Category: Repair

We are delighted to be bringing our Repair Café back to Stoneybatter Festival this June.

Tog Hackerspace will be joining the 10th Stoneybatter Festival with a community Repair Café, giving people a chance to bring along broken household items and work with our volunteers to see if they can be fixed.

Do you have broken items at home, small appliances, toys, electronics, household bits and pieces, or something that just needs a bit of care?

No need to throw them away just yet. Bring them along, and our volunteer fixers will do their best to help. We will have tools, materials, and a team of people who enjoy opening things up, figuring out what went wrong, and sharing repair skills along the way.

Key Info

What: Repair Café at Stoneybatter Festival
When: Saturday, 20 June 2026, 2 pm – 6 pm
Where: Aughrim Street Scout Group, Dublin 7
Tickets: Free, booking via Eventbrite
Book here: https://www.eventbrite.ie/e/repair-cafe-stoneybatter-festival-by-tog-hackerspace-tickets-1989820913918

What can you bring?

You can bring along small broken items such as:

• Small electrical appliances
• Electronics
• Toys
• Lamps
• Household items
• Other bits and pieces that might be repairable

Safety testing for electrical items will be available.

Please note that we may not be able to fix everything on the day, but we will do our best to diagnose the issue, suggest next steps, or point you towards parts or recycling options where needed.

What is a Repair Café?

A Repair Café is a community event where people bring broken items and work with skilled volunteers to try to repair them. It is about keeping useful things out of landfill, saving money, learning practical skills, and having a bit of fun along the way.

At a Repair Café, you can:

• Learn how things work
• Pick up practical repair tips
• Meet people interested in sustainability and making
• Give your broken items a second chance

Stoneybatter Festival is a brilliant celebration of local community, culture, creativity, food, music, and sustainability. We are very happy to be part of it again and to bring some repair energy to the weekend.

So dig out those broken treasures and join us in Stoneybatter on Saturday, 20 June. Let’s see what we can fix together.

This June Bank Holiday weekend, Tog Hackerspace will be heading to Bord Bia Bloom in the Phoenix Park.

Bloom is always a lovely mix of gardens, food, flowers, sustainability, and community ideas. This year, we are delighted to be taking part in the conversation around circular communities in Ireland.

Our own Jeffrey Roe will be joining Eibhlin Fitzpatrick of Circular.ie and other familiar faces from Ireland’s circular economy and community space for a panel discussion on the Sustainable Living Stage.

The panel takes place at:

12:45pm
Monday 1st June
Sustainable Living Stage
Bord Bia Bloom, Phoenix Park, Dublin

At Tog, we spend a lot of time thinking about how people can learn practical skills, share tools, repair broken things, and keep useful items in circulation for longer. From our regular Repair Cafés to electronics nights, workshops, and community projects, we see first-hand how much can happen when people have access to a friendly space, a bit of knowledge, and someone willing to say, “Let’s have a look inside.”

Circular communities are not just about recycling at the end of an item’s life. They are about building local confidence, sharing skills, reducing waste, and helping people feel that they can understand, maintain, and repair the things around them.

We are looking forward to bringing a little bit of the hackerspace spirit to Bloom, among the gardens, flowers, and sustainability conversations.

If you are visiting Bloom on the June Bank Holiday Monday, do drop by the Sustainable Living Stage and say hello. We will probably be talking about fixing things, hackerspaces, and why we all seem to own far too many mystery cables.

You can find out more about sustainability at Bloom here:
https://www.bordbiabloom.com/sustainability-at-bloom/

Not every evening in Tog involves waking up a piece of 1980s Eastern Bloc computing, but that is exactly what happened over a few nights recently.

Our member Eduard Garanskij brought in a retro CRT terminal, a Mera CM 7209, also known as the MERA 7953 Z. It is a computer terminal rather than a full computer, the sort of screen and keyboard setup that would have connected to larger systems. The CM 7209 name was used for the international market, while MERA 7953 was the Polish domestic name. These terminals were made in the 1980s by Mera-Elzab in Zabrze, Poland. Read more on Wikipedia.

Mera-Elzab was part of Poland’s computing industry and produced terminals, monitors and computers. In the 1980s it was counted among Poland’s major industrial enterprises and exporters. Mera-Elzab also produced the Meritum computer family.

The CM 7209 was designed to work with systems such as SM-series computers and PDP-11-compatible machines. It is functionally close to a DEC VT52-style terminal, showing rows of green text on a CRT display. That gives it a lovely place in computer history, somewhere between mainframe rooms, minicomputers and the world before personal computers became common. You can fall down that rabbit hole with PDP-11 and VT52.

Of course, “new retro computer” usually means “new set of problems to solve”. The terminal still needs more work, but the first job was to find out if the CRT was alive. With help from Ambrose, Garry and Roman, Eduard opened it up, checked around the boards, traced signals and carefully brought it back to the point where the screen lit up.

And then, the magic moment: green glow.

It is hard to explain to normal people why a screen full of messy green lines can make a room full of hackers happy, but it does. It means there is life in there. It means the tube is working. It means the next stage of the repair can begin.

A nice bonus discovery was inside the machine: some of the chips were stamped Made in Ireland. There is something lovely and strange about that. A Polish terminal, from the Eastern Bloc era, designed to talk to Soviet-compatible computer systems, now sitting on a bench in a Dublin hackerspace, with Irish-made silicon inside it. We talk a lot about living in a connected world, but apparently, the connected world was already there. It just weighed more and had a CRT.

Eduard also noted that similar Mera CM 7209 terminals have appeared in photos connected with Pripyat and Chornobyl-era sites, which adds another layer of Cold War computing history to the story. We will leave the full Chornobyl rabbit hole for another night, but it is a reminder that these machines were not just office furniture. They were part of real industrial and scientific systems.

The terminal is not fully fixed yet, but that is part of the fun. Retro repair is rarely one clean “before and after” moment. It is usually a few evenings of poking, testing, asking someone across the room to have a look, and celebrating each tiny bit of progress.

Huge thanks to Eduard for bringing it in and sharing the story, and to Ambrose, Garry and Roman for helping to light up the screen.

If you are into retro computing, electronics repair, old keyboards, mystery connectors or the warm green glow of a CRT, drop into one of our open nights. You never know what will arrive on the bench next.

Safety note: CRTs can hold dangerous voltages, even when unplugged. This is one for careful repair with people who know what they are doing.