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OSHUG #72 — Open Source FPGA Hardware and Tooling Past, Present and Future, Thurs 21st March.
by Andrew Back 13 Mar '19

13 Mar '19

Hello, Registration is now open for the 72nd meeting, which is being held in partnership with the BCS OSSG. Details below. Also a reminder that the OSHCamp 2019 call closes in a little under a month, on Monday 8th April! Still plenty of opportunity to submit talk and workshop proposals and there is an online form at: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1Bd2FHzkjehF-7zD386xbJ1ujrVcWWPoe_As1WOYnrQ… Any questions don't hesitate to get in touch. Cheers, Andrew // Event #72 — Open Source FPGA Hardware and Tooling Past, Present and Future. On 21 March 2019, 18:30 - 20:30 at BCS London, 1st Floor, The Davidson Building, 5 Southampton Street, London, WC2E 7HA. Registration: http://oshug.org/event/72 Once upon a time we could only use proprietary tools and development boards supplied by FPGA vendors. This all changed in 2016 with the advent of the IceStorm open source toolchain, combined with open hardware like the myStorm board. With the 2nd generation of tools and hardware, sophisticated FPGA features are opening exciting avenues for 'open source all the way down'. We hope to provide an update and crystal ball on where some of this could be leading to. — Tools: past to present David Shah looks at where we have come from with the IceStorm toochain, and looks at how this has developed recently and expanded Lattice iCE40 support to include new lower power, lower cost, reduced pin count FPGAs to include their Ultra & Ultra Plus range. — Hardware: past to present Alan Wood talks about the journey through the early history of open source FPGA open hardware from IcoBoard through myStorm too recent UltraPlus offerings recently made available. — Tools: present to future IceStorm was aimed at a narrow family of iCE40 FPGAS, the new SymbiFlow family of tools expands the open source tooling exponentially. David Shah takes a look at NextPNR, which lies at the heart of the toolset and deals with specific FPGA family functionality, in particular he concentrates on the Lattice ECP5 family support he has developed with Project Trellis as part of NextPNR and the recent 1.0 version supporting this new family and high end FPGA features. — Hardware: present to future What comes next for open source FPGA hardware, after the success of tinyFPGA and myStorm we are beginning to see ECP5 open source hardware emerging, first with Radiona's ULX3S and being followed up by offerings from both tinyFPGA and myStorm dev board stables. With new hardware comes new features building on NextPNRs tooling, like DSP, SerDES I/O gearing and DDR memory etc. Alan plots the course for these new powerful opesource development boards. — Demos Time permitting we can show some of what's possible with the new tools in a brave new 'open source all the way down' 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. * Alan Wood has been working with parallel distributed programming for several decades. His recent work includes smart grids, 3D printers, robotics, automation, biotec diagnostics and designing FPGA dev boards. His current research is focused on machine learning for embedded automation using FPGAs. 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. Note: Please aim to arrive by 18:15 as the event will start at 18:30 prompt. -- Andrew Back http://abopen.com

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OSHUG #69 — Members' Lightning Talks, Thurs 16th Sept.
by Andrew Back 25 Aug '18

25 Aug '18

Hello, Registration is now open for the 69th meeting, held in partnership with the BCS OSSG, and featuring a series of member lightning talks. Details below. Regards, Andrew // Event #69 — Members' Lightning Talks 13 September 2018, 18:30 - 20:00 at BCS London, 1st Floor, The Davidson Building, 5 Southampton Street, London, WC2E 7HA. http://oshug.org/event/69 We don't usually do a September meeting, but we thought it would be interesting to hear from our members about the projects that they have been working on over the year. We're delighted to welcome a range of speakers who will spend 10 or 15 minutes discussing their projects. This is a joint meeting with the British Computer Society Open Source Specialist Group. — Hammerspoon: Staggeringly powerful macOS desktop automation Hammerspoon exposes many parts of macOS to the simple scripting language Lua. Its goal is to make the most powerful and flexible tool for serious power users to automate and customise as many things as possible. In this talk we'll look at the history of automation on Apple computers, how Hammerspoon works, and some of the excellent things it can help you do. Of course, it's Open Source, so you can also jump in and help make it even better! * Chris Jones has been creating, using, and advocating for Open Source software, since the mid-1990s. He's spent the last 12 years of his professional life working on/with Open Source - the first half at Canonical (creators of Ubuntu) and since then working on OpenStack at HP and Red Hat. After 13 years of zealously running only Linux on his desktops/laptops, he has spent the last 8 years recovering as a macOS user, but has nevertheless retained his passion for contributing to Open Source. — Cooking with a touch of science and a dash of engineering. Sous vide (under vacuum) is a technique that places food into a temperature controlled water bath. The vacuum bit isn't that important, and squeezing the air out of a zip lock bag is generally sufficient; but precise temperature control is essential to ensure that the right proteins are denatured. The thermostat in a typical piece of kitchen equipment is nowhere near good enough, but add a sensor (immersible temperature gauge), an actuator (433MHz remote control socket), some control software and a dev board to run it on and you have the ability to cook perfect steaks, eggs, fish or whatever. * 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 Delivery for DXC Technology 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. — Building an Open Source Electric Surfboard With the increasing availability of 3D printers and the wide variety of components available over the internet, how hard is it to build an electric surfboard? This talk will cover the design and construction of an open-source electric surfboard from the concept to hitting the sea, including some of the challenges met along the way, especially those to do with managing lots of electricity very close to lots of water. The project can be found on GitHub at https://github.com/largeostrich/openelectricsurfboard and https://github.com/largeostrich/openwaterjet. * Peter Bennett (thelargeostrich) is currently studying Mining Engineering at Camborne School of Mines, University of Exeter. He has a long standing interest in open source technology, particularly 3D printing and electronics. He previously reimagined peripherals for the EDSAC using 3D printing and arduino for ChipHack at Wuthering Bytes 2017. — Jumbo Servo - I2C position control When Andy needed a really big servo, rather than spend a fortune on an industrial monster, he decided to make one. As it would be used with a Raspberry Pi or Microcontroller he decided it would be digitally controlled rather than the usual analogue pwm. * Andy Clark has been Making and Repairing in a shed at the bottom of the garden for the last 10 years. The code and designs for his often quirky and enchanting projects can be found on GitHub and documented on the Workshopshed blog. — Next Generation Storage Interfaces The efficient, convenient, and robust execution of data-driven workflows and enhanced data management are key for productive in computer-aided RD&E. Still, the storage stack is based on the low-level POSIX I/O (or objects in cloud storage). This talk introduces chances for establishing an open community-driven next-generation storage interface in a similar fashion to the existing forums. The forum would bring together vendors, storage experts, and users to discuss key features of the API and establish governance strategies. The envisioned coarse-grained API aims to overcome current obstacles for highly parallel workflows but would be beneficial also in the domain of big data and even desktop PC. It bears the opportunity to create a new ecosystem. * Dr. Kunkel is a Lecturer at the Computer Science Department at the University of Reading. Previously, he worked as postdoc in the research department of the German Climate Computing Center (DKRZ) that partners with the Scientific Computing group at the Universität Hamburg. He manages several research projects revolving around High-Performance Computing and particularly high-performance storage. Julian became interested in the topic of HPC storage in 2003, during his studies of computer science. Besides his main goal to provide efficient and performance-portable I/O, his HPC-related interests are: data reduction techniques, performance analysis of parallel applications and parallel I/O, management of cluster systems, cost-efficiency considerations, and software engineering of scientific software. — upspin.io: a personal storage and sharing system Details TBC — A Plan 9 C Compiler for RISC-V The Plan 9 operating system was developed at Bell Labs in the 1980s using a new C compiler written by Ken Thompson, which was also later used to implement the kernel of the Inferno operating system and to bootstrap early releases of the Go language. Like Plan 9 itself, the compiler is highly portable, elegantly minimalist, lightweight and quick. The ARM version, for example, is about 21,000 lines of code and compiles itself in 15 seconds on a Raspberry Pi 3. This talk will describe the exercise of re-targeting the Plan 9 C compiler to generate code for the RISC-V open instruction set architecture. * Dr Richard Miller learned C in 1977 while re-targeting (and re-hosting) Dennis Ritchie's original Unix C compiler from the PDP-11 to the Interdata 7/32. Since then he has re-targeted Unix and Plan 9 C compilers for various other CPUs from NS 16032 to Nios II. Note: Please aim to arrive by 18:15 as the event will start at 18:30 prompt. // -- Andrew Back http://abopen.com

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Open Source Hardware Camp 2018 — Sat 30/06 & Sun 01/07, Lincoln.
by Andrew Back 23 Apr '18

23 Apr '18

Hello, I'm pleased to announce that we have 10 talks and 7 workshops confirmed for Open Source Hardware Camp 2018, with the possibility of one or two more. Registration is now open! As in previous years, there will be a social event on the Saturday evening and we have a room booked at the Wig and Mitre. Food will be available. There will likely be a few of us meeting up for pre-conference drinks on the Friday evening also. Details of the programme can be found below and, as ever, we have an excellent mix of topics being covered. Regards , Andrew // Open Source Hardware Camp 2018 On the 30th June 2018, 09:00 Saturday morning - 16:00 on the Sunday afternoon at The Blue Room, The Lawn, Union Rd, Lincoln, LN1 3BU. Registration: http://oshug.org/event/oshcamp2018 Open Source Hardware Camp 2018 will be hosted in the historic county town of Lincoln — home to, amongst others, noted engine builders Ruston & Hornsby (now Siemens, via GEC and English Electric). Lincoln is well served by rail, reachable from Leeds and London within 2-2.5 hours, and 4-5 hours from Edinburgh and Southampton. There will be a social at the Wig and Mitre on the Saturday evening. For travel and accommodation information information please see the event page on oshug.org. *** Saturday :: Talks *** — Introduction to cycle-accurate Verilog simulation Developing hardware designs in Verilog is tricky, for both FPGA platforms and ASIC hardware targets. Understanding the behaviour of a design, testing it, and debugging are made much easier by simulating in software. There are a variety of simulation approaches with different trade-offs in what properties of the design are accurately modelled and how quickly they run. This talk starts by giving a brief overview of the approaches, then focusing in more detail on cycle-accurate modelling, which is a relatively fast approach that is robustly implemented in an open-source tool called Verilator. The main focus will be on working with CPU designs, but the software and techniques are generally applicable to other areas. A brief overview of how to use Verilator to simulate a design, to develop testbenches, and to visualise simulation output using GTKWave will be given. The software and techniques discussed in this talk will be put into practice in the "Open-source RISC-V core quickstart" workshop on Sunday. * Dr Graham Markall has a background in languages and compilers for scientific computing, and is well known for his work on the Numba project. He is part of Embecosm’s GNU tool chain team, where his current projects include the implementation of security enhancements to the GCC and LLVM compilers for RISC-V and ARM, and the development a GCC-based toolchain for a customised RISC-V processor. — LoRaWAN at 100,000 feet & 10mW with High Altitude Ballooning High-altitude balloons are manned or unmanned balloons, usually filled with helium, that are released into the stratosphere and generally attaining between 18,000 to 37,000 metres (59,000 to 121,000 ft; 11 to 23 mi). In 2002, a balloon named BU60-1 attained 53.0 km (32.9 mi; 173,900 ft). The advent of cheap open source electronics & suitable GPS chips has allowed hobbyists worldwide to build fly & (usually) recover these balloons since the mid 2000’s with modest budgets compared to professional weather balloons. Indeed, the Raspberry Pi Foundation ran a few Skycademy events aimed at helping school teachers. There is a wealth of information available from the United Kingdom High Altitude Society (UKHAS), their website HabHUB.org and Dave Ackerman’s website. Ofcom limit the power of any airborne transmitter to 10mW, which whilst tiny isn’t a practical problem since the line of sight is usually superb. The community stated using RTTY initially but latterly has begun to use LoRaWAN to transmit the telemetry and some of the pictures taken during a typical 2 to 3 hour flight. The Civil Aviation Authority will grant permission for such flight via their system, NOTAMs. It’s normal to be asked to contact air traffic control before launch to make sure commercial aviation traffic isn’t hindered. * Tony Brookes is a member of the Derby Makers who is leading a project to launch such a balloon (or more if funding permits) over the summer. Derby Makers are now resident in the Radio Communications Museum of Great Britain in Derby following their tenure in the Derby Silk Mill museum which is now undergoing HLF funded refurbishment. — Machine Vision Machine Vision is one of the fastest growing disciplines in robotics and automation. In the past, discrete vision processing tasks have been both complex and brittle requiring a great deal of specialisation and practice. Now however machine learning (ML) inference is becoming practical at the edge, Machine Vision is one of the emerging 'edge applications' of ML inference technology. Machine Vision is much less brittle than earlier approaches and promises much wider and simpler applications. This talk (and hands on workshop) will explore the landscape of Machine Vision and its applications for robotics and automation. * 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, CSP and Neural Turing Machines. 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. — Making Electronic Tesla Coils - Keeping in the Magic Smoke This talk will give an overview of designing and building an electronic Tesla coil from off the shelf or easily modified components. It will cover the safety, construction methods and some of the theory of operation. It will also present details of the controls and methods needed to prevent the Tesla coil from destroying itself when power is applied. * Derek Woodroffe has been building Tesla coils as a hobby for over 20 years. He has constructed over 30 different Tesla coils, from 30mm to over 1M tall and of many different types. He runs both the Nottingham Gaussfest and Cambridge Tesla coiler meet-ups and has worked a number of times on TV to assist with Tesla coil and high voltage demonstrations to programs such as the Royal Institute Christmas Lectures and Dara O Briain's Science club. Derek also has a keen interest in all other uses and generators of high voltage and has built working examples of many. His projects are detailed on www.extremeelectronics.co.uk. Amazingly, he is still alive. — Turning your hobby project in to a business for fun and profit Designing hardware is the easy part. Turning it in to a business is where it gets interesting. This talk will cover some of the things needed to take it to market, including stock, marketing, shipping, support, cash flow. * 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. — MakerNet Alliance A brief presentation of ideas the MakerNet Alliance is working on with E-nable.org for a Design Ecology Interface, to visualize the evolution of open source designs for prosthetics (and ultimately any hardware designs) and help users find the design version with the features they need. The presentation will be followed by discussion session with the audience to get feedback on the ideas and input on requirements. * Anna Sera Lowe has always been fascinated by how things are made and how they get to the people who need them. As a manufacturing manager and later a supply chain consultant, she made a career of finding great excuses to visit manufacturing facilities around the globe; from multi-million dollar automated factories to informal waste-processing operations on dumps (sometimes next to each other) - and everything in between. She has consulted for clients as diverse as Johnson & Johnson, the state electricity monopoly of South Africa, and the Global Fund to Fight Aids, Tuberculosis, and Malaria. Over the last few years her interest has been caught by ideas around grassroots innovation and distributed manufacturing networks. She co-founded Kumasi Hive, a makerspace in Ghana, and is leading work on MakerNet, an initiative to explore business models and digital tools for local manufacturing of useful goods for development. — EMC for IoT Often the last thing on your mind when working on an exciting new project are the regulatory hurdles that come with getting a product ready for sale in the European market. These afterthoughts suddenly become pressing priorities as you approach your launch date. Electro-Magnetic Compatibility (EMC) is the study of how all electronic devices and phenomena interact and, in our increasingly electro-dense society, these requirements become all the more important. Without EMC and radio regulations we would suffer interference to the wireless infrastructure we so depend on. This talk will give a tour through the EMC and radio regulations for a typical IoT type product (equally applicable to any electronics product), why they are required and look at some of the risks and pitfalls involved in the process. If you've got a product that you want to start selling, have limited experience or are merely EMC-curious then this talk will be extremely useful. Questions often asked include: Why do I need to do EMC testing? What about if I have a radio module in my product? What sort of certificate should I have? Do I even need to do anything? You'll find some of the answers here. * James Pawson, Unit 3 Compliance. Having a broad background of electronics experience (and also a beard), James found himself drawn to the field of EMC partly because of the interesting variety of work and partly because no one else wanted to do it. Twelve years later, now with his own test laboratory and consultancy business, he has found his vocation in helping solve people's EMC problems. He's also found more grey hairs in his beard and worries that the two are related. — Non-Standard Computation — From Bits to Pulses to Spikes Taken together the rise of parallel distributed processing and the end of Moore's law has brought a renaissance in alternative views of computation. This talk is a journey through the rapidly changing area of non-standard computation: from GPU's, tensor and neuromorphic processors to stochastic, temporal and quantum computation. The main aim of the talk is to describe the tremendous opportunities that currently exist for radical change in computational paradigms, and crucially for the open source community, in the delivery of these architectures. * Jonny Edwards is the CEO/CTO of Temporal Computing - the first business in the UK to focus on temporal computation methods. The work on temporal computing started in the Non-Standard Computation Group at York University, via several Unconventional Computing Conferences, and has since attracted VC and IUK funding to support long-term commercial exploitation. — It’s the people, stupid! (But the people aren’t stupid) — Hardware as an enabler to Heating as as Service Why are clocks slowing down over western Europe like halving your heating bills at home? Remember when at the start of the year a row in one corner of what used to be Yugoslavia caused clocks across Europe to slow down and eventually lose six minutes? Nothing technical was broken, and it’s a reminder that people issues can’t just be ‘fixed’ blindly with tech. When a purely technical fix for energy efficiency is installed, for example a better boiler, savings tend to persist for many years, maybe for a decade if the tech lasts that long. Solutions that may make as big a difference but rely on the people around it continuing to do something to assist, tend to have much shorter persistence. Maybe between one and four years. We already have a smart radiator valve called “Radbot” that can knock 20–50% off your heating bills and pay for itself in a year. It requires very little input if any to do its job. But it won’t work if people open all their windows in winter and expect magic to happen. Yes, some people do. We just finished an Innovate UK project "Heating as a Service - Lite”. We are more convinced than ever that while the technical and financial elements are probably easy to find solutions to, the social part, making things that work with real people for a long time, is intriguing! * Damon Hart-Davis created the OpenTRV project 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 production 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 25 years ago. A previous virtual/on-line credit-card company start-up that he co-founded as CTO, Ixaris, turns over ~GBP13m. — Bela, an embedded platform for ultra-low latency audio and sensor processing Bela started off as a research project at Centre For Digital Music (Queen Mary University of London) and is now a commercial product, mainly aimed at makers, programmers and researchers that work with audio. The platform is based on a BeagleBone Black with a custom expansion cape and a dedicated software environment. The board runs Debian Linux with Xenomai as a real-time co-kernel. The combined use of Xenomai and the BeagleBone Black's on-board PRU microcontroller allows to achieve sub-millisecond latency for audio and sensor processing, while node.js is used to provide a user-friendly web-based IDE. The project is entirely open source, hardware and software. * Giulio Moro is a PhD student in the Centre for Digital Music at Queen Mary University of London. A sound engineer by training, he is now researching in the field of performer-instrument interaction. He is one of the inventors and core developers of Bela. -Note that this talk was originally given at OSHUG #63 in London and is being repeated at OSHCamp as a refresher and to serve as an introduction for the workshop on the Sunday.- *** Sunday :: Workshops *** — Open-source RISC-V core quickstart An introductory workshop for getting starting with simulating RISC-V cores using Verilator, which is an open-source tool for generating cycle-accurate models of hardware designs written in Verilog. Although this workshop focuses on simulation, the cores can in general be instantiated on FPGAs for use in real applications (and higher performance!) The workshop will use two or three different RISC-V implementations (including Clifford Wolf's PicoRV32 and Ariane from the PuLP platform). Loading and executing programs onto these bare metal systems through a testbench and also through a debugger (GDB) will be covered, along with some examples of interacting with the cores, and inspecting their state. Gathering accurate performance measurements is also possible, because the simulations are cycle-accurate. The tutorial materials will provide enough implementation that it is possible to follow this workshop without having had prior experience of hardware design or Verilog specifically - however, some understanding of programming and the organisation of computer hardware will be required. The workshop should be of interest to people with a background in software who would like to tinker with open-source processor core development, and people with a background in hardware who would like to tinker with software toolchains. — An introductory workshop to NetBSD on embedded platforms An introductory workshop to NetBSD in the context of developing embedded platforms. NetBSD is a fully featured operating system with great agility that has been around for many many years. This workshop is intended to introduce some of the features which are available in the operating system as standard. We'll explore how to go from obtaining the source code to building the operating system, cover features which simplify working with the system, how accessible it is without resorting to installing third party software or writing any C. Topics we will cover: - Cross compilation support with build.sh - File tamper detection / execution prevention with Veriexec - High-level access to subsystems e.g exploring GPIO via Lua - Rapid development with Rumpkernel * 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. — High Altitude Ballooning An in-depth look at the help and advice available online, likely costs and technical issues for those wanting to build, fly and recover a HAB. If our project has some spares available, I’ll try and bring them along so people can see what’s being discussed. If we’re lucky there may be a balloon launch somewhere in the world that we can follow during the session! * Run by: Tony Brookes — Machine Vision A hands-on machine vision workshop - further details TBC. * Run by: Alan Wood — Soldering Workshop A soldering workshop where novices get to assemble and program the Cuttlefish, Arduino-compatible, kit. * Chelsea Back is a trainee engineer and is working towards a degree in Electronic Engineering. She enjoys building microcontroller projects and teaching people how to solder, is a student member of the IET and a STEM Ambassador. — Build a Z80 based retro computer A step-by-step build of a RC2014 Mini Z80 Retro Computer. Approx 2 hours should be enough time to assemble a computer running BASIC. Participants will need to purchase a (heavily discounted) RC2014 Mini. Some soldering experience is assumed. * Run by: Spencer Owen — Bela: an embedded platform for ultra-low latency audio and sensor processing This hands-on workshop introduces Bela, an embedded platform for ultra-low latency audio and sensor processing. Bela is useful for creating digital musical instruments and other interactive projects, which can be developed in C/C++, Pure Data (Pd) or Supercollider. The platform features an on-board browser-based IDE for getting started quickly. In this workshop we will guide participants through connecting sensors and accessing them from C++ or PureData and use them to control the generated sound. On Bela, sensor inputs are sampled at audio frequency and with high resolution (16bit), in order to allow for detailed, nuanced interactions. The hardware and software architecture allows sub-millisecond latency, allowing for expressive musical performances, as well as feedback control of physical systems. * Run by: Giulio Moro 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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OSHUG 66 — Shrimping (hand-built Arduino) workshop, Thursday 19th April.
by Andrew Back 05 Apr '18

05 Apr '18

Hello, Registration is now open for the 66th meeting, a Shrimping workshop for children and adults, held in partnership with BCS OSSG. Regards, Andrew // OSHUG #66 — Shrimping (hand-built Arduino) workshop for children and adults 19 April 2018, 18:30 - 20:00 at BCS London, 1st Floor, The Davidson Building, 5 Southampton Street, London, WC2E 7HA. Registration: http://oshug.org/event/66 The shrimp is a small Arduino compatible computer built on a breadboard. In this 1.5 hour workshop you will learn how to build and program a Shrimp, with two projects. Bring your children (7 and up) — Workshop details Project 1. Flashing LED. This project is to get you started. You will build the shrimp, and get it to flash a small LED. You will then learn how to program the shrimp to change how the LED flashes. Project 2. Persistence of vision. You will add a line of LEDs to your shrimp, and program it to flash them at very high speed, so when waved in the air it spells out a message. At the end of the workshop you can take your shrimp home with you. This workshop is suitable for anyone over the age of 7. For children 7-11, it is very much about following instructions to build a computer. For older children (our record is 92), you will start to understand how a computer works and want to explore how much it can be modified. Pre-requisits BCS Open Source SG will supply the Shrimping kits. You'll need to bring a laptop with the free Arduino IDE installed — Speaker Biographies Dr Jeremy Bennett is Chair of the BCS Open Source Specialist Group. He is also Chief Executive of Embecosm who provide open source compiler development services. A former academic he is author of the standard textbook "Introduciton to Compiling Techniques" (McGraw-Hill 1990, 1995, 2003). Note: Please aim to arrive by 18:15 as the event will start at 18:30 prompt. // -- Andrew Back http://abopen.com

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OSHCamp travel, accommodation and social.
by Andrew Back 19 Feb '18

19 Feb '18

Hello, Below you can find details of the venue, local accommodation and travel for OSHCamp 2018. We have our own room reserved at The Wig and Mitre (http://www.wigandmitre.com/) for the social on the evening of Sat 30th June, with details of the venue (pub!) for pre-OSHCamp drinks on Fri 29th to follow. The first few talks and workshops have been confirmed and just a reminder that the closing date for proposals is a little over a month away, 25th March. So if you would like to give a talk and/or host a workshop, please enter details via the form at: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1pLyItcKRDYmegNXtAXRgpt21yOFXdWlBO_K6uu0LlB… Regards, Andrew // — Venue The event will be held at The Blue Room, The Lawn, Union Road, Lincoln, LN1 3BU (map location https://goo.gl/maps/mdW1g8Pmk492). Lincoln is a city of two halves, the uphill and the downhill. The OSHUG venue is located uphill in the historic area of the city, home to the castle and cathedral, museums, pubs and a quaint shopping area The Bailgate. The downhill area of Lincoln is the shopping and transport hub, and also contains the Brayford Pool and most ‘night-life’. — Where to stay There are a variety of accommodation options within and around Lincoln from self-contained lets, guest houses, hotels, farms and camping. Visit the Visit Lincoln Website for lots of options, https://www.visitlincoln.com/stay/ Some nearby, reasonably priced accommodation includes: 202 Guest House, 07767 497 189 http://www.202guesthouse.co.uk/lincoln/rooms-and-accommodation.asp (0.5 miles from conference venue – mid hill location.) St Clements Old Rectory Apartments, 5 Self Catering Apartments and 1 Guest room available, (0)1522 538087 http://www.stayatstclements.co.uk/ (0.5 miles from conference - uphill location). 2 Night minimum. — Travel For downloadable PDF maps and guides of Lincoln including Bus Routes, Cycle Routes and a Train Map visit the Visit Lincoln website. * By Road >From the North Via the A15 (Hull) or the A46 (Grimsby) >From the South Via the A46 (Leicester, Nottingham, Newark) or the A1 and A15 (London, East Anglia) >From the East Via the A158 (Skegness) >From the West Via the A1 and A57 (Leeds, Worksop, Sheffield) * Lincoln Car Parks There is a large council run car park at The Lawn, chargeable on the day at the ticket machines. (Has 2 fast-charge spaces.) There are many other car parks in the area, and both up and downhill. https://en.parkopedia.co.uk/parking/parking_in_lincoln/ Electric Charging points - https://www.lincoln.gov.uk/living-in-lincoln/transport-travel-and-parking/p… * By Train Lincoln Central railway station is located in the south of the city centre within easy walking distance of Lincoln High Street, the main shopping areas and the historic Cathedral Quarter. Direct connections are provided by East Midlands Trains, Virgin Trains East Coast and Northern Rail which operate daily services to Peterborough, Leicester, Nottingham, Sheffield, Doncaster and London. We would advise you to plan your trip in advance with an online route planner or by phone with TrainTracker 0871 200 49. More information on the train station and its services can be found here. You can find the station at: Lincoln Railway Station St Mary’s Street Lincoln Lincolnshire LN5 7EW The train station is fully accessible for wheelchairs. * By Bus There are good bus connections throughout Lincolnshire and Lincoln. Lincoln Bus Station: You can find the (brand new!) central bus station, near the train station and at: 18-20 Sincil Bank, Lincoln LN5 7ET For all timetable and route information please visit the Lincolnshire County Council website or call in to the Travel Shop at the bus station. Local operators include Stagecoach and PC Coaches. Walk & Ride Steep Hill Shuttle: The Lincoln Walk & Ride Steep Hill Shuttle is a useful local bus service which operates to link the Cathedral Quarter with the High Street, Cultural and Brayford Waterfront Quarters stopping at most key points across the city. The Walk & Ride Steep Hill Shuttle runs 6 days a week throughout the year: Monday to Saturday: 9.10am – 2:47pm, 4:10pm – 5:22pm. Walk & Ride tickets can be purchased on the bus. Park and Ride: For details see: https://lincolnbus.co.uk/special-services/lincoln-park-and-ride -- Andrew Back http://abopen.com

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OSHUG 65 — Yanking the Chain: open source software compliance in the supply chain, Thursday 22nd March.
by Andrew Back 07 Feb '18

07 Feb '18

Hello, In March we have another 1-day event, which this time will be dedicated to the topic of open source software compliance, featuring talks and workshops on topics such as OpenChain, SW360, Quartmermaster and FOSSology. There are additional sessions in the pipeline also and further details will be provided in due course. Cheers, Andrew // OSHUG #65 — Yanking the Chain: Open Source Software Compliance in the Supply Chain On the 22 March 2018, 09:00 - 17:00 at BCS London, 1st Floor, The Davidson Building, 5 Southampton Street, London, WC2E 7HA. Registration: http://oshug.org/event/65 With the ever increasing complexity of embedded device software stacks, coupled with the proliferation of new mechanisms for distributing complex server software stacks, open source compliance has never been more important — or indeed more of a challenge. Fortunately, there are growing number of tools and methods at our disposal to support open source software compliance efforts. This 1-day event will feature talks and hands-on workshops covering a number of these, with insights into practical experiences and lessons learned. The preliminary programme can be found below and please note that further details will be published in due course as additional sessions are confirmed. —Talks - Introducing OpenChain OpenChain is a scalable, flexible compliance programme, developed by the Linux Foundation. It provides a great foundation for businesses of all sizes to adopt appropriate practices and procedures in place to control development and supply chain risks. Already adopted by companies like Qualcomm, Toyota and ARM, it's equally applicable to SMEs. * Andrew Katz is a lawyer and former programmer who advises extensively on free and open source software and other opens. He is head of the technology department at Moorcrofts LLP, a boutique technology law firm, which is one of the 5 OpenChain pilot partners in the world, and has been involved in drafting many of the OpenChain materials. - Eclipse SW360 - Open Source Management with Open Source SW360 manages software components with their license compliance documentation in SPDX and allows for setting up bills-of-material to provide comprehensive documentation for products and projects. Organizations can use SW360 as a one-stop shop for sharing component information, tracking their usage in projects or products. This involves the handing of compliance information, but also, as an example, matching for vulnerabilities from data providers. As an EPL-1.0 licensed Open Source project, it is highly customizable, letting organizations keep their confidential product development data on premises, and prevents them from becoming dependent on a single vendor. This presentation shows briefly features and a walk through the application to demonstrate capabilities and use cases of SW360. * Michael C. Jaeger is one of the maintainers for the projects, FOSSology and SW360, both of which are in the area of license compliance and component management with open source software. At Siemens Corporate Technology in Munich, Germany, Michael manages the Siemens contributions to SW360 and FOSSology. Michael is a certified software architect and received a German PhD degree from the faculty of electrical engineering and computer science at TU Berlin. - How License Compliance Engineering Can be Simplified When people are confronted with license compliance for the first time it feels overwhelming because there are many aspects to it: license scanning of hundreds of thousands of files, complete and corresponding source code, derivative works and code clone detection, and so on. Clients often say that they simply do not know where to start. However, experience demonstrates that license compliance does not need to be overly complicated, as there are short-cuts that can be taken and have zero risk, but that will vastly speed up compliance processes. This talk will highlight a few best practices learned from compliance work with clients and explain how information from upstream projects can be used to make the license compliance processes quicker, predictable and more standardised. * Armijn Hemel, MSc, is an expert in open source license compliance engineering. From 2005-2012 he helped enforce the GPL license in Germany several hundred times as part of the coreteam of gpl-violations.org. Since then he has assisted companies to come into compliance (including in recent troll cases in Germany) and is actively involved in advancing the field of compliance by exploring new topics and tooling. - Compliance Tooling using Build Time Analysis The Quartermaster project aims at building industry standard tooling that supports the open source license compliance workflow. It's open source workflow engine integrates existing scanning and reporting tools, and integrates into continuous integration/development processes. It offers API endpoints against which toolmakers, communities and service providers can integrate their products, while maintaining an open source and open data model for the elemental toolchain. The presentation will explore a number of key findings from the development of Quartermaster so far. For example, that focusing on whole source packages alone to identify and convey license information may be insufficient, and that the product build process may be the most suitable time to create compliance documentation. The presentation will introduce the Quartermaster project, the novel approach it takes on implementing open source compliance tooling, and how the lessons learned from the prototype influenced the Quartermaster toolchain architecture. * Mirko Boehm is a Free Software and Open Source contributor, primarily as a software developer and speaker. He is the founder of the Quartermaster project, and has been a contributor to major Open Source projects including the KDE Desktop since 1997, including several years on the KDE e.V. Board. He is a visiting lecturer and researcher on Free Software and Open Source at the Technical University of Berlin, a fellowship representative in the FSFE general assembly and a Qt-certified specialist and trainer. The Open Invention Network protects the Open Source ecosystem by acquiring patents and licensing them royalty free to all participants. As director for the Linux system definition, Mirko is responsible for the technical scope that defines the field of use of the patent non-aggression agreements. As founder and CEO of Endocode, an employee-owned, shareholder company based in Berlin, Germany providing professional IT services with a focus on Open Source technologies, Mirko specialises in consulting to and mentoring startups and medium to large businesses. His areas of expertise include complex software development endeavours, the use of Open Source products and methods in organisations, and technology related issues of business strategy and intellectual property. — Workshops - Using FOSSology - License Analysis Hands On FOSSology is an open source license compliance software system and toolkit. As a toolkit, you can run license, copyright and export control scans from the command line. As a system, a database and Web user interface provide you with user interface and functionality to analyse the licensing situation of open source software. * Hosted by: Michael C. Jaeger. Note: Please aim to arrive by 08:45 as the workshop will start at 09:00 prompt. -- Andrew Back http://abopen.com

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Open Source Hardware Camp (30th June & 1st July), call for talks/workshops.
by Andrew Back 29 Jan '18

29 Jan '18

Hello, This year we will be hosting OSHCamp in the historic town of Lincoln, over the weekend of Sat 30th June & Sun 1st July. Details of the call for talks and workshops can be found below. // -- Open Source Hardware Camp 2018 -- This year Open Source Hardware Camp will take place over the weekend of Saturday 30th June & Sunday 1st July, at the Blue Room, Lincoln, LN1 3BU. We’re excited to be hosting OSHCamp for the first time ever in the historic county town of Lincoln — home to, amongst others, noted engine builders Ruston & Hornsby (now Siemens, via GEC and English Electric). Lincoln is well served by rail, reachable from Leeds and London within 2-2.5 hours, and 4-5 hours from Edinburgh and Southampton. Proposals for talks and workshops for OSHCamp 2018 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/1pLyItcKRDYmegNXtAXRgpt21yOFXdWlBO_K6uu0LlB… Any questions can either be directed to the list or sent to andrew(a)abopen.com. **** Note that the deadline for submitting titles and abstracts is Monday 25th March 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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OSHUG 64 — Intel® Movidius™ Neural Compute Stick Workshop, Thursday 22nd February.
by Andrew Back 03 Jan '18

03 Jan '18

Hello, Registration is now open for the first workshop of 2018, which will provide hands-on experience with using the Intel Movidius Neural Compute Stick and open source frameworks to deploy deep neural networks. Details of which and a link to registration can be found below. Regards, Andrew // OSHUG #64 — Intel® Movidius™ Neural Compute Stick Workshop. On the 22 February 2018, 09:00 - 17:00 at BCS London, 1st Floor, The Davidson Building, 5 Southampton Street, London, WC2E 7HA. http://oshug.org/event/64 Learn how to use the Intel® Movidius™ Neural Compute Stick and open source frameworks to deploy deep neural networks at the edge. — Workshop details Market research estimates there will be as many as 20 billion connected devices in the market by 2020. These devices are expected to generate billions of petabytes of data traffic between cloud and edge devices. In 2017 alone, 8.4B connected devices are expected in the market which is sparking a strong need to pre-process data at the edge. This has led many IoT device manufacturers, especially those working on vision based devices like smart cameras, drones, robots, AR/VR, etc., to bring intelligence to the edge. Through the recent addition of the Movidius™ VPU technology to its existing AI edge solutions portfolio, Intel is well positioned to provide solutions that help developers and data scientists pioneer the low-power intelligent edge devices segment. This workshop will provide hands-on experience with Intel’s Neural Compute Stick – a low-cost, form-factor developer kit for low-power vision based embedded inference applications. What You Will Learn: * Insights into how Movidius™ VPUs are pioneering DNN accelerated vision processing. * Introduction to hardware and software components of NCS. * Workflow of network profiling and application development using NCS. * Detection/Classification models * Advanced functionalities * Hands-on with advanced demos and sample codes built using NC SDK’s API framework, which includes support for Caffe and TensorFlow — Participant requirements ** Participants are required to bring a laptop computer with Ubuntu 16.04 and Neural Compute SDK installed ** https://github.com/movidius/ncsdk — What is provided * NCS hardware will be provided for use during the workshop * A light lunch will be provided and please ensure that any dietary requirements are made clear during registration — Hosted by The workshop will be hosted by Intel engineers. This workshop is free to attend and hosted by Intel in partnership with the BCS Open Source Specialist Group and the Open Source Hardware User Group. * Sponsored by DesignSpark — https://www.rs-online.com/designspark/home Note: Please aim to arrive by 08:45 as the workshop will start at 09:00 prompt. // -- Andrew Back http://abopen.com

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OSHUG 63 — Collaborative music making, ultra-low latency audio and sensor processing.
by Andrew Back 21 Dec '17

21 Dec '17

Hello, Details can be found below for the 63rdm, and first meeting of 2018, the theme for which is open source musical software and hardware. Regards, Andrew // Event #63 — Collaborative music making, ultra-low latency audio and sensor processing. On the 18 January 2018, 18:00 - 21:00 at BCS London, 1st Floor, The Davidson Building, 5 Southampton Street, London, WC2E 7HA. http://oshug.org/event/63 We start the new year with an event on the theme of open source musical software and hardware. — Bela, an embedded platform for ultra-low latency audio and sensor processing Bela started off as a research project at Centre For Digital Music (Queen Mary University of London) and is now a commercial product, mainly aimed at makers, programmers and researchers that work with audio. The platform is based on a BeagleBone Black with a custom expansion cape and a dedicated software environment. The board runs Debian Linux with Xenomai as a real-time co-kernel. The combined use of Xenomai and the BeagleBone Black's on-board PRU microcontroller allows to achieve sub-millisecond latency for audio and sensor processing, while node.js is used to provide a user-friendly web-based IDE. The project is entirely open source, hardware and software. * Giulio Moro is a PhD student in the Centre for Digital Music at Queen Mary University of London. A sound engineer by training, he is now researching in the field of performer-instrument interaction. He is one of the inventors and core developers of Bela. — Female Laptop Orchestra: exploring geographical, cultural, technical and artistic challenges of collaborative music making As a collective of female musicians, artists, engineers, computer scientists and researchers, Female Laptop Orchestra has been pushing the boundaries of technology and cross-cultural co-located and distributed collaborative music making since 2014. Besides musical instruments, we use a variety of open source and commercial tools to create music, stream music and connect with our audience during the performance. We often collaborate with classical composers and ensembles, filmmakers, visual designers, choreographers and dancers. Recently, we also collaborated with members of Women in Music Technology (a student organization whose goal is to encouraging more women to join the music tech field of study and highlight the often unsung role of women in music technology, based at Georgia Tech Centre for Music Technology in US) and Sonora (a collaborative network bringing together artists and researchers interested in feminist manifestations in the context of the arts, based in Brazil). * Nela Brown is a sound artist, technologist, researcher and educator. In the past decade, she composed music and designed sound for award-winning projects including theatre performances, dance, mobile, film, documentaries and interactive installations. She is the founder of the Female Laptop Orchestra (FLO), an eclectic group of female musicians and technologists exploring co-located and distributed collaborative music making within different contexts and across different geographical locations. As a creative director of FLO since 2014, Nela co-ordinated 7 national and international FLO performances involving 36 collaborators from 21 different countries. — Talk #3 TBA Note: Please aim to arrive by 18:15 as the event will start at 18:30 prompt. Closing date for bookings is Tuesday 16th January 2018 at 11:30 pm. No more bookings will be taken after this date. For overseas delegates who wish to attend the event please note that BCS does not issue invitation letters // -- Andrew Back http://abopen.com

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OSHUG 62 — RISC-V, RISC-V, RISC-V, Thursday 23rd November.
by Andrew Back 08 Nov '17

08 Nov '17

Hello, Details can be found below for the 62nd meeting, the theme for which is the RISC-V open ISA. Regards, Andrew // Event #62 — RISC-V, RISC-V, RISC-V On the 23 November 2017, 18:00 - 21:00 at BCS London, 1st Floor, The Davidson Building, 5 Southampton Street, London, WC2E 7HA. Registration: http://oshug.org/event/62 The sixty-second meeting will be on the theme of RISC-V, an open ISA which started life at the University of California, Berkeley. A joint meeting with the BCS Open Source Specialist Group. — Bringing up cycle-accurate models of RISC-V cores The openness of the RISC-V ISA has enabled the development of many open-source RISC-V cores with varying capabilities. Choosing an implementation that meets given requirements can be done to some extent by comparing specifications and other attributes of the cores, but any decision must be based on actual testing. Using Verilator to generate cycle-accurate models enables rapid development of testing platforms. This talk provides a report of our experience bringing up cycle-accurate models of two cores in particular, RI5CY from the PuLP project, and Clifford Wolf's PicoRV32. For testing, a software ecosystem consisting of a compiler, binary utilities, debugger, and an interface between the model and debugger accompanies the Verilator model. To compare the cores, we used the GCC test suite and the RISC-V ISA test suite for measuring correctness, and the Bristol/Embecosm Embedded Benchmark Suite (BEEBS) to compare performance. All code and scripts used for the implementation are open-source, and can be re-used by others who wish to do similar exercises with other RISC-V cores. * Edward Jones has a background in parsing techniques and works at Embecosm on LLVM and GNU toolchains. He is also involved in research by Embecosm to investigate ways in which the software tool chain can reduce program energy consumption. Edward Jones is a Computer Science graduate of the University of Kent. — FreeBSD/RISC-V and Device Drivers The FreeBSD port to RISC-V 64-bit ISA was added in January 2016. FreeBSD is the first operating system that officially supported RISC-V in the main repository. Since its introduction, support has evolved, RISC-V privileged architecture has updated a few times. The platform is maturing making it suitable for general, commercial, research and educational use. The GCC v7.0 target for RISC-V was officialy upstreamed and NVIDIA is planning to ship all of their GPUs with RISC-V coprocessor enabled in the future. Several companies have announced the start of RISC-V chip development and many universities are taking RISC-V as a target architecture for doing research. The world first RISC-V microcontroller-class board HiFive1 was released and we are getting closer to the first general purpose board to become available! This talk will describe the current status of FreeBSD/RISC-V, toolchain and supported simulators. The porting process as well as describing the latest changes made to FreeBSD in order to support the latest RISC-V privilege specification (v1.10). This includes enabling by default FDT support and drivers attachment change, SBI interface, compiler flags/built-in definition changes, support for updated BBL boot loader, RISC-V privilege levels, initial page tables build, page table entry flags and other changes. An overview of FreeBSD device drivers subsystem will also be covered describing the device frameworks, buses and kernel-interfaces that exists in FreeBSD (e.g. Newbus, cdevsw, bus_dma, SYSINIT, vt, sound, ifnet, spibus, etc), how to use and configure them and how to debug a device driver. This should answer the question: How to write device driver for FreeBSD/RISC-V? * Ruslan Bukin is a Research Associate at University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory. He has been a FreeBSD user since 2002 and src committer since 2013. His main interests and contributions to FreeBSD are related to computer architectures support, performance monitoring technologies support, hardware tracing technologies (Intel PT), devicedrivers, DMA engines and DMA frameworks, hardware security (Intel SGX, CHERI), heterogeneous computing. Ruslan is the lead developer of the FreeBSD/RISC-V project. He obtained a Computer Science degree in 2008 from Peoples' Friendship University of Russia in Moscow — Talk #3 TBA Note: Please aim to arrive by 18:15 as the event will start at 18:30 prompt. Closing date for bookings is Tuesday 21st November 2017 at 11:30 pm. No more bookings will be taken after this date. For overseas delegates who wish to attend the event please note that BCS does not issue invitation letters -- Andrew Back http://abopen.com

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