/////// OSHUG #6, At Home ////////
(Tacticalendar, Denkimono Clock)
18th Nov 2010, 18:00 - 20:00 at London Hackspace, Unit 24, Cremer Business
Centre, 37 Cremer Street, London, E2 8HD, UK (51.530746, -0.076218)
http://oshug.org/event/6
Open source hardware is not just about catering for niche applications and
marginal use cases and many projects are concerned with creating devices for
everyday use. For the sixth OSHUG meeting we'll have presentations on two
projects targeted at the home and one that doesn't even involve electricity.
! Please note that this meeting will be hosted at the London Hackspace !
** Tacticalendar
Tacticalendar is an open design project for a timeless 4-week-ahead rolling
planner. New versions are managed through a github issue-tracker, laser cut
from plywood and acrylic, articulated with duct tape, offered at a discount
to release candidate testers and finally shared with premium customers. A
continually evolving product, it is the first to market from the
Enigmaker.org open prototyping experiment - a two-month project to prototype
an invention every week in the public domain. Patent protection has been
rejected in favour of a share-alike design and an open innovation community.
Near-term feature testing includes Google Calendar synchronization using
machine-vision and augmented-reality techniques.
Cefn Hoile sculpts open source hardware and software, and supports others
doing the same. Drawing on ten years of experience in R&D for a
multinational technology company, he works as a public domain inventor
through Enigmaker.org, and an innovation catalyst and architect of bespoke
digital installations and prototypes, working most recently with Tinker.it,
BT, the BBC, EDF, Nokia. Cefn is a founder-member of the
CuriosityCollective.org digital arts group, and a regular contributor to
open source projects and not-for-profits.
** Denkimono Clock
TheDenkimono Clock is a kit to build a countdown timer, fully functional
alarm clock and stopwatch, that is not only fun to build but that also
provides a practical device for everyday use. This talk will cover the
initial design and build as a personal hobby project, to its redesign as a
commercial kit and the associated sales, marketing and after-sales service.
Initial concerns over open sourcing and how these turned out to be unfounded
will also be covered.
Mark Longstaff-Tyrrell trained as an electronics engineer and was seduced by
the money and glamour of software and began his career writing code for
fruit machines in a shed in Wolverhampton. He subsequently progressed to
developing for mobile handsets with extendible aerials in the late 90s, and
then for stylus driven PDAs and currently develops software for Android
devices.
** Lightning Talks
Take the stage for five minutes and tell us all about your open hardware
home hacks!
For links to more information and to register: http://oshug.org/event/6
--
Andrew Back
mailto:andrew@osmosoft.com
http://carrierdetect.com
Event #5 — Radio (HPSDR)
On the 21st Oct 2010, 18:00 - 20:00 at Osmosoft, 1a Broadway Street, London,
SW1H 0AY, UK (51.498325, -0.134347)
Registration: http://oshugradio.eventbrite.com/
Event page: http://oshug.org/event/5
Radio spectrum is a finite resource and it should therefore come as no
surprise that radio systems are a particularly hot area of research. Whilst
ever more advanced schemes for modulation, digital encoding and spectrum
access promise increased efficiency, step upgrades more often than not
require new hardware. As has been evidenced in the evolution of mobile
telephony from analogue to GSM and 2.5G (GPRS) to 3G, and similarly in the
evolution of wireless computer networks. A disruptive development in radio
technology promises to change this and to bring an unprecedented flexibility
to radio systems, and one similar to that which programming brought to the
task of machine computation. Despite, or perhaps due to being at the cutting
edge there are a number of open source hardware projects concerned with
developing software-defined radio (SDR) technology. As with the earliest
developments in radio systems radio amateurs are once again at the
forefront, and at this month's meeting we will have a presentation on the
comprehensive HPSDR platform.
// HPSDR - High Performance Software Defined Radio //
HPSDR is an open source (GNU type) hardware and software project intended as
the "next generation" software-defined radio for radio amateurs and
shortwave listeners. It is being developed by a group of software-defined
radio enthusiasts around the world, and in a modular hardware fashion to
help promote experimentation by both hardware and software developers.
John Melton has held an amateur radio license since 1984 when he was first
licensed as N6LYT while living and working in California, and he was
assigned the UK callsign of G0ORX on moving back to the UK. He became
interested in developing open source software in 1990 with the launch of
AMSAT Oscar 16, an amateur radio satellite with a store and forward
messaging payload. He developed an open source software package to
communicate with the satellite that ran on Linux (pre 1.0) and subsequently
wrote an open source fully automated satellite ground station software
package in Java. John has been a software engineer since 1970 when he was
employed by Burroughs Corporation, and for the last 14 years he has worked
for Sun Microsystems who were acquired by Oracle this year.
// Open Discussion - Ideas for Future Meetings //
Themes, speakers, venues - it's all up for grabs! Have your say and help
shape future OSHUG meetings. Offer to present, suggest a speaker or sit
quietly until it's time to cross the road to the pub...
Registration: http://oshugradio.eventbrite.com/
Regards,
Andrew
--
Andrew Back
mailto:andrew@osmosoft.com
http://carrierdetect.com
