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Fix All The Things

socks

If you follow Tog, you’ll know that we’re no stranger to Repair Café. It’s become a bit of an institution around here. We never know whats going to come in our door on the day. We’re probably well into 4 figures in terms of the number of items that we have fixed over the years. Repair Café also embeds a culture of repair in all those who get involved with them.

When is the last time you darned a pair of socks however? This is an easy fix, and probably one that most of us will have the means to do at home. Sadly however, we’re too inclined to just throw our old clothes away. This morning, we read that Ireland consumes more than double the European average of textiles.

These socks, bought on the Aran Island of Inisheer in 2024, were a bit too young and too nice to throw away. So out with the needle and thread, and in no time they’re good to go for another while. Now just need to keep those toenails trimmed!

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High-voltage Vector Display ⚡️🧪

At last night’s Electronics Night in Tog Hackerspace, one of our members brought in a brilliant build: an old oscilloscope CRT tube running at ~750 V (stepped up from 12 V) with a custom deflection circuit.
An ESP32 drives the X/Y plates with ~200 V deflection signals, running a tweaked open-source vector clock. They even used AI to analyse photos of the circuit and suggest fixes—super handy for fast iterations.

What’s next?

  • Build a wooden/perspex case
  • Add a weather display mode 🌦️
  • More vector art experiments

Huge thanks to everyone who dropped by to brainstorm and test. If you’ve a half-finished idea, odd component, or smoky breadboard—bring it along!

📍 Electronics Night: every second Monday, 7pm at Tog Hackerspace
📸 Photos in the comments.

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Postcards

Every week we send a postcard to some hacker or maker space somewhere in the world.

We’ve interacted with many spaces over the years, and it’s a right of passage for our members to visit the local hacker space whenever they visit somewhere new.

Sure you can email, and there’s all manner of instant social media and messaging apps, but where is the fun in that! 

If you’d like a postcard from Dublin, let us know and we’ll add you to our list. Send us a postcard yourself!

TOG, Unit 1B Motor City, Kylemore Road, Dublin 12, D12 CF6V, Ireland.

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Build Your Own Air Quality Sensor – Science Week Workshop

Friday, November 14th, 7:00 pm – 8:30 pm
Tog Hackerspace, Dublin 8
No experience needed — Ages 18+

Air pollution affects many people’s daily lives, not just those living near industrial centres. In Ireland, most official air quality monitoring is carried out using a limited number of government sensors spread across the country. As a result, we often rely on modelling to estimate current pollution levels. This can miss out on local or seasonal sources such as coal fires during winter or short-term event-based pollution.

In this hands-on Science Week workshop, we’ll explore how to measure local air pollution and take part in a global citizen science movement. You’ll build your own particulate matter (PM2.5) sensor system using a simple kit of off-the-shelf components. The device uses consumer-grade hardware to give a reasonable indication of local air quality — not as precise as professional lab equipment, but accurate enough to spot trends and patterns in your community.

The workshop introduces participants to IoT (Internet of Things) devices, data collection, and environmental monitoring. You’ll learn how to assemble the hardware, connect it to the network, and share your data online through the Sensor.Community platform — an open global network of more than 13,000 citizen-built sensors contributing over 10 million data entries worldwide.

By the end of the evening, you’ll have built your own working air quality sensor and joined a growing international community helping to better understand our environment through open data.

Come along, learn something new, and make a real contribution to citizen science this Science Week!

🎟 Tickets available via Eventbrite – €70 per person
This covers the cost of materials and includes a donation to Tog Hackerspace.

https://www.eventbrite.ie/e/build-your-own-air-quality-sensor-science-week-workshop-tickets-1811695402719?aff=oddtdtcreator

This is one of many events happening during Science Week.

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8mm Cine Camera and Projector

Tog recently received a very kind donation of an 8mm movie Ciné camera, projector and other items. We still have all of our dark room equipment in the space, and several TOG members are still keen on film photography.

In the past, we have ran film photography workshops and processed film in the space. These formats are not dead. They still have a small but dedicated following. If film photography including Ciné and instant photography is something that interests you, why not drop in, see what we have, and have a chat with us. 

When we moved into our current space here in Bluebell, one of the very first pictures that we took on the day was an instant photo on an original 1970s vintage Polaroid SX70 camera that’s still working like new!