Charity and Recovery Support, January 2023

COVID-19 caused widespread disruption to many people and businesses.  

As businsses and organisations recover, CodeStep.UK have provided our usual support and our suppliers have worked hard to ensure an uninterrupted service throughout.

Many small organisations and charities have been particularly affected, and as such we are reaching out to local groups to help them as best we can

Charity Support

We are offering free advice and free basic services to any Registered Charity within the Essex, Hertfordshire and Cambridge areas with onsite, face to face support.  For further afield, we are happy to help via a remote meeting session.

Click here for more information

Our quick start guide for micro businesses and traders needing a free solution to get their business online – right now.

We have create a quick guide to get started for fast and for free, see our Fast Start Guide

Need Assistance ? Free help for local businesses

If you need advice please get in touch. 

Whilst we can't help everyone for free - we are currently running a free consultancy service for any Self Employed / Sole Trader / Small Business within Basildon, Harlow, Stansted or Bishops Stortford that needs help getting online fast.

We have limited the free cover to these areas for immediate assistance, however if you are further afield we may still be able to help.

 Quick Contact

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Special Support to those that Support Others

We are offering to help local Registered Charities within the Essex, Herts or Cambridge areas develop, build and host basic services for free to kickstart a new service for your users

We can discuss and develop tailored solutions for any charity that needs to organize, manage or share information with their service users and patients

For more information see our Contact Page or use our Contact Form to get in touch!

Donating whatever we can

We are donating our unused hosting capacity to the Folding @ Home Project (see https://foldingathome.org/ ) to help with the research into fighting disease.  Some of our services may be running a little slower than usual, we hope you don't mind for this period and this should not affect customer services.

As of January 2023 - we are proud to have donated over 7302 work units to the project from our donation of processing cores on our Xeon Datacenters, i7 servers and Nvidia GPU Cores

- our team ranking is 6,842 - within the top 10K globally
- at our peak free capacity - we donated over 20 processor cores and around 2800 Cuda cores - 24 hours a day

our latest donation record can be found by clicking here (opens in a new window)

FoldingAtHome-wus-certificate-242995

We are here - ready to help

Throughout the Covid-19 situation we and our partners have been providing our usual full service.

Whilst there may be delays or complications with on-site and installation services, our remote development, support and maintenance services are not affected.

Donate your PC or GPU to help combat disease

Do you have a gaming PC ?, Do you have a cheap, unused PC ?  You will be surprised what you can do with it!

Simply by running a small program on your PC  you can help researchers across the world in one of the biggest global super-computing efforts yet.

All the credit goes to the amazing guys at Stanford University and the people they work with.  But you can help too!.

Visit https://foldingathome.org/ for more information.

CodeStep.UK team score:  https://stats.foldingathome.org/team/242995

Cloud research, under your nose

Anyone can join in the vast numbers of medical and scientific research collaboration projects online.

Anyone can donate their spare capacity - search around and see who you can help.

Donate your 3D Printer and help print face shields

BBC News published an article (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-52111522) about 3DCrowd.uk - they are crowd-printing parts for NHS face shields.

We're going to try with our very cheap hobby printer - but don't know yet if this will be successful........

Update: 5th April: The time it takes to print these probably makes this unviable on a large scale for any individual printer considering the number that are required.
On a very basic printer, it's about 6 hours per set of brackets!  But, they are potentially viable if someone can test them & produce them on a larger / faster scale?

If someone wants to print small quantities for re-usable use, it could be worth printing locally, attaching some simple clear plastic and a little tape and giving direct to those that need them.

So if you have a 3D Printer - check out https://www.3dcrowd.uk/ and see if you can donate your skills and help print shield brackets!

You can also check out Prusa directly and see their shields....  https://www.prusaprinters.org/prints/25857-prusa-protective-face-shield-rc2

Technical Notes:

The documentation received contained a reference to Prusa printer settings.  In my experience, these are not suitable and produced a very weak end-part.

To make a better (stronger / better looking) part - I changed filament settings to output 1,1x, changed the fill to hexagonal, and tweaked the speeds to match our printer / filaments, which actually reduced print time and gave a better result.   

(Printing more plastic at a fast speed seemed better than less plastic at a slow speed, which wasn't expected!)