[ELECTRON] Equipment in the room

[Alice]

I'm wondering how other hackspaces solve this problem. The one in London
(which is amazing btw and everyone who can should visit if they can. They
have open evenings every Tuesday) has a ton of equipment. I remember there
being a lot of signage. I'll be going along anyway as moving to london for
5 months in September, so I'll find out how they do it and if their system
works. As you said, this is an ongoing problem and we need a longterm
solution.

Another thing I liked there was a rotating 3 week bin system for old bits
of kit etc. The bins are moved steadily downstream and anything left in by
week 3 gets thrown out.
Yes, this again... read on, there's a nice horror story.

On Monday I visited the room to find that someone had been messing
around with the router and the computer. The router wasn't responding
to WiFi requests, on investigation someone had plugged in a cable
between ports 3 and 4 which seems to cause it to fail totally. It's a
fairly old piece of low end kit, while it does the job it's seemingly
easily confused.

Various wires including the network connection had been removed from
the computer.

Perhaps more dangerously someone had changed two of the wires on my 3D
printer. The temperature sensors for the hotend and bed had been
switched. As consequence when heating the extruder the system was
getting a temperature reading for the bed, which was ambient
temperature, and continued to throw more and more power to heat the
hotend. I quickly noted the black smoke, hit the emergency stop and
opened the windows.

The hotend/jhead are unsalvagable, the replacements are an outgoing I
could have done without.

I and other members are growing tired of having to tidy up the room
and/or fix the infrastructure when we arrive so that it's fit for
others to use. We shouldn't have to be doing this. I shouldn't have to
be sending this email. People should expect the equipment to be be in
a safe working state, or at least the state their projects were in on
previous use, given that some items are left in the room in a damaged
state, awaiting repair.

Safety and security are the issues here. There is a lot of equipment
in the room which, if used incorrectly could do some real damage,
either to the equipment or the user, the consequences of using
equipment that has been tampered with are potentially much worse.

If you see someone messing around with something stop them, or at
least raise the issue. If you're hosting an event you are responsible
for your guests.

If you have any questions or would like to discuss these matters
further please let me know.

Thanks

Martin

_______________________________________________
Electron Club Members mailing list

You have received this message because you are a member of the Electron
club 'Members' mailing list. To manage your subscription use the URL below.

http://www.electronclub.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/members
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://www.electronclub.org/pipermail/members/attachments/20140827/3a84c35c/attachment.html>