are of all ages and backgrounds, coming from all over Ireland and beyond.
Our Repair Cafe takes place on Sunday, the 1st of September from 10:30 – 13:00 at Richmond Barracks.
Continue reading “Repair Cafe At Dublin Maker”
Each year the Dublin Maker festival comes around and our members Jeffrey Roe and Christian Kortenhorst want to take part. They have been to many maker festivals and collaborated over the years.
Christian likes to make big things with tools and Jeffrey likes to make things with technology and electronics. They tend to come together on their love of interactive games. While wandering around EMF camp last year they came across the work of We Throw Switches and their flux game
The goals of the project:
Eary on, it came clear we would be using arcade style buttons, and addressable LEDs to meet the project deadline of only a few weeks.
Christian got started working on the box. He create an LED display that was 4 by 6 “pixels”. Each pixel would be made up of 4 addressable LEDs. Two stripes of 50 LEDs would be used and due to the wiring layout, some would be hiddle and just covered in tape.
Doubts started to come to the project team. Would these LEDs work in direct sunlight? Remember the goal is to use the game in an outdoor daytime festival. Christian came up with the idea to paint everything white and Jeffrey said let’s bump up the current to make the LEDs brighter.
Now for the brain of the game. Jeffrey started out with the idea of using the USB controller that comes with buttons. How hard could it be to use a Raspberry Pi Pico and a USB host library?
It turns out that with Jeffrey on the team running Dublin Maker there is not enough time to learn new things for projects. We quickly switched back to using the reliable and known Arduino. In order to make the game responsive all eight buttons would be required to have their own hardware interrupt.
He started to use an GPIO expainder over I2C. This device allows for lots of interrupts. We started to build out a little board that would take the connector from the buttons and power the LEDs strips. The video below shows testing an interrupt to turn on the LED in the button when the button is pressed.
The code started to come together with a few late-night sessions but the interrupts didn’t seem to work as expected. Due to the way, the buttons are wired, the LED and the button share a pin and it’s only controlled by three pins. This causes the interrupts not to trigger when the LED is turned on.
Unfortunately, we did not meet the deadline of the event and never fixed the problem before the Dublin Maker event. We coded up a bit of a demo on the LED display but was not interactive.
The project did not end there. Another big public event was only a few weeks with Dublin Comic Con Summer edition. During a few late-night coding sessions, Jeffrey came up with a new way to check the inputs of the buttons without using hardware interrupts but still be reactive. The code just checks the status of the expected two buttons to be pressed over and over so there is little delay.
The game was unleashed to the visitors of comic con, it was a hit. People loved playing it once they got going. We did kind of miss the other goal of making the game portable as it ended up a little big.
You can check out more f the photos from the build in our gallery.
No need to throw them away!
Save your things from the landfill and your wallet from having to replace them.
Bring them to our repair café and learn how to fix them together with our volunteers. We have tools, materials, space to work on your item, and repair experts who will help you with your repair.
We are bringing the repair cafe to this year’s Dublin Maker. There will be 50 makers will taking over a tented village of invention. From traditional Aran jumper-making, to AI racing robots, we have everything to keep robots warm and content, but also lots for humans.
The event gives you the chance to speak to makers who have created everything from wooden sculptures to lightweight jewellery, from 3D-printed cosplay props to giving coffee pods a second life as hand-crafted jewellery.
We will be showcasing a mix of our projects and also a repair café. So don’t come empty-handed to the festival on the 23rd of July in Merrion Square.
Where? – Dublin Maker, Merrion Square Dublin 2
When? – Satruday July 23rd, 10 am – 6 pm
Admission free – all are welcome!
If you would like to be a fixer, drop us an email.