Hello,
Registration is now open for the March meeting, details of which can
be found below.
Cheers,
Andrew
//
Event #46 — Embedded Platforms (BSD, OpenWRT, Plan 9 & Inferno)
On the 17 March 2016, 18:00 - 20:00 at BCS London, 1st Floor, The
Davidson Building, 5 Southampton Street, London, WC2E 7HA.
Registration: http://oshug.org/event/46
The forty-sixth OSHUG meeting will take a look at embedded platforms,
with talks on the BSD family of operating systems, Linux and OpenWRT,
and Plan 9 and Inferno in distributed systems.
— The BSD Family of Operating Systems
A familiar environment for your VAX, PIC32 or RISC-V ISA and many
other platforms.
The Berkeley Software Distribution started out as a patch set to AT&T
UNIX in the 70's and grew to a complete Operating Systems. Today
several projects continue to develop variant operating systems based
on the work originally started by the Computer Science Research Group,
each with a different area of focus.
This presentation will cover some of the benefits these operating
systems can offer to aid the workflow of a hardware project.
Sevan Janiyan is founder of Venture 37, which provides system
administration & consultancy services. As a fan of operating systems
and computers with different CPU architectures, in his spare time he
maintains builds of open source software on a variety of systems
featuring PowerPC, SPARC and armv7l CPUs. He hopes to own a NeXTcube &
OMRON LUNA-88K2 one day.
— Developing Linux based products in the connected devices ecosystem
-- The OpenWRT Approach
Linux is accepted as a standard component of the Internet of Things
domain. With the abundance of development platforms and the abhorrent
state of vendor provided SDKs, getting started with and more
importantly the maintenance of Linux powered devices is pretty much a
dark art these days.
This talk focuses on the mass market hardware platforms of interest to
folks building the Next Great IoT ProductTM and how the development
could be sped up with OpenWRT. To supplement the topic of product
development, a couple of noteworthy System-on-Chip devices and how
they could be adopted will also be discussed.
Ivan Iacono is an Embedded Systems Engineer interested in the
development of Linux based products and the surrounding periphery of
embedded devices, cloud and the overall architecture of connected
systems. He is the Firmware Wrangler at Den Automation.
Omer Kilic is an Embedded Systems Engineer who likes tinkering with
small computers of all shapes and sizes. He works at the various
intersections of hardware and software engineering practices, product
development and manufacturing. He is the Chief Hacker at Den
Automation.
— Embedded devices are often now part of a distributed system: my
Pebble watch is linked to my Nexus phone, which is coupled to Google.
Plan 9 and Inferno are two distributed systems originally developed by
the Bell Labs research centre that produced Unix. They allow a single
large system to be composed from smaller cooperating systems
performing specific tasks. (In other areas they illustrate an
alternative time line that diverged from strict adherence to Unix's
details of the 1970's.)
Distributed systems infrastructure often focuses on algorithmic
aspects, such as Paxos, and the operating system is largely irrelevant
when it is not merely obstructive. Plan 9 and Inferno provide
structural support for distribution, at the operating system level.
Their defining novelty is the representation of all distributable
resources as hierarchical name spaces, which can be composed in useful
ways, and simplify design, development, testing and integration. This
talk will give a brief summary of both systems, then begin to name
names, including their use in embedded appliances in distributed
systems.
Dr Charles Forsyth is a founder and Technical Director of Vita Nuova,
which specialises in systems software and distributed systems.
He is interested in compilers, operating systems, networking
(protocols and services), security, and distributed systems and
algorithms. He specialises in the design and implementation of systems
software, from low-level drivers through compilers to whole operating
systems. He has published papers on operating systems, Ada
compilation, worst-case execution analysers for safety-critical
applications, “resources as files”, and the development of
computational grids.
Note: Please aim to arrive by 18:15 as the event will start at 18:30 prompt.
Hello,
Registration is now open for the February meeting — and preceding hack
day! — details of which can be found below.
Cheers,
Andrew
//
Event #45 — Open Energy Tools & Interoperability (Open Inverter,
OpenTRV, Heat Pump Monitoring)
On the 18 February 2016, 18:00 - 20:00 at BCS London, 1st Floor, The
Davidson Building, 5 Southampton Street, London, WC2E 7HA.
Registration: http://oshug.org/event/45
For the forty-fifth meeting we will return to a topic which has been a
recurring theme and of much interest at previous meetings, open energy
platforms. There will be talks on Open Inverter, OpenTRV and heat pump
monitoring, with a focus also on interoperability. The evening meeting
will also be preceded by an interoperability hack day for project
contributors.
— Low power DC conversion using open source hardware
The Open Inverter is a micro inverter designed to produce an AC power
output of up to 250 VA. It uses modular, open source PCB designs for
both it's controller and power boards — and is extendible to larger
power outputs or for other power electronics projects, such as battery
charging, DC ring mains and DC power transformation using buck-boost
DC/DC converters.
Open Inverter will provide an AC output from a single 250W
photovoltaic panel, micro-hydro turbine. It also has applications in
electric bike charging and DC power storage. The key PCBs are
currently at either the layout or manufacture stage. The
microcontroller board features an RFM69 low power wireless, making it
compatible with the Open Energy Monitor ecosystem.
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.
— OpenTRV
OpenTRV have a vision to make carbon cutting and energy saving easy
and cheap for everyone, with a mission to take 8% out of the EU’s
carbon emissions and in the order of £300 out of a typical UK home’s
heating bill every year. Achieving this using a device that doesn’t
need an instruction manual or a smartphone to operate.
OpenTRV aim to eventually be managing 400 million home radiators
across Europe. Their journey so far has taken them from “scratching an
itch” with open source, to injection moulded plastics being made in
Shenzhen, and attempting to build a growth business around their
ideas, that could really make a difference to carbon and climate,
while improving householder comfort and health.
As part of their aim to make the world a better place, OpenTRV will
keep as much as possible of their work in the public eye and liberally
licensed, while interoperating with existing equipment and protocols
so that there is no need to reinvent the wheel and the end user
doesn’t get “locked in”. To that end, interoperability with
OpenergyMonitor and OpenHAB are high on their wish list!
Damon Hart-Davis is lead on the OpenTRV open source project created
following his 2012 presentation to DECC's smart heating workshop. He
has freelanced in technology for over 30 years, delivering
mission-critical products from design to BAU in the City for more than
20 of those, and has founded and been involved in several start-ups
over that time with his creations seen on TV, the Web, and his
pioneering Internet Service Provider helping crack open that market
more than 20 years ago. A previous virtual/on-line credit-card company
start-up that he co-founded as CTO, Ixaris, turns over ~£10m.
Mark Hill spent 15 years in the City after a solid grounding in IT at
the chip level at the microprocessor manufacturer Inmos, designing and
delivering highly complex systems. Project management, direction and
governance are all part of his toolkit. He now speaks regularly about
innovation, collaboration and IoT. Recently he founded a mobile phone
software start-up and is now OpenTRV Ltd's co-founder.
— OpenEnergyMonitor 5 years on
OpenEnergyMonitor is a project to develop open-source tools to help us
relate to our use of energy, our energy systems and the challenge of
sustainable energy.
This short talk will provide an overview of what has been achieved so
far, what has been learnt and outline the project roadmap for the
future. Topics will include: running an open-hardware business, local
manufacture and electronic carbon footprinting and sustainability.
Glyn Hudson is co-founder and full-time developer of the
OpenEnergyMonitor project.
— Heat pumps and heat pump monitoring
Heat pumps are a key part of zero carbon energy plans, making it
possible to provide heating from renewable energy in an efficient way.
Heat pumps have a rocky track record in the UK and there are numerous
stories of poorly performing systems, giving householders unexpectedly
high electricity bills. However, there are also many systems that have
been designed and installed well that do work effectively.
This talk will give an example of using open source hardware and
software tools to monitor and evaluate the performance of heat pumps,
using the speaker's own air source heat pump system at home as a case
study.
Trystan Lea is co-founder and core developer on the OpenEnergyMonitor
project. He is also testing out through his own life how it is
possible to provide for our energy needs from sustainable sources,
while using and developing open source energy modelling and monitoring
tools, to understand and evaluate what is possible and how we might
better design zero carbon energy systems. Trystan is currently testing
heat pump heating, along with electric vehicle and solar photovoltaic
at home.
— Interoperability Hack Day
The 18th February meeting will be preceded by a hack day, running from
09:00-17:00 and also hosted at the BCS offices in Covent Garden. This
will aim to to foster collaboration between open energy platform
projects, in support of a greater interoperability.
There is a separate registration page for this part of the day, but
please note that participants are expected to have experience of
developing for a relevant platform, such as OpenEnergyMonitor,
OpenHAB, OpenTRV, or some other open source energy or home automation
etc. system. As such hose without suitable experience would not
benefit from attending.
https://events.bcs.org/book/1886/
Please note that the link at the top of the page should be used for
registering for the evening talks.
Note: Please aim to arrive by 18:15 as the event will start at 18:30 prompt.
