I can not express how hard it is to keep trying to improve the area a little every week, mange the budget, spend my own money and bend backwards to save money for good quality tools, waste so much of my time helping others, and then? This how we get repaid for the hard work?
By the way there where another 3 calipers in the drawer, what a coincidence that the missing one is the good quality brand new one!
You could have stolen the box and the cover too, this way at least you could take good care of it!
On a related note: the identical mini CNC set have also vanished since maybe a week ago, checked the electronics drawers, 3d printing, big CNC drawer, lathe area - the ones in a blue mitutoyo sleeve
Not impossible that somebody has been doing something weird with calipers and leaving them somewhere in the space, but we’re missing about £100 worth of calipers now if they don’t show up
Wrt CCTV I can see the sense in wanting a longer discussion than what was possible with only a few minutes of the meeting left
With the doors as they are currently nothing really stops someone walking in and if they have a vague idea of what is worth money, walking off with something. Like the expensive sewing machine. I’m not sure CCTV will do all that much.
I saw what I now think was them in the wood shop yesterday. Didn’t realise at the time - I would have returned them if I’d known they were the metal shops.
We already have an authentication system for “locking” machines, couldn’t we just connect that up to a locked tool chest for some of the more at-risk stuff?
Tap in with tool control to say it was you that opened it and agree to:
Check nothing is obviously missing
Return anything you took
And then tap out when you return it
It won’t stop a dedicated thief, but not much will stop a dedicated thief with time on their hands, however it would create an timed audit log of who last used something likely to go AWOL and when.
For the purpose of exploring the topic, if members were to debate this and decide in favour of it, there are 3 big considerations:
Currently our policy is that CCTV can only be accessed by directors and every instance must be documented. It feels like this could become a lot of work for someone, or we’d need to create a new CCTV controller role who can be delegated this task.
How would it feel for people to work in a space under CCTV coverage most of the time, and where do we draw the line using it for every small item that goes missing? What does it feel like to have a conversation where someone is saying they saw you take something on CCTV, when that could be a perfectly innocuous incident.
The cost of CCTV cameras suitable for this task is not particularly cheap on a Makerspace level, we’d likely want to install a 360º camera to cover the majority of an area, they RRP for £395 each. If we put one in every major space that’d be 5 of them £1,970 + a few conventional ones to fill the gaps. This would still leave massive gaps where we can’t see whats in the draws before and after.
The system I specified last year should be more than capable of handling all these additional cameras and more but I think we have to ask ourselves if this is the kind of space we want to be in where a couple of missing tools requires a CCTV manhunt.
We’ve been talking about building some smart lockers for tools, and I wonder if we should push that forward instead, as it would allow us to have a log of who’s fob opened the locker or draw, and then techs could talk to those people and see if they remember what happened.
This is far less invasive than CCTV for this application, and feels more proportionate.
The existing tool control system we have could probably do this, and I’m working with Kyle on trying to replace the card reader for Arch 2 with something totally different using off the shelf access control hardware, and if approved by the directors, theres no reason this couldn’t be expanded to provide access to small cupboards and draws linked to the permissions in the membership system.
Going beyond this, another approach we might consider is putting access control onto the doors into certain areas, this isn’t possible for metal as it’s currently designed, but could be an option for textiles and screen printing as this was originally part of the Arch 1 design to close off areas with access control as needed.
would it be the nice one by the mini CNC mills dear sir , if not I shall have a dig around tomorrow morning , dont lose faith. Brian D=