All are welcome to the TAPlab AGM on 12th June 2017 at 7pm (in the taplab space @Te Atatu Peninsula Community Centre.
If you would like to help shape the coming year please book this in and come along and get involved. All executive positions are up for re-election:
President, Treasurer, Secretary, Committee (~5)
If you would like to put your name forward for one of these positions please contact the secretary (secretary@taplab.nz) if you’d like the opportunity to promote yourself beforehand, or throw your hat into the ring on the night.
Agenda:
1. Receive the minutes of the previous Annual General Meeting and of any other General Meeting held since the last Annual General Meeting.
2. Receive the Executive Committee’s report on the activities of the Society over the last year and the proposed priorities and directions for the Society in the current year.
3. Receive the balance sheet and statement of income and expenditure for the past year and the estimate of income and expenditure for the current year.
4. Elect the officers and other ordinary members of the Executive Committee of the Society (see section 9.1).
5. Appoint an auditor of the Society’s accounts.
6. Conduct any other business which may properly be brought before the meeting
I was in Dunedin recently and Ian and Paul from 
There’s a full-on hoist for working on cars including the project shown in the photo to the right, which is a conversion to from petrol to electric. The electric tuktuk looks just as interesting.
In the same space is a bike workshop where old bikes are fixed up and restored. I’m sure more than one of these discarded bikes were discarded by Otago students leaving at the end of their study. The cool thing about what DSpace is doing is that they’re all now potentially new(-ish) bikes for new Otago students arriving as they begin their studies.
There are some pretty amazing electronics projects going on at DSpace with both Paul and Ian talking about the workshops they run to help people design and then have built their own circuit boards. The SMD rework station and surrounding components show that this space is well-used. Paul has been prototyping circuit boards for robots and kits of various sizes to teach people to solder and about electronics, and is planning to return to China soon to oversee the production of some of his projects.
3D printing is also big at DSpace with the team printing a lot of parts for Prusa Repraps, and in the spirit of Repraps, giving them away to people on the condition that they build a printer then print two copies of the plastic pieces and give them away to pay it forward.
Recently I was travelling through Masterton for work and was lucky enough to be able to call into Fablab Masterton to have a look around with John Hart, one of the founders. This Fablab is working with local schools and community groups to increase people’s experience with making and fabrication, as well as to grow people’s capacity to teach others.
EL wire is pretty cool stuff: when you put alternating current (AC) through it, it lights up like a neon light. 
The trick is that in order to be mobile on the bike, we need to use batteries to power our EL wire (we can’t use mains power!), but batteries provide direct current, not alternating current, so that’s where the inverters come in. Inverters can turn DC into AC, powering the wire. Even cooler, we used inverters that are sound-activated- they light up when there’s a sound and don’t when there’s no sound. Perfect for a disco bike!