On Safer Internet Day, TOG members share some tips on how to stay safe online. Please share this with anyone you think will find it useful.
Last Saturday 4th of February, we held the first AGM of the new Tog Hackerspace company. It has been a long process for us to move legal structure over the course of the last number of years. Our first AGM shows all these process are now in place and our new members get a chance to see how our organisation is run.
We have always had a section in our constitution about how members and the public should interact with each other but we felt a little more was needed. After a lot of internal discussions, we created an additional code to supplement what we have in our constitution. Our members have voted in the new code at our AGM. You can view it on our website. -> code of conduct
We are delighted to Andrew Felle, Ben Field and William McLoughlin being elected to our board of directors. The board handles all legal requirements on behave of our members. We would like to thank our outgoing director Jeffrey Roe for this work over the past year. Our full board of directors is listed before.
Board of Directors
Here are some of the events in TOG over the next 2 weeks:
A few months ago we did a blog post about our variac. It was tripping the circuit breakers on our distribution board and we made some mods to the variac to reduce the inrush current. Our story generated a lot of interest and was picked up by Hackaday. We used a 2 terminal NTC inrush current limiter from Ametherm.
Following our story, the good folks at Ametherm and Rhopoint Components (our local distributor) were in touch with us. They gave us some great technical advice and did some calculations for us. They have a whole range of limiters and it turns out that we had actually chosen quite a good model for our application. They kindly sent us some samples.
There are many ways to soft start a load. We originally thought about adding a series power resistor and a shorting relay. We also had some suggestions around Triac and IGBT solutions. Each of these methods have their merits and can allow fine grained control of switch-on. Unfortunately there was very little room inside the variac case and we didn’t want some kind of external box. So we looked at these relatively simple 2 terminal limiters.
Carefully chosen, these components are an elegant solution. They can probably last the life of the application with no maintenance. Placed in series with the load, they have a relatively high resistance at room temperature which limits the initial inrush current. When current flows through them they self-heat and the resistance falls very quickly, so they have little effect on the normal operating current.
TOG members and Capital Brewers return to TOG HQ this coming Saturday (4th February). Hearty brews are on the menu, in both brewing with guidance and instructions from the experts, and tasting craft beer made at previous brew days!
A very rough time-line of a brew day is as follows (a little earlier than usual to be finished before AGM):
Every brew day is slightly different with a mix of brewers, recipes and techniques. The long term goal would be to get a full set of brewing equipment that TOG members can use themselves at the space and make your own beer, cider or wine whenever you like! All you need are the ingredients. We are already well on our way to achieving that goal with several sets of equipment for members to choose from.
Brewing Equipment in TOG
Its always a fun and engaging day, the cost is free (donations are welcome) so come along, ask questions and even help with the brewing!
We have been improving our workshop a lot lately. Check out some of the work below.
We have found a new home for our air compressor and mounted it on our metal shelves. We also mounted a air hose reel. It makes using air tools in our workshop very easy.
Label all the things. If you have a lot of stuff, soon you find yourself in a situation where you can’t find anythings. We have done a big sorting job of our stuff. So now most things have their own box.
We have long things like pipes hat need to be put somewhere but they don’t fit in our current wood storage area. Long things now have their own area . aka Long things storage.
Drop by our upcoming Birthday Party to see a host of changes we have made to the space since our opening last year.