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Open Source Hardware Camp 2024 CFP — Sat 24/08 & Sun 25/08, Hebden Bridge.
by Andrew Back 17 Apr '24

17 Apr '24

Hello, Please find details below of the call for participation for Open Source Hardware Camp 2024. Tickets are not on sale yet, but these will be £12/day and this includes lunch, plus tea/coffee. Those presenting and running workshops will receive free tickets. Budget accommodation is available at Hebden Bridge Hostel, which adjoins the venue, and there are plenty of B&Bs, plus a number of small hotels in the area. OSHCamp will once again be hosted as part of the Wuthering Bytes technology festival, which this year is celebrating its 11th anniversary, with the launch “Festival Day” on Friday 23rd August. Further details will be made available via the website in due course: https://wutheringbytes.com/ Any questions don't hesitate to get in touch! Cheers, Andrew // -+- Open Source Hardware Camp 2024 -+- This year Open Source Hardware Camp will take place over the weekend of Saturday 24th & Sunday 25th August, at The Birchcliffe Centre, Birchcliffe Road, Hebden Bridge, West Yorkshire, HX7 8DG. Proposals for talks and workshops for OSHCamp 2024 are invited! There is no theme and topics may include, for example: * Open source hardware projects * Open development practices and principles * Novel/interesting/fun projects built using open source hardware * Tools (hardware and software) * Skills and techniques, e.g. PCB fab, DIY SMT assembly * Relevant technologies, e.g. SPI/I2C bus programming * ...something else relevant to the community If you would like to give a talk on the Saturday and/or run a workshop on the Sunday, please submit details via the form at: https://forms.gle/v1mauARqgd9kWYy16 A social event is planned for Saturday evening. **** Note that the deadline for submitting titles and abstracts is Tuesday 30th April at 17:00. If you would like to discuss ideas etc. please get in touch sooner, rather than later. **** -- Andrew Back http://abopen.com

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Upcoming Meetings in London
by Andy Bennett 18 Jan '24

18 Jan '24

Hi all, It was great to see so many people at the Christmas drinks. Since then, Omer and I have been chatting about how to get something going in London again. We'd like to solicit some feedback on our proposed format (below) and also to invite you to submit your proposals for talks on this Google Form: https://forms.gle/rBQopohr6UHWNRcq9 Our goals are to do in person meetups in/around Central London because we received a lot of feedback where people said that it was the personal community feel that was most valuable. Online events of talks don't seem to be much better than pre-recorded talks that you can consume in your own time. We'd like to propose a similar but slightly different format to the old one. 2 or 3 slots per session of no more than 30 minutes each, with plenty of time for questions. We'd like to have a larger social aspect to the evening, including time during the event for 5->10 minute lightning talks or show and tell sessions. There are a lot of people doing lots of interesting things but who can't commit to a big talk. This could also be a channel for periodic updates on ongoing projects from people who are working on something and who would like input or who do not feel they are finished enough to present a longer talk. The evening would start with a meet-and-greet at the venue, but perhaps with food or snacks, depending on the host. After the talks we would retire to the pub, but hopefully early enough that people can stay for at least one drink before leaving for trains. For now we'd like to solicit some feedback on this format and also to invite you to submit your proposals for talks on this Google Form: https://forms.gle/rBQopohr6UHWNRcq9 We're aiming to set up a pipeline of events so that when we launch we can be sure to have events regularly. Best wishes, @ndy -- andyjpb(a)ashurst.eu.org http://www.ashurst.eu.org/ 0x7EBA75FF

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Open Source Hardware Camp 2023 — Sat 26th & Sun 27th August, Hebden Bridge.
by Andrew Back 08 Jun '23

08 Jun '23

Hello, I'm pleased to announce that we have a total of 12 talks and 4 workshops confirmed for Open Source Hardware Camp 2023! See below for details. As in previous years, there will be a social event on the Saturday evening and OSHCamp is once again being hosted to coincide with the Wuthering Bytes technology festival. https://wutheringbytes.com/ <http://wutheringbytes.com/> The programme for Festival Day (Fri 25/08) should be announced within the coming weeks and for details of speakers confirmed so far, see: https://wutheringbytes.com/whatson/festival-day Cheers, Andrew // Open Source Hardware Camp 2023 On the 26th August 2023, 09:00 Saturday morning - 16:00 on the Sunday afternoon at Hebden Bridge Town Hall, St. George's Street, Hebden Bridge, HX7 7BY, UK (53.742436, -2.012918) Registration: https://oshcamp2023.eventbrite.co.uk/ Open Source Hardware Camp 2023 will take place in the Pennine town of Hebden Bridge, where it will return to be hosted as part of the Wuthering Bytes technology festival. Hebden Bridge is approximately 1 hour by rail from Leeds and Manchester. Budget accommodation is available at the Hebden Bridge Hostel which adjoins the venue, with private rooms available and discounts for group bookings. Details of other local accommodation can be found at www.hebdenbridge.co.uk and via Airbnb and Booking.com etc. There will be a social event on the Saturday evening from 8PM. *** Saturday :: Talks *** — Life beyond 2-layer FR4: A high-speed peek into the world of PCBs The perfect combination of open source tools exponentially getting better and the availability of affordable and easy-to-use printed circuit board manufacturing services have enabled many folks to get their weekend projects “fabbed”. While laying out a 2-layer board is relatively straightforward, there is a much wider world when one gets into the nitty-gritty of the humble circuit board for more complex designs. From materials and finishes to multi-layer stack-ups and exotic drilling and milling options, we will take a quick peek at the world of printed circuit boards. * Omer Kilic is an Embedded Systems and Manufacturing Consultant who works at the various intersections of hardware and software engineering practices, product development and manufacturing. — Automated irrigation using a novel approach to determine soil moisture level Rod spoke at OSHCamp 2017 about his greenhouse and garden automation project in York, with particular emphasis on his design of a capacitance sensor for measuring soil moisture level. In 2019 he undertook another project near Scarborough on the East coast of Yorkshire, this time to irrigate 16 vegetable planting areas in a one acre garden. The project went into service in the spring of that year and has continued to work very successfully up to the present time. As with the previous garden project, the Arduino Mega2560 was used but a number of problems were envisaged using capacitance probes. This talk will largely focus on the novel approach used to determine soil moisture level without the need for physical soil moisture sensors. Instead, employing a predictive algorithm that uses rainfall and climatic temperature and humidity to derive the soil moisture level of each planting area. * Rod Moody was born in 1940, and at 15 years of age started an electrical engineering apprenticeship with Dale Electric, a manufacturer of diesel-engine driven electrical generators ranging from a few kW to a few MW for both base load and standby applications. Through day release and night class he gained an HNC in electrical engineering, and at the age of 19 was appointed to the post of Test Department Manager, this led to many trips around the world to provide commissioning, trouble shooting and training. In his mid-twenties he was appointed to the position of Electrical Engineering Manager responsible for running the design office and designing control systems using relay logic. As technology advanced, and as a self-taught electronics engineer, he designed complex control systems using CMOS logic, and alternator AVRs using semiconductor analogue technology. In his early thirties Rod was appointed to the position of Engineering Director. In 1992, at 52 years of age he joined Deep Sea Electronics as their Engineering Manager. DSE were quite small at that time using through-hole technology, but through improved product design and the introduction of SMT production they grew very rapidly over the eight years before Rod retired in year 2000 at 60 years of age. DSE are now the leading supplier of microprocessor based controllers to generating set manufacturing companies worldwide. In retirement Rod spends most of his spare time with projects involving mechanics, electronics, and software using Raspberry Pi and Arduino microcontrollers. He continues to be a keen gardener as he has been from an early age, has a keen interest in all aspects of science and engineering, and is leader of the York U3A Science & Engineering World group. The Missing Bit: Recovering data from magnetic discs — The Missing Bit: Recovering data from magnetic discs Magnetic discs were - from the 1970s - how computer data was stored. A technical deep-dive into how these relics can be read using modern equipment, by digital an analogue means, and how to handle the problems which creep in. * By training Phil Pemberton is a software engineer, electronics hobbyist and ham radio operator from Leeds. In his spare time he plays with old computers, reverse-engineers old radio equipment, and tries valiantly to fix his house without destroying it in the process. Phil is an active member of the Stardot retrocomputing community and can often be seen recovering strange and unusual data from magnetic discs. — The story of Älgen guitar: how to mix traditional hand-craft woodwork with cutting edge digital fabrication Michael spent the last year designing and building a novel guitar that tries to bring in the best of both traditional luthiery and cutting edge digital fabrication techniques like 3D-printing (not just plastic, but also metal and carbon fibre), and generative design. The result is Älgen, a light-weight, visually distinct, uniquely engineered instrument. This talk will focus on the design behind the guitar, looking at what you can do with generative design and 3D-printing, how to interface the old and new construction techniques (e.g., mating a walnut body with 3D printed nylon sides), and how to decide what bits to do with which technique. * By training Michael Dales is a Software Engineer with experience in numerous Cambridge startups and more established companies, and currently works at the University of Cambridge, helping ecologists build tools and methodologies for assessing the impact of climate change on biodiversity of plants and animals. By passion Michael builds custom guitars and guitar related things: whilst he has a love for the craft that goes into hand-build instruments, he also has an equal love for new manufacturing techniques such as generative-design and 3D-printing in metal, and has branched out into building instruments that sit at the intersection of those two worlds. — MicroPython for Hardware Hackers Nowadays it should only be necessary to use assembly language for the most demanding and time-critical applications. MicroPython is a port of Python to microcontroller hardware. This talk, followed by workshop on the second day of OSHCamp, explains how the Python programmer interacts with various typical pieces of hardware, and gives you the opportunity to get some hands-on experience. * Steve Holden has worked with computers since 1967 and started using Python at version 1.4 in 1995. He has since written about Python, created instructor-led training, delivered it to an international audience, and built 40 hours of video training for “reluctant Python users.” An Emeritus Fellow of the Python Software Foundation, Steve served as a director of the Foundation for eight years and as its chairman for three; he created PyCon, the Python community's international conference series and was presented with the Frank Willison Award for services to the Python community. He lives in Hastings, England and works as Technical Architect for the UK Department for International Trade, where he is responsible for the systems that maintain and regulate the trading environment. — Why not build an oscilloscope? How hard can it be? Tom will discuss the trials and tribulations in building a mid-performance digital oscilloscope (1 gigasample per second 8-bit ADC, 100MHz bandwidth, 4 channels) using a Xilinx Zynq FPGA, a Raspberry Pi, and a few leaked datasheets. In the talk, he will discuss what he learned about oscilloscope architecture, FPGA's and the Raspberry Pi's camera interface, what he'd do differently, and why he did it (because, well, how hard can it be?) There may be a demonstration. The project is open source and available on GitHub. * Tom Oldbury is an electronics, FPGA and software engineer now living and working in Cambridgeshire, currently working for a company designing and manufacturing thermal imaging systems. He studied Electronics Engineering at the University of Leeds, but has been playing with electronics and software from a young age. — Reinventing the Single 8 home movie format When home movies on 8mm film were king, there was a format war between Kodak's Super 8 and Fuji's SIngle 8. Just like Sony's Betamax in the home video wars, Fuji's technically superior contender lost the battle, and the final Single 8 cartridges were manufactured in about2010. The physical dimensions of the film are the same though, so here in 2023 it should be possible to load a SIngle 8 camera with film from a Super 8 cartridge. This is the story of the revival and reinvention of a lost film format through OpenSCAD and 3D printing, done mostly without an original cartridge to copy. * Jenny List is an electronic engineer and technical journalist, writing mostly as a contributing editor for hackaday.com. — Open Hardware in Bio Labs and Clinical Diagnostics Technology — even when developed for consumer use — has great potential in healthcare and clinical applications, and open source hardware can speed development. We enthusiastically use open source hardware in our biomedical technology research group, for example to shrink critical diagnostic microbiology tests and transport them out of the lab closer to patients. We will present our experience developing a simple to build open source robotic microfluidic blood test platform built around Raspberry Pi imaging. However, although clinical diagnostic testing used to rely entirely on fully open and totally transparent methods, a strong recent trend has replaced these with closed proprietary products. In this "double act" Ruya will describe the benefits of open source technology for a biomedical engineering PhD student, then Al will raise some bigger questions and discussion points about trends in science and technology, such as: Are we losing the ability to make medical decisions based on fully understood and publicly shared testing methods? Could open source hardware avoid this problem? Is it possible to return to open access and transparency in clinical diagnostics? * Al Edwards is Associate Professor in Biomedical Technology, and has been exploring ways to improve diagnosis of a range of clinically important health problems, from heart attack to bacterial infection, for nearly 15 years. One major aim is to simplify complex laboratory instrumentation using the latest components, such as smartphone cameras. Wherever possible our laboratory uses open source hardware, although we also work towards commercialisation to ensure our developments can become useful products. * Ruya Meltem Sariyer is currently finishing her PhD using miniaturised blood tests towards improved epidemiology of cardiovascular disease. Arriving in the UK in the depths of covid-19 lab closure, she was able to start building an open source imaging system in her room using a Raspberry Pi zero. Alongside her doctoral laboratory research into blood tests to measure variation in cardiovascular function, she has explored the use of open source hardware as an alternative to expensive lab instruments. — The Fuller Stack Engineer The abstractions on which we build software go so much further than what the software industry normally considers a "Full Stack Engineer". This term really just covers the tip of the iceberg. Going lower, into the realm of circuit boards, micro-controllers, and even silicon, is easier than ever. It no longer means working with nasty chemicals, proprietary software, expensive development boards, low level programming languages or processes that are only available to businesses willing to shell out extremely large sums of currency units. I'll explore some of the open software, libraries, tools, that are now available, as well as hardware, services, and educational resources that make it possible, and comparatively easy, to explore the entire tech stack: From GUIs all the way down to doped silicon. Join me on my quest to become a Fuller Stack Engineer, it has never been easier. * Christian Jacobsen is a “fuller stack" engineer. When he isn't procrastinating on writing an ODBC to REST bridge for KiCad, he writes largeish Python backends and tinkers with hardware design. He is an active open-source contributor and in a previous life he ran occam code on a lot of small computers. — Breaking proprietary smart home lock-in: untangling OpenThread and does it Matter? Will the promising Thread and Matter standards and their open source implementations free us from proprietary smart home solutions, and what advantages does it offer for security, privacy and reliability? * Andrew Robinson. Bio to follow. — The Open Source Keyboard Matrix - A dive down into the Open Source keyboard rabbit hole A fun journey into the world of Open Source keyboards. Most folks accept the keyboard that comes with a PC without even thinking about it, however many of us want to build or hack our own personal keyboard designs. This leads to a wide diversity of interesting bespoke keyboards. We will take a journey through this diversity and explain common requirements and features available to hack your very own personalised keyboard. We will look at the OpenSource hardware and the software that enable the concoction of virtually any keyboard design. You will get to dive into the keyboard rabbit hole and see just how deep it goes. * 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 automation using FPGA and µC. He is a long term advocate of open source communities, a moderator (aka Folknology) for xCORE, the co-founder of myStorm open hardware FPGA community, as well as a co-founder of Surrey and Hampshire Makerspace. — LibreCores CI - why did it fail? And did it? In 2016 the FOSSi Foundation presented the LibreCores project — an attempt to build an all-in-one hub for open digital hardware developers. To some extent it was an open source rebuild of OpenCores with many added value solutions like LibreCores CI which was presented in 2017 at Hebden Bridge. In 2022 the whole LibreCores infrastructure was shut down, although many bits remain available to end users in GitHub repositories. This talk is a retrospective on the project of building a reusable CI solution for open hardware projects. Let's talk about what worked there and what didn't, and what could be done better to sustain an open hardware and open EDA project. Please talk would be useful to contributors and especially maintainers who want to ensure a long-term sustainability of their projects and attract more contributors. * Oleg Nenashev is a serial community builder currently working on WireMock and WireMock Cloud ecosystems. He's passionate open source software and open hardware advocate. Oleg is a core maintainer and board member in the Jenkins project where he writes code, mentors contributors and organizes community events. He is a TOC member in the Continuous Delivery Foundation, and also a CDF and CNCF ambassador. Oleg has a PhD degree in electronics design and volunteers in the Free and Open Source Silicon Foundation. /\/ Compered by: /\/ Kevin Murrell is is a trustee of The National Museum of Computing with a particular interest in computer technology from the 1950s and 1960s. Kevin recently completed a rebuild of the Wireless World Computer which was published in 1967. During working hours, Kevin is technical director of a UK software house providing systems for the UK, Canada and Ireland. Kevin is the proud owner of a Myford Super 7 - which occupies his spare time! *** Sunday :: Workshops *** — Solder Paste and Stencil Workshop - Build your own WiFi Device! This hands-on workshop demonstrates the usage of solder paste and stencils with SMD devices in a hobbyist home-lab capacity. Participants will be provided with a kit of electronic parts to assemble a small WiFi device with a few functions, details of which and code examples to be published closer to the event. Some familiarity tinkering with electronic devices would be beneficial, but is not required. Participants should bring: - USB battery pack and USB-C cable. - A laptop if you would like to customise the firmware. * Run by: Omer Kilic. — MicroPython for Hardware Hackers This workshop follows on from the talk on Saturday and gives you the opportunity to get some hands-on experience. Participants should bring: - A laptop. * Run by: Steve Holden. — Build your first Open Source keyboard to take away and customise This workshop follows on from the talk on Saturday and participants will get to build their own keyboard. * Run by: Alan Wood. — Writing Python Games on a Quirky Pico Device Having high level languages available on cheap microcontrollers massively lower the bar to creating interesting software on small devices. Take the Roto, a small handheld with a screen, a Raspberry Pi Pico, and a quirky input setup and write some Python to implement a drawing program, a game, or whatever else takes your fancy, all in a couple of hundred lines of code. And the worst that can happen? You'll get a helpful stacktrace on a tiny screen. The hardware is available to take home at the cost price. Participants should bring: - A laptop with the mu code editor installed. * Run by: Christian Jacobsen. NOTE: - There are separate tickets for Saturday and Sunday. - A light lunch and refreshments will be provided each day. - Please aim to arrive between 09:00 and 09:15 on the Saturday as the event will start at 09:20 prompt. -- Andrew Back http://abopen.com

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OSHCamp 2023 (26th & 27th August) Call for Talks & Workshops.
by Andrew Back 06 Apr '23

06 Apr '23

Hello, After a three year absence Open Source Hardware Camp will be making a return and hosted at Hebden Bridge Town Hall, over the weekend of Saturday 26th & Sunday 27th August. OSHCamp will once again be running as part of the Wuthering Bytes festival, with the launch "Festival Day" being held on Friday 25th August. Further details will be added to the Wuthering Bytes website in due course and you can sign up to the mailing list in order to receive updates direct to your inbox. https://wutheringbytes.com/about Details of the OSHCamp call for talks and workshops can be found below. Hope to see you in August! Andrew // -+- Open Source Hardware Camp 2023 -+- This year Open Source Hardware Camp will take place over the weekend of Saturday 26th & Sunday 27th August at Hebden Bridge Town Hall, St George's St, Hebden Bridge, West Yorkshire, HX7 7BY. Proposals for talks and workshops for OSHCamp 2023 are invited! There is no theme and topics may include, for example: * Open source hardware projects * Open development practices and principles * Novel/interesting/fun projects built using open source hardware * Tools (hardware and software) * Skills and techniques, e.g. PCB fab, DIY SMT assembly * Relevant technologies, e.g. SPI/I2C bus programming * ...something else relevant to the community If you would like to give a talk on the Saturday and/or run a workshop on the Sunday, please submit details via the form at: https://forms.gle/xkkuX476rtQNzTpJA Any questions can be directed to andrew at abopen.com. **** Note that the deadline for submitting titles and abstracts is Sunday 30th April at 17:00. If you would like to discuss ideas etc. please get in touch sooner, rather than later. **** A social is planned for the Saturday evening and details of accommodation nearby to the venue will be provided in due course. -- Andrew Back http://abopen.com

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Lead the BCS Open Source Group
by Andy Bennett 14 Oct '22

14 Oct '22

Hi Oshugs! I hope everyone is well. Thanks Andy for letting me post this on the announce list! OSHUG and the BCS Open Source Group have been holding joint meetings for some years now and it's nearly time for their AGM again. In my eMail to the talk list I said that this would be next week but we have now moved it to November to give ourselves more time to make arrangements. At that meeting we will be holding elections for all the positions In particular, our current chair has moved away from the UK and therefore we're looking for someone who might lead the group over the next year. The responsibilites are not onerous because there are others who take on a lot of the work of organising meetings. However, the candidate must be an active member of the BCS. If anyone is interested in standing for this position, please let me know and we can put you on the nominations list for the AGM. If you're currently an active member of the BCS, please seriously consider applying! Best wishes, @ndy -- andyjpb(a)ashurst.eu.org http://www.ashurst.eu.org/ 0x7EBA75FF

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OSHCamp 2020 (29th & 30th Aug), call for Talks & Workshops.
by Andrew Back 20 Feb '20

20 Feb '20

Hello, OSHCamp will be returning to Hebden Bridge Town Hall over the weekend of Saturday 29th & Sunday 30th August, with 2020 also being the year that the Open Source Hardware User Group turns 10 years old. Details of the call for talks and workshops can be found below. Andrew // -+- Open Source Hardware Camp 2020 -+- This year Open Source Hardware Camp will take place over the weekend of Saturday 29th & Sunday 30th August, at Hebden Bridge Town Hall, St George's St, Hebden Bridge, West Yorkshire, HX7 7BY. Proposals for talks and workshops for OSHCamp 2020 are invited! There is no theme and topics may include, for example: * Open source hardware projects * Open development practices and principles * Novel/interesting/fun projects built using open source hardware * Tools (hardware and software) * Skills and techniques, e.g. languages, fabrication and assembly etc. * Relevant technologies, e.g. buses, platforms and frameworks * ...something else relevant to the community If you would like to give a talk on the Saturday and/or run a workshop on the Sunday, please submit details via the form at: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1QW39du03T64haCJAiN69pkBR4FQO4oMxNDKGRMBRNj… Any questions can either be directed to the list, sent to andrew at abopen.com, or discussed in person with myself, Sevan Janiyan or Andy Bennett at an OSHUG/OSSG meeting. **** Note that the deadline for submitting titles and abstracts is Monday 20th April at 17:00. If you would like to discuss ideas etc. please get in touch sooner, rather than later. **** A social is planned for the Saturday evening and details of accommodation nearby to the venue will be provided in due course. // -- Andrew Back http://abopen.com

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OSHCamp 2019 additional talk, Zerynth workshop and Festival Day programme.
by Andrew Back 18 Aug '19

18 Aug '19

Hello, A twelfth talk has been confirmed for OSHCamp 2019: — The complex and simplistic elegance of the 1-wire protocol The Dallas 1-wire protocol is a two-way communications bus that allows microcontrollers to talk to a number of peripherals using just a single wire. It promises high data rates, a range of peripheral types and very long wires all with the minimum of resource requirements and complexity. This talk will explore how it works, how to implement it and how to actually drive those busses made up of very long wires. * Andy Bennett trained as an Electronic & Electrical Engineer and has a background in consumer electronics, FPGAs, operating systems and device drivers. For the last 10 years he has been building companies around distributed database technology. He is currently Director of Register Dynamics who help companies and governments apply their data usefully, responsibly and ethically. Andy is a Technologist that likes to inhabit the void between users, software and the hardware that it all runs on. His love of ceramic taps is well-documented. // Don't forget to book tickets via Eventbrite: http://oshcamp2019.eventbrite.co.uk/ In other news, Zerynth in partnership with DesignSpark/RS will be hosting an IoT workshop on Monday 2nd September, which is free to attend and participants will get to keep the hardware used in the workshop! https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/o/designspark-rs-components-23220915493 And the Wuthering Bytes Festival Day programme has now been finalised: https://wutheringbytes.com/whatson/festival-day Regards, Andrew -- Andrew Back http://abopen.com

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OSHUG #75 — Inaugural London RISC-V meetup, Mon 22nd July.
by Andrew Back 17 Jul '19

17 Jul '19

Hello, Registration is now open for the 75th meeting, held in partnership with the BCS OSSG. Details below. Regards, Andrew // 22nd July 2019, 17:30 - 20:30 at IET London, Watson-Watt room, 2 Savoy Place, London, WC2R 0BL. http://oshug.org/event/75 This will be the inaugural London meetup for the RISC-V community, hosted by the BCS Open Source Specialist Group and the UK Open Source Hardware User Group. As with the other UK meetups, we provide an opportunity to share the latest ideas around the RISC-V ecosystem, combined with plenty of time for networking. However unlike other meetups, the London meetup will have a specific focus on the open source aspects of RISC-V. This is a joint meeting with the British Computer Society Open Source Specialist Group. — The LowRISC project Alex Bradbury will talk about lowRISC, a non-profit community interest company, using collaborative engineering to develop and maintain open source silicon designs and tools. Their expertise includes processor and SoC design, with a particular focus on hardware security, design verification, RISC-V tools, and the LLVM compiler. * Alex Bradbury (@asbradbury) is a Co-founder and Director of the lowRISC project. You may also be familiar with his LLVM work, and the LLVM Weekly newsletter. — The OpenHW Group Rick O'Connor will introduce the Open Hardware Group, an industry and academia grouping, aiming to provide high quality free RISC-V hardware and software IP. * Rick O'Connor is Executive Director of OpenHW. — The XCrypt instruction set extension Ben Marshall will talk about his work at Bristol University on the SCARV project: a side-channel hardened RISC-V platform. He’ll introduce the XCrypt instruction set extension for RISC-V. * Ben Marshall is a Research Associate on the SCARV project. Note: There is networking over tea, coffee & biscuits from 5:30pm. The talks will start at 18:00 prompt. There will be opportunity to network further from 19:30 at the IET, continuing later at the Coal Hole pub on the Strand. -- Andrew Back http://abopen.com

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Open Source Hardware Camp 2019 — Sat 31st August & Sun 1st September, Hebden Bridge.
by Andrew Back 07 Jun '19

07 Jun '19

Hello, We are pleased to announce that we have a total of 11 talks and 6 workshops confirmed for Open Source Hardware Camp 2019. As in previous years, there will be a social event on the Saturday evening and OSHCamp is once again being hosted to coincide with the Wuthering Bytes technology festival. https://wutheringbytes.com/ Regards, Andrew // Open Source Hardware Camp 2019 On the 31st August 2019, 09:00 Saturday morning - 16:00 on the Sunday afternoon at Hebden Bridge Town Hall, St. George's Street, Hebden Bridge, HX7 7BY, UK. Registration: http://oshug.org/event/oshcamp2019 Open Source Hardware Camp 2019 will take place place in the Pennine town of Hebden Bridge, where it will return to be hosted for the sixth year as part of the Wuthering Bytes technology festival. Hebden Bridge is approximately 1 hour by rail from Leeds and Manchester. Budget accommodation is available at the Hebden Bridge Hostel which adjoins the venue, with private rooms available and discounts for group bookings. Details of other local accommodation can be found at www.hebdenbridge.co.uk. There will be a social event on the Saturday evening from 8PM.. *** Saturday :: Talks *** — Customising a RISC-V Core This talk walks through the RISC-V ISA and the microarchitecture of an open-source RISC-V core, to provide an understanding of how new instructions can be added to the hardware. RISC-V is an open Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) that can be implemented freely. The ISA is modular, providing a base set of integer instructions alongside standard extensions for multiplication, floating point, atomic operations, and many other categories. In addition to standard extensions, the ISA reserves space for user-defined extensions, providing the flexibility to add custom instructions that fulfil any purpose. There are many open-source implementations of RISC-V cores - in this talk we will look at a small core written in SystemVerilog that is simple enough to be understood by those relatively new digital logic design. We will walk through the different components of the core and how they fit together to build a picture of how instructions are decoded and executed, and go through an example of the changes to each component needed to support a custom instruction. * Dr Graham Markall is a software toolchain engineer at Embecosm, which provides open source toolchain services. Most of his work focuses on GNU toolchains (GCC, Binutils, GDB, etc.) and the use of cycle-accurate simulation for pre-silicon toolchain development and testing. His current projects focus on the development of customised toolchains for various RISC-V systems, ranging from small, deeply-embedded applications up to high-performance multicore systems. — Building A Network on a Chip for a Raspberry Pi Zero Cluster A Raspberry Pi cluster is a popular platform for experimentation and learning about parallel computing. The tiny Raspberry Pi Zero has no built-in ethernet capability, so a Pi Zero cluster needs an alternative way to connect the CPUs. By implementing a specialised local network on an FPGA chip, linked to a serial or SPI port on each CPU, we can avoid the need for bulky ethernet cables and switches, and build a very compact cluster with low cost and low power consumption. * As a member of Oxford University's Programming Research Group in the 1980s, Richard Miller wrote software for parallel computing systems from the transputer to the Cray T3D. More recently as a freelance software engineer, he ported the Plan 9 operating system to the Raspberry Pi. His current focus is on FPGA circuit design. — From humble beginnings to manufacturing the HILTOP open source test and measurement platform and the problems along the way! The story of how three entrepreneurs with a vision and willingness to succeed have carved out an open source test and measurement business and the details behind the hardware and software problems they had with early prototypes and product integration. * Tim Telford is a hardware engineer with diverse skill set and highly motivated self starter. Passionate about design detail and experienced in high reliability solutions for the Aerospace, Defence, Telecoms and Nuclear industries. Development of test equipment and measurement systems for Rolls-Royce Aerospace. Systems and Electronic engineering experience within the nuclear industry. Design of commercial test equipment and high integrity, high value projects. Analogue and Digital board level design, Schematics, PCB, FPGA development, DFM, DFT, Simulation, systems design and integration/testing. Requirements management, FMEA, WCA & PSA analysis techniques. * Joe Burmeister spent nearly 12 years in the console and PC game industry. He worked in a number of areas from graphics and animation engine to art and animation tools, finally file systems and databases. Joe comes from a multiple platform background, partly as consoles used to not be PCs, but also having grown up on RISC OS (Acorn’s desktop ARM OS), before moving to Windows for work then Linux for fun and finally work. For the past five years Joe has done work on GNU/Linux, often on ARM. Having started out bedroom programming, Joe is a strong believer that everyone should have the option of source code and learning how things work. — Linux on Open Source Hardware and Libre Silicon This talk will explore Open Source Hardware projects relevant to Linux, including boards like BeagleBone, Olimex OLinuXino, Giant board and more. Looking at the benefits and challenges of designing Open Source Hardware for a Linux system, along with BeagleBoard.org's experience of working with community, manufacturers, and distributors to create an Open Source Hardware platform. In closing also looking at the future, Libre Silicon like RISC-V designs, and where this might take Linux. * Drew Fustini is an Open Source Hardware designer at OSH Park, board member of the BeagleBoard Foundation, maintainer of the Adafruit BeagleBone Python library, and Open Source Hardware Association vice president. — Exploring the Gigatron TTL Computer The Gigatron TTL computer is an open source computer constructed almost entirely from TTL logic - without the need for a microprocessor. The unique design combines 36 standard 74HCTxx TTL devices with ROM and RAM chips to make a platform capable of colour VGA video and sound. The machine can host 1980's style games and can be programmed in interactive Tiny BASIC. In the last year, Ken has explored the architecture of this machine and achieves some performance gains by overclocking the cpu by over 200%. This has yielded a platform that is rated at about 2 to 3 times the performance of the classic 1980's machines, such as the C64, Spectrum etc. Working with an unfamiliar architecture has meant creating some programming tools and also simulating the machine behaviour on an ARM processor. Ken discusses the progress to date - and poses the question, "What would computers be like had the microprocessor not appeared when it did?" * Ken Boak began programming computers in 1979 at school, and has * continued to do so - somewhat infrequently over the last 40 years. The Gigatron rekindles old memories of TTL logic and working with resource limited computing. It illustrates just how much can be done with such a minimal machine. — Gearing up for Volume Manufacturing: Tales from China The journey of a design from engineering sign-off all the way to customer shipment takes many months of hard work and the smallest of hiccups could translate to severe delays. With many actors involved, how does it all work? What is involved in designing and shipping a consumer product with high volume manufacturing in mind? This talk will give the audience a behind the scenes look at what it takes to ship electronics products at scale, particularly focusing on the approach, dialogue and the processes required to run a successful manufacturing project. * Omer Kilic is an embedded systems engineer who works at the various intersections of hardware and software engineering practices, product development and manufacturing. — Saving Your Electronic Conference Badge From A Life On The Shelf As the creator of an electronic conference badge, you want to create something memorable, a badge with Wow! factor which will be remembered fondly and remain in use for years afterwards. Unfortunately so many badges end up sitting in drawers gathering dust, never to see the light of day again. Firmware,hardware, or documentation haven't been kind to the conference attendees, and though you've given them an amazing piece of hardware they just haven't been able to get a handle on it and use it in their own projects. This talk gives a few ideas about how that might be avoided, how an awesome badge can avoid being an ignominious piece of e-waste and become a valued piece of hardware used in projects for years afterwards. * Jenny List is an electronic engineer and technical writer who spent a long career in electronic publishing from CD-ROMs to dictionaries before breaking out and forming her own hardware business, and writing about hardware as a contributing editor for Hackaday.com. — What's So Good About The Z80 CPU Anyway? This talk will briefly cover the history of the Zilog Z80 CPU including early development, some predictable places where it turned up, as well as some more less expected uses. It will include a look at the architecture of the Z80 itself and then an overview of how to build a simple Z80 based computer and program it in BASIC. This will lead on to a description of the kit in your goodie bag and a plug for the workshop on the Sunday. * Spencer Owen like many kids in the 80s, loved his ZX Spectrum and other 8 bit computers. This set him up for a career in IT, and he worked as a server engineer and network engineer for many years. In 2013, in a bid to see if he really understood how computers worked at the lowest level, Spencer went back to his roots built a simple Z80 based machine on a breadboard. This was to mature in to the RC2014, which Spencer started selling in his spare time in 2015. Within a few months it was clear that the RC2014 was taking up more time than he had spare, so he quit network job and started a retro computer kit company. Spencer is now the largest supplier of Z80 computers worldwide. — Next Generation Open Source FPGAs After the success of Icestorm and the growth of the open source FPGA ecosystem, work started on the next generation of open source FPGA toolchains in 2018. This includes the next-generation place-and-route tool nextpnr, designed to support a wide range of FPGA architectures as well as producing higher quality results with less runtime. Combined with Project Trellis which provides bitstream documentation for the Lattice ECP5 FPGAs, a wide range of advanced projects such as Linux-capable RISC-V SoCs with fast memory, Ethernet and video interfaces are possible with an end-to-end open source flow. This talk will introduce these new tools and their capabilities, as well as discussing what lies ahead for open source FPGA tools, and how you can get involved in this exciting new open world! * David Shah is a engineer at Symbiotic EDA and a Electronic and Information Engineering student at Imperial College London. He entered the world of open source FPGAs by extending Project Icestorm, the iCE40 bitstream documentation project, to include the newer iCE40 UltraPlus FPGAs. As well developing Project Trellis, he has been involved in the development of a new open source FPGA place-and-route tool, nextpnr. — Heterogeneous design for embedded development Developing embedded solutions for today's challenging applications be them IoT, consumer, automation or robotics requires a heterogeneous technology approach involving hardware, FPGA, µC Firmware, and software combined at multiple levels. Concepts such as Machine Vision/Learning, Artificial Intelligence coupled with traditional embedded hardware and software stacks require hybrid approaches to design and implementation. I take a look at typical hardware being used and platform sweet spots I have been identified. I also take a look at some emerging tools and approaches for tackling these heterogeneous projects. * 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 automation using FPGA and µC. He is a long term advocate of open source communities, a moderator (aka Folknology) for xCORE, the co-founder of myStorm open hardware FPGA community, as well as a co-founder of Surrey and Hampshire Makerspace. — EMC Design for Open Source Hardware Many Open Source electronics designs start off as cool development tools and end up being integrated into commercial products due to their low barrier to entry and ease of development. Now your hardware becomes subject to various Regulatory requirements, Electro-Magnetic Compatibility (EMC) amongst them. Whilst it might not be viable for an Open Source project to undergo full compliance testing, there are things that can be done to improve the EMC performance of your system. In this talk, James gives an overview of common problems encountered during EMC testing of Open Source hardware and the fixes required to resolve them. We'll also look at some key electromagnetic concepts (don't worry, no scary maths) that will help you look at your designs in a new light. * James Pawson runs Unit 3 Compliance, a West Yorkshire EMC test lab and consultancy that offers practical advice and EMC problem solving for a wide range of electronics products. *** Sunday :: Workshops *** — Customising a RISC-V Core - workshop Starting from an Open-source RISC-V core, add a new instruction to it that you design! This workshop will walk through the process of getting started with simulating an open-source RISC-V core and making the necessary modifications to decode and execute a new instruction. A processor that supports a new instruction is not much good if you can't write any code for it, so the second part of the workshop will focus on adding support into the assembler for your new instruction, so that you can write a program using the instruction and see that it executes correctly (or does not, and helps you to work out the bugs in your implementation). The tutorial materials will provide enough of the implementation and sufficient guidance to be able to work through with a little experience of Verilog and C++. For those new to Verilog, the materials from last year's talk and workshop ("Introduction to cycle-accurate Verilog simulation" and "Open Source RISC-V core quickstart") will be available to provide a more accessible starting point. Participants should bring: - A laptop. * Run by: Graham Markall — A Crash Course in KiCAD A KiCAD basics workshop that will be a crash course covering the main aspects of schematic capture, PCB layout and generating the manufacturing outputs and 3D models etc. Participants should bring: - A laptop with KiCAD version 5 installed ready to go. * Run by: Tim Telford — Gigatron TTL Computer demo and hands-on There will be a demo of the machine and an opportunity to do some retro-programming. * Run by: Ken Boak — SMD Soldering In this workshop we will introduce common SMD soldering techniques, including stencils and solder paste usage in a hobbyist home-lab capacity. The format is a series of demonstrations followed by exercises. Participants will be provided with a kit of parts and will assemble their circuits taking turns on the equipment provided. There will be a mixture of hand soldering and hot plate/air reflow techniques covered and a variety of SMD packages including some fine pitch components will be used. Participant requirements: - Some familiarity with soldering and electronics in general would be beneficial. * Run by: Omer Kilic — Assembling Your RC2014 Z80 Based Computer This workshop will take participants through all the stages of assembling and getting started with the RC2014 kit. Some basic soldering experience is assumed and soldering irons and tools will be available for groups of up to 6 people at a time. There will be a nominal charge of £5 per person. Participants should bring: - A laptop. - An FTDI cable if they have one. — Heterogeneous embedded hardware example walk through A walk through a practical heterogeneous application and its development, based around the combination of a microcontroller and an FPGA along with mixed tooling. * Run by: Alan Wood NOTE: - There are separate tickets for Saturday and Sunday. - A light lunch and refreshments will be provided each day. - Delegates will receive an RC2014 Micro upon registration on the Saturday! - Please aim to arrive between 09:00 and 09:15 on the Saturday as the event will start at 09:20 prompt. With thanks to Open Source Hardware Camp 2019 sponsors: * BCS Open Source Specialist Group - https://ossg.bcs.org/ * AB Open - https://abopen.com/ * RC2014 - https://rc2014.co.uk/ // -- Andrew Back http://abopen.com

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OSHCamp 2019 (31st Aug & 1st Sept), call for Talks & Workshops.
by Andrew Back 28 Mar '19

28 Mar '19

Hello, This year we will be returning to Hebden Bridge Town Hall for OSHCamp , over the weekend of Saturday 31st August & Sunday 1st September. Details of the call for talks and workshops can be found below. Regards, Andrew // -+- Open Source Hardware Camp 2019 -+- This year Open Source Hardware Camp will take place over the weekend of Saturday 31st August & Sunday 1st September, at Hebden Bridge Town Hall, St George's St, Hebden Bridge, West Yorkshire, HX7 7BY. Proposals for talks and workshops for OSHCamp 2019 are invited! There is no theme and topics may include, for example: * Open source hardware projects * Open development practices and principles * Novel/interesting/fun projects built using open source hardware * Tools (hardware and software) * Skills and techniques, e.g. PCB fab, DIY SMT assembly * Relevant technologies, e.g. SPI/I2C bus programming * ...something else relevant to the community If you would like to give a talk on the Saturday and/or run a workshop on the Sunday, please submit details via the form at: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1Bd2FHzkjehF-7zD386xbJ1ujrVcWWPoe_As1WOYnrQ… Any questions can either be directed to the list, sent to andrew at abopen.com, or discussed in person with myself, Sevan Janiyan or Andy Bennett at an OSHUG/OSSG meeting. **** Note that the deadline for submitting titles and abstracts is Monday 8th April at 17:00. If you would like to discuss ideas etc. please get in touch sooner, rather than later. **** A social is planned for the Saturday evening and details of accommodation nearby to the venue will be provided in due course. // -- Andrew Back http://abopen.com

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