Hello,
The next OSHUG meeting will be on Thursday 31st May. Details and
registration link below.
Regards,
Andrew
//
OSHUG #19 — Kits (Homesense, Quick2Wire)
31st May 2012, 18:00 - 20:00 at Centre for Creative Collaboration, 16
Acton Street, London, WC1X 9NG, [map] (51.529049, -0.116436)
Sponsored by DesignSpark: http://www.designspark.com/
— Registration: http://oshug.org/event/19
For those that are new to hardware development it can prove a daunting
prospect, and kits that address the needs of those with little or no
experience in this area have a vital role to play. At the nineteenth
OSHUG meeting we will be hearing about two such kits, one that was
designed to support user-led smart home innovation and that was based
around the Arduino platform, and an experimenters kit for the
Raspberry Pi that is currently in development.
- The Homesense Project
The Homesense project was a European user-led, smart-home development
project employing open source hardware. The project was led by Tinker
London and EDF and engaged households supported by local experts in
the design and development of smart home concepts.
The project was developed as a reaction to top-down design approaches
commonly observed in technological development and home building. Most
early research viewed smart homes as a single complex system that is
designed and constructed from the ground up, and assumes that most
aspects (physical building, digital infrastructure, furniture,
appliances) are under the control of a single smart-home developer.
(Kortuem et al. 2010)
In the contrasting reality however of multi-vendor development and
retrofitting this is rarely the case. Inspired also by an argument
that smart homes are developed by experts in a top down approach
subsequently living with a smart home is acknowledged to be
problematic to non-experts who lack control over respective
technologies.
The Homesense project was therefore designed to enable user-led
innovation within the home environment, building alongside existing
environmental and social conditions allowing end-users to address
their own concerns in their physical and ‘lived in’ space. Homesense
sought to bring the open collaboration methods of online communities
to physical infrastructures in the home. Designing a toolkit to
support this approach is explored as a topic of this presentation.
Natasha Carolan is a PhD student at HighWire Doctoral Training Centre,
Lancaster University where her research considers commodification of
design and production processes in the digital economy. A product
designer by background, her research explores open and user
innovation, service design and value co-creation in areas of NPD and
manufacturing. Natasha co-designed the Homesense toolkit by situating
the toolkit as a cultural probe a strategy that Natasha believes is
important in placing open source hardware in a democratic system as a
tool for learning and empowerment.
- Quick2Wire
Quick2Wire Limited is a start-up that is developing a range of OSH/OSS
add-on products for the Raspberry Pi. The first product is an
experimenter's kit, contaning an expansion board, a set of components
with which to experiment, software to drive the Pi, and an instruction
manual. This will be followed by a series of expansion kits, using I2C
and SPI to add capabilities like ADC, DAC, PWM and stepper motor
drivers.
All the hardware and software will be released under open source licences.
The presentation will conclude with a demonstration using hardware
prototypes driven by a Raspberry Pi.
Romilly Cocking spent the ten years before his 'retirement' as an
agile software developer, coach and trainer. He spent the first two
years of retirement experimenting with robotics. Then Raspberry Pi
came along, and now Romilly works full-time running Quick2Wire.
Note: Please aim to arrive for 18:00 - 18:20 as the event will start
at 18:30 prompt.
— Registration: http://oshug.org/event/19
