April Hackathon Some Results

It was a good hackathon even with a lot of our members going to ossbarcamp on Saturday. Cheryl made some some significant progress on her led matrix top; namit got some sleep 😉 ; I made up a load of electroluminescent wire and started playing around with some ideas for the MAKE/MakerBot 3D printer giveaway!.

We also had some visitors including John who came along with his college friends from Leed’s (who were over for the Trinity Ball), and then decided to spend the day in TOG instead of going on a nice trip to Howth.

Thanks to all that took part and lets hope next month will be even bigger and better.

April Hackathon

Come one, come all, to another Synchronous Hackathon at TOG this weekend!

Yes, it is also the OSSBarcamp this Saturday, so many of our members will only be around Sunday, but that just means more elbow room for the rest of us. Time to get out those space-hungry projects! I for one will be around with metres of fabric, handfuls of LEDs, and trying to put together an infrared controller. (There is a hope of having a go at making some paper, but that will depend on whether I can get the supplies together between now and then. Bring any old paper you want rid of just in case.) Others will be working on getting thin clients working, and playing with some new toys. (Ominious, no?)

You can see the kinds of things we normally get up to in previous posts: February, March, and St. Patrick’s. Anything and everything goes, whether you want to work or just look around and show off.
Officially it’s noon to 11pm both days, but we’re a very relaxed bunch of people. More information and details on location available on the blog.

Updating the FAQ Page

Our old Frequently Asked Questions page has needed a good clean up for a while now. So read through the new questions and answers in the rest of this blog post. Let us know if we’ve missed anything or need to clarify some of the answers by posting a comment.

2010-04-22 All the changes have now been incorporated in to the main FAQ page.

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/

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.