oshug-announce November 2016

oshug-announce@oshug.org

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OSHUG #54 — Educating the Next Generation, Thursday 1st December.
by Andrew Back 01 Nov '16

01 Nov '16

Hello, Details below of the final OSHUG meeting of 2016, which will take place on the evening of Thursday 1st December, following on from the workshop earlier that day. Don't forget that if you plan to take part in the workshop and attend the evening meeting, that you need to register for both separately. Cheers, Andrew // On the 1 December 2016, 18:00 - 20:00 at CSC, 3rd Floor, The Wallbrook Building, 25 Wallbrook, London, EC4N 8AQ. Registration: http://oshug.org/event/54 At the fifty-fourth meeting there will be three talks on the theme of educating the next generation. — myStorm update myStorm is an open hardware and software FPGA development platform that is based around a Lattice iCE40 FPGA, which uses the fully open source IceStorm/Yosys/Arache-pnr toolchain for development. It is low cost and aims to provide a gentle on-ramp for those who are new to RTL development and working with FPGAs. In this talk we will hear a report from the workshop which took place earlier in the day, together with a status update on the myStorm project. * Ken Boak started his professional career at BBC Research Department in 1986 working on digital signal processing systems for HDTV and subsequently over 30 years, a mix of 10 other technology companies, both UK and US based, in the fields of instrumentation, automation, telemetry telecomms. Ken has been interested in energy monitoring since the early 1990s, when he constructed a 4 seater electric car, and provided rudimentary energy analysis of the battery charge and discharge cycles. In 1998 he joined a South London company and designed a low power wireless, monitor device for automatic, remote gas and electricity meter reading. In 2009 Ken worked on the Onzo Energy Monitoring Kit, a commercial device that was ultimately distributed to Southern Electric customers. Then in 2010 he produced a series of educational devices to teach engineering undergraduates the principles of photovoltaic energy systems. Ken has continued his interests in energy monitoring, working collaboratively with Megni on the OpenEnergyMonitor project, the open Inverter Project and also for All Power Labs in Berkeley, California, where he was involved in power monitoring of wood gasifier generator sets. He tries to live a low impact lifestyle in a modest Edwardian house in Surrey, with a little help from modern electronics. * Alan Wood has been working with parallel distributed programming for several decades. His recent work includes smart grids, 3D printers, robotics, automation and biotec diagnostics. His current research is focused on machine learning for embedded applications using Motes on FPGA and emerging Asics. He is a long term advocate and moderator (aka Folknology) for xCORE and other opensource communities, as well as a founder of Surrey and Hampshire Makerspace. — micro:bit first impressions The BBC micro:bit is an ARM Microcontroller based development board that has been handed out to all year 7 (first year secondary) school kids. The BBC's aim is to get kids coding, along the same lines as with the BBC Micro that became ubiquitous in schools in the 80s. This presentation will look at what it can (and can't) do, and how accessible it is. * Chris Swan has been tinkering with electronics since he was a small child, and got into software when he realised that it was necessary to make hardware do interesting things. In his day job as CTO for Global Infrastructure Services for CSC he's bringing a large services company and its customers into a world of DevOps and Infrastructure as Code. On evenings and weekends he can often be found making some sort of project around a dev board, with a particular fondness for Raspberry Pis. — Encouraging the next generation: How a 16-year old got to present his silicon chip design at CERN In 2014 a local Year 10 student, Dan Gorringe, approached Embecosm to ask it he could do a 2-week work experience with us. We agreed and asked him to take our existing hobbyist weekend course on introductory FPGA design with Verilog and rework it for use by students of his age. We forgot to tell him teenagers aren't supposed to be able to write Verilog, and the result was the Embecosm Application Note, Silicon Chip Design for Teenagers. In 2015, Dan asked to work for us over the summer. We had recently designed an instruction set architecture, AAP, which is a 16-bit mixed byte/word addressed Harvard architecture to test compiler technology, and which worked in simulation. We realized that a physical implementation would be very useful, so we asked Dan to create this over the summer. We forgot to tell him that teenagers aren't supposed to be able to design processors and the result was an implementation of AAP which runs on a DE0-Nano FPGA board. As a result Dan was asked to present his work at ORCONF 2015, which happened to be held at CERN. Probably one of the better excuses for a day off school. Dan also subsequently won the BCS OSSG School Student competition for his work, which he spoke about at the BCS AGM in October 2016. Dan came to work for us this summer, and since we are currently working on energy efficient compilation for high performance computing we asked him to build us a system out of single board computers. We again forgot to tell him that teenagers aren't supposed to be able to design supercomputers. We demonstrated his system at the BCS OSSG AGM, and it is reported in the HiPEAC newsletter of November 2016 for academic researchers in high performance and energy efficient computing in Europe. Dan is taking his 'A' levels next summer and is hoping to attend university next year to study engineering mathematics. In this talk we'll look at the factors that made such a series of projects both possible and successful. * Dr Jeremy Bennett is founder and Chief Executive of Embecosm, a consultancy implementing open source compilers and chip simulators for major corporations around the world. He is a author of the standard textbook "Introduction to Compiling Techniques" (McGraw-Hill 1990, 1995, 2003). Contact him at: jeremy.bennett(a)embecosm.com. Note: Please aim to arrive by 18:15 as the event will start at 18:30 prompt.

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OSHUG #53 — Getting started with FPGAs & Verilog using IceStorm & myStorm (workshop), Thursday 1st December.
by Andrew Back 01 Nov '16

01 Nov '16

Hello, Excited to announce that in a little over a month we will be jointly hosting with BCS OSSG, a 1-day workshop that will serve as an introduction to FPGAs and Verilog, via the most excellent project IceStorm/Yosys/Arachne-pnr open source toolchain and myStorm iCE40 FPGA board. Place are limited, FPGA workshops have proven highly popular in the past and so if you would like to take part, I'd suggest registering sooner rather than later. However, please only register if you are confident that you can make it, as the workshop will likely sell out fairly quickly and we'd prefer to avoid having a waiting list and then empty seats on the day. Note that the venue for this is the RSA and not the BCS. There will also be a regular meeting following the workshop, albeit at a different venue, on the evening of Thursday 1st December. Details will be forwarded in a separate e-mail. Cheers, Andrew // On the 1 December 2016, 09:00 - 17:00 at Prince Philip Room, The Royal Society of Arts, 8 John Adam Street, London, WC2N 6EZ. Registration: http://oshug.org/event/53 A full day, hands-on FPGA programming workshop that is free to attend. The regular monthly meeting will then follow in the evening, but at a different venue and for details see the OSHUG No. 54 event page (to be added soon!). Please note that if you intend to attend both the workshop and evening meeting, you must register separately for each of these! — Workshop details In this workshop we will build some basic Verilog blocks and modules targeting low power, low cost FPGAs from the Lattice iCE40 series. The workshop will operate using a complete open source Verilog toolchain based around Yosys and Arachne-PNR, which can be run on Linux and OS X. We will cover basic sequential and combinational logic blocks. In addition we will show you how you can combine simple ARM microcontroller code running alongside and communicating with Verilog peripherals synthesised on a Lattice iCE40 FPGA, all running together on myStorm. This workshop will give participants a real taste of FPGA development in an open source software environment, using open source hardware. * Ken Boak started his professional career at BBC Research Department in 1986 working on digital signal processing systems for HDTV and subsequently over 30 years, a mix of 10 other technology companies, both UK and US based, in the fields of instrumentation, automation, telemetry telecomms. Ken has been interested in energy monitoring since the early 1990s, when he constructed a 4 seater electric car, and provided rudimentary energy analysis of the battery charge and discharge cycles. In 1998 he joined a South London company and designed a low power wireless, monitor device for automatic, remote gas and electricity meter reading. In 2009 Ken worked on the Onzo Energy Monitoring Kit, a commercial device that was ultimately distributed to Southern Electric customers. Then in 2010 he produced a series of educational devices to teach engineering undergraduates the principles of photovoltaic energy systems. Ken has continued his interests in energy monitoring, working collaboratively with Megni on the OpenEnergyMonitor project, the open Inverter Project and also for All Power Labs in Berkeley, California, where he was involved in power monitoring of wood gasifier generator sets. He tries to live a low impact lifestyle in a modest Edwardian house in Surrey, with a little help from modern electronics. * Alan Wood has been working with parallel distributed programming for several decades. His recent work includes smart grids, 3D printers, robotics, automation and biotec diagnostics. His current research is focused on machine learning for embedded applications using Motes on FPGA and emerging Asics. He is a long term advocate and moderator (aka Folknology) for xCORE and other opensource communities, as well as a founder of Surrey and Hampshire Makerspace. — What to bring Participants must bring a laptop computer and ideally one that is running either Linux or OS X. If your laptop is running Windows, you should also bring along a Raspberry Pi or similar Linux SBC, that you can use to build the toolchain and program myStorm over USB. Note: Please aim to arrive by 08:45 as the workshop will start at 09:00 prompt.

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oshug-announce November 2016