Dublin is to host its own Mini Maker Faire on the 14th July 2012 in the Science Gallery. A maker faire is a family-friendly showcase of invention, creativity and resourcefulness, and a celebration of the Maker movement.  It’s a place where people show what they are making, and share what they are learning.

Makers range from tech enthusiasts to crafters, educators, tinkerers, hobbyists, engineers, artists, science clubs, students, authors, and commercial exhibitors. They are of all ages and backgrounds. Maker Faire’s mission is to entertain, inform, connect and inspire these thousands of Makers and aspiring Makers.

The open call for Projects which closes on the 15th of March. I’m on the organising committee and would love to see some robotics projects be part of the event. Your project/product/idea/performance/workshop does not need to be finished at the moment, you just need to be confident it will be ready by July 14th.  You can Submit your idea here

Science Hack Day Dublin will be taking place on March 3rd-4th 2012 in "The Hub" DCU. It is an all-day-all-night (36 hour) event that brings scientists, engineers, computer scientists and designers together to find solutions (hacks) to real-life problems and questions during a brief but intense period of collaboration. Starts at 9am Saturday, ends 6pm Sunday, with Hacking/sleeping overnight in the venue (optional).

I (David) am on the organising committee for this and I think it is going to be really great, we opened registeration last week and have a had a really great response.

Science Hack Days have become an international trend successfully bringing science and technology together by providing a platform for different types of creative and inquisitive minds to collaborate in the same physical space on focused tasks.Dublin will be the 6th city in the world to run a Science Hack Day after London, San Francisco, Mexico City. Cincinnati and Cape Town with another 24 planned to run throughout 2012.

Science Hack Day is for anyone with an interest in bringing science and technology together. If you’re a coder, designer, scientist, hacker, statistician or simply an enthusiastic person with good ideas, Science Hack Day is for you.

All the details are on the Science Hack Day Dublin Website

Hope to see you there!

The UCD Robotics Group is holding the first UCD Robotics Open Day on February 9th 2012. They are opening their labs and robots to students from schools and universities. There will be lab tours, hands-on demonstrations and invited talks featuring robotics researchers from all over Ireland.

Details about the talks and demostrations can be found here

The Irish FIRST LEGO League (FLL) be will held on Saturday 21st of February in the Radision hotel Galway. FLL is an international program for children ages 9-16. It combines a hands-on, interactive robotics program and a research presentation with a sports-like atmosphere. Teams consist of up to 10 members and focus on team building, problem solving, creativity, and analytical thinking. National winners go on to compete at European and World championships.

There is also be a 3rd level mini-sumo competition with robots being entered from Trinity College, GMIT and UCD.

It has been a while since I last ran a Make Night, but the Christmas Jumper one is great!

Make Nights are returning to the Science Gallery 30th of November (6pm-8pm). Relaxed making will once again be the order of the day. Make Nights are about making anything you want at all in a friendly atmosphere, but since it is Christmas Season (well almost!) this extra special event is about making Christmas jumpers.

Yes think Bridget Jones Diary. Just bring a jumper and will we provide the materials to make it festive! We will have red ribbons, fake snow, holly etc ... So bring your creativity and any other "bits and pieces" you have to create an unique Christmas jumper which will wow your existing friends and win you new better friends.

As always Make Nights are open to all and is admission is Free.

The Irish Robotics Club will be holding a class on microcontroller programming using the popular Arduino board in the Science Gallery on 14.08.2011

What’s an Arduino?

Arduino is an open-source electronics prototyping platform based on flexible, easy-to-use hardware and software. It's intended for artists, designers, hobbyists, and anyone interested in creating interactive objects or environment.

What you’ll learn

• Familiarisation with the Arduino programming environment
• How to read digital and Analogue inputs
• Digital and Analogue outputs
• Set up a communication port between the Arduino and an laptop

We’ll be blinking more LEDs than you could possibly ever want!

At the end of the class we will put all the skills together to make a simple breathalyser using an alcohol sensor.

What You’ll need

A laptop with the Arduino IDE installed from here 

We’ll give you a lend of an Arduino board for the class or you can bring your own. You’ll get to keep the alcohol sensor circuit at the end.

No previous electronics experience or programming experience is required.

Arduino boards will be available to buy in Science Gallery shop after the workshop if you wish to do so.

Workshop length 3-4 hours approx. 

Tickets (10 Euro) are available from the Science Gallery Website 

The theme last month for me has been workshops, more precisely arduino workshops. Firstly I ran two Arduino workshops for a new Dublin Skillshare thingy Beth Kocher is trying to set up. Beth rocks, here is some chat about Dublin Skillshare and what happened at the first workshop and some photos from the second workshop. All the new skills learnt were put to use in building an arduino based breathalyzer. The workshop raised 190 euro for the Irish Society for Autism in the process, happy days! I then flew over to St Andrews University for the  SACHI summer school on Multimodal systems for Digitial Toursim  to give a 6 hour arduino workshop there. Great fun again and I enjoyed spending time with a good bunch of clever people. To finish off this season of beginners electronics classes, II hope to do another one in the Science Gallery sometime in August.

Just before all that I was involved in a project with John Beattie an artist in residence at the Irish Museum of Modern Art. It was a fun and hectic project to work on. We created a robot arm out of one of the gallery's lamps and with a pen attached to the end John performed a drawing by controlling the arm remotely. Which might have of been easy if he didn't want to control it from his workshop about 100m outside the gallery. So all sorts video links and wireless communications later (some of which happened to jam my brother's car central locking when testing, sorry!) we where able to pull it off. It was on show from in the process room in IMMA from the 25th of may to the 5th of June. There's a video of it here.

Six members of the Irish Robotics Club are heading to Vienna at the end of the month to compete in Robot Challenge 2011. It's great for the club to continue representing Irish amateur robotics at international competitions. It's going to be great!

We are sending five robots (two more than last year) in five different categories :

• R. O'Bot - Linefollower
• An Droíd - Mini Sumo
• T4 Rover - Mega Sumo
• RPS - Freestyle
• Brice - Lego sumo

A massive thanks to T4.ie for their sponorship of our Mega Sumo and for their support of amateur robotics and technology focused education. There is lots of making, tweeking and testing to do in the coming weeks, so there will be some open making nights (likely held in the Science Gallery) over the next few weeks.

The Irish Robotics Club will be running an Electronics workshop for Engineering Week. It will be held in the Science Gallery on Sunday the 20th of Feb.

We will be making a "Useless Machine"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z86V_ICUCD4

In the workshop you will learn how to solder, modify servo motors and wire up circuit. When you are finished you can take home your useless machine and amaze your friends.

Workshop is open to all and no previous electronics experience is needed.

Tickets are 20 euro to cover the cost of the materails and can be purchased from the Science Gallery Site 

**************SOLD OUT!!*******************************

In other news...

The application period for summer interns in robotics at NASA-Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, is open. You can apply through: https://solar.nasa.gov/web/public/main/

Irish robotics club member pstakem is a mentor for the program. So contact him if you want to ask any questions about the program or applying

Last year, there were 40 students, from US, Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, & Bolivia and they produced a robot rover that is carrying a scientific payload to the Greenland Ice Shelf. Its open internationally so there is no reason we can't have an Irish participants next time around .

It is open to upper-level undergrads, and graduate students.

I'm delighted to announce that the Irish Robotics Club will be holding a linefollower competition on Saturday the 8th of January in the Radison hotel, Galway.
We will be gate crashing the Irish FIRST LEGO League Challenge finals so there will already be a fantastic setup already in place, big screen, MC, the works. Thanks to them and their sponsors SAP for allowing us to join in their great event.

As a club we have entered 2 competitions this year (Vienna, Wroclaw) , but this is the first competition we have run ourselves, so its very exciting and important step for the club. The rules of the line follower event are here. Line follower robots are perhaps the simplest competition robots you can build and there are plenty of resources on the internet to get you started. The competition is open to all, from beginners and robot ninjas.

If you are interested in entering please send your name (and the name of your robot) and contact details to competitions@robots.ie

Entry is free

** EDIT - The super talented Dublin Based Sculptor Robosteel is kindly providing a trophy for the winner, a 30cm transformer made from recycled metal. Things just got interesting! :)

Should look something like this

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QGKCBqI9ukY