Category: News

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Robot Challenge

Last weekend members of TOG headed off to Vienna, Austria for the Robot Challenge competition. This is the world’s biggest competition for self-made, autonomous, and mobile robots. There where over  600 robots from all over the world are registered for the competition.

A group of  eight left Ireland for the event, three from TOG and the rest from the Irish Robotics Club. With us we had 2 mini sumo and 3 line followers.

TOG enter a robot in the Linefollower category , named TOG BOT. There was stiff competition on the day. It turns out that the TOG BOT was very under powered. It was just too slow moving, coming in at 53rd out of 139. It was a great experience building the robot for all involved. We learned a great deal about robots. Hopeful we will be back next year with a better robot.

It was not all bad on the Irish front, robots from the Irish Robotics Club, did very well wining three rounds of the Mini Sumo competition and came 18th out of 139 in the Line follower. Congratulations to all involved.

For more photos check out our new gallery.http://gallery.tog.ie/v/2010_robotchallenge/

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Hackerspaces Talks

Over the past two weeks member’s of TOG have been giving talks on creating Hackerspaces around Ireland .

On the Saturday February 27th , members from TOG gave a talk to Skynet in University of Limerick.The talk was part of  day of talks orgained by Skynet and Ubuntu-ie.

On Wednesday 10th of March , a member gave a talk on Hackerspaces in general and TOG in Dublin City University. This talk was part of a week long series of events called techweek.

The notes from the UL talk are available  here.

The sides from the DCU talk are available here.

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Electronics Workshop with Mitch Altman and Jimmie P Rodgers

TOG in association with the Irish Robotics Club will be hosting an Electronics Workshop by Mitch Altman and Jimmie P Rodgers in the Science Galley on the 23rd of March.  Mitch Altman is a San Francisco-based hacker and inventor, best known for inventing TV-B-Gone remote controls, a keychain that turns off TVs in public places. Also Mitch is a co-founder of Noisebridge hackerspace. Mitch travels all over the world sharing his knowledge and love of microcontrollers and soldering. Some of you might not know this, but on a trip to 25c3 some of the founding members of TOG learned to solder for the first time with Mitch’s help. It was this trip that gave the spark to start TOG. If you look closely at the image on the right you might recognise some of them.

Workshop Description:

This will be a hands on workshop expert instruction by Mitch Altman and Jimmie P Rodgers in Soldering. There will be plenty of cool kits available to build (and take home) on the night.

including:

  • TV-B-Gone (turn off TVs in public places!)
  • Brain Machine (Meditate, Hallucinate, and Trip Out!)
  • LEDcube (cool cube of blinky lights!)
  • Mignonette Game (play fun games!)
  • Trippy RGB Waves (interactive colored blinky lights!)
  • MiniPOV (more cool blinky lights!)
  • MintyBoost (charge your USB enabled gadgets!)
  • and for the more advanced: Microcontroller programmers, Arduino clones and more.

Cost


Instruction is free.
There is a materials fee for this workshop.

€20

Tickets are now Sold Out.

Tickets are available via the Science Galley website

http://sciencegallery.com/events/2010/03/electronics-workshop-mitch-altman-and-jimmie-p-rodgers

When:

Tuesday 23rd of March.
18:00 – 21:00.

Where:

In the Science Gallery,Trinity College Dublin, Pearse Street, Dublin 2

See map.

No electronics skills required. Workshop open to ALL.


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Hackerspaces on the rise in Ireland

Ireland now has two active hackerspaces and it has only been a year since the founding of it’s first. There are planed hackerspaces spring up all over the country. Cork, Limerick and Ennis are set to be home for the next wave hackerspaces in Ireland. Also it looks like Northern Ireland might be home its its first space soon.

Some of the members of TOG will be giving a talk in UL , entitled  “So you want to build a Hackerspace” on Saturday 27 of February.

*Edit. It now looks like Galway will have a hackerspace soon. Its called 091labs. We wish them the best of luck in getting a space soon.*

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Engineers Week Roundup

Wow! What a week in TOG. For Engineers Week we ran nine events over seven days. Throughout the week we had sixty nine people attending talks and workshops covering radio , pcb’s, arduino , robots and soldering . It has been a great success for all involved, for many participants it was their first time visiting TOG, many found the talks and workshops a great avenue to furthering their interests. Visitors were encouraged by the ethos of the hackerspace and enjoyed the “hack to learn” aspect of the community.

Throughout the coming year TOG will be continuing to host a number of events to foster innovation in science, technology, modern culture and creative arts.