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OSHUG 61 — Reimagining EDSAC, NetBSD Updates, Semantic & Change Coupling of Software Classes, Thurs 19th October.
by Andrew Back 10 Oct '17

10 Oct '17

Hello, Details can be found below for the 61st meeting, which is in just over a week, so please don't delay in registering if you plan to attend. Best, Andrew // Event #61 — OSSG AGM, Reimagining EDSAC, NetBSD Updates, Semantic and Change Coupling of Software Classes. On the 19 October 2017, 18:00 - 21:00 at BCS London, 1st Floor, The Davidson Building, 5 Southampton Street, London, WC2E 7HA. Registration: http://oshug.org/event/61 The meeting this month will start with the BCS OSSG AGM and this will be followed by a talk on recent and planned improvements to NetBSD, a report from Chip Hack EDSAC Challenge, and finally a talk on the interplay between semantic coupling and co-change of software. — BCS Open Source SG - AGM All members of OSHUG are welcome to attend and OSHUG members are encouraged to put themselves forward to join the committee. In particular we would welcome anyone to join the event organizers who arrange the speakers for each month and the occasional all-day workshops. Currently we have Sevan Janiyan, @ndy Bennett and Andrew Back as event organizers on the committee. — Updates to the NetBSD operating system since OSHUG #57 & #58 Since the workshops held earlier this year, numerous changes have been made to the NetBSD operating system to ensure future workshops are easier for users and work smoother from the outset. This talk will cover some of the improvements made so far and what's currently in the works. >From wrestling with the u-boot firmware to new tools included in the os and much more. * 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. — Reimagining EDSAC: The ChipHack experience ChipHack is an occasional 2 day workshop introducing students and hobbyists to FPGA design. This year, ChipHack was sponsored by the BCS OSSG and Computer Conservation Society. To celebrate the 60th anniversary of the BCS, the workshop was extended by half a day and attempted to reimagine one of the earliest valve computers, EDSAC, designed by the BCS' founding president, Prof Sir Maurice Wilkes. * Mary Bennett led the team putting together the technical content of the workshop. She will report back on what was achieved, from the three implementations of the computer, to the diverse reimagining of the original peripherals. The result is a legacy of lectures and videos, to allow anyone to run their own ChipHack course. — The Interplay between Semantic Coupling and Co-Change of software classes During maintenance, developers must ensure that related entities are updated to be consistent with these changes. Studies in the static change impact analysis domain have identified that a combination of source code and lexical information outperforms using each one when adopted independently. The presentation has two aims: first, to compare the effectiveness of measuring semantic coupling of OO software classes using (i) simple identifier based techniques and (ii) the word corpora of the entire classes in a software system. Second, to empirically investigate the interplay between semantic and change coupling. * Dr Andrea Capiluppi joined the Department of Computer Science at Brunel University London (UK), as a Lecturer in Software Development in May2012. Between 2009 and 2012 he was at University of East London, working as a Senior Lecturer in Software Engineering. Before that, he worked as a Senior Lecturer and at University of Lincoln between 2006 and 2009. Andrea's research and teaching interests focus on Software Evolution and Maintenance, as well as the construction, evaluation and maintenance of Social Networks. Andrea is mostly interested in the use of open technologies and in understanding how they can improve learning and teaching as well as the production of software and other artefacts. 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 11th talk added and accommodation.
by Andrew Back 14 Aug '17

14 Aug '17

Hello, An 11th talk has been added to the programme for Open Source Hardware Camp on Sat 2nd September, entitled Conservatory and Garden Automation. Details of which can be found below. If you haven't registered yet, you can find full programme details and the Eventbrite link at: http://oshug.org/event/oshcamp2017 Finally, the Cross Inn at Heptonstall now have rooms and so if you haven't booked accommodation yet, it's worth checking out. http://www.thecrossinnheptonstall.co.uk/ 01422 846607 They said they will give a £10 discount to people booking for Wuthering Bytes events. It's also the venue for the OSHCamp social this year and so particularly handy if you plan to attend this. Regards, Andrew // — Conservatory and Garden Automation Rod will talk about his recent conservatory project where he grows exotic plants, and how he has used Arduino to automate the heating, cooling & ventilation, humidification and irrigation, and how a Windows PC is used as the user interface to provide monitoring, set-point adjustment, calibration and data logging. The brief introduction explains how he came to choose Arduino as his preferred microcontroller, while a background picture show takes you through the construction and planting phases of the conservatory. He then goes on to talk about: Heating Humidification Cooling and ventilation by pneumatic control of the windows Irrigation Choice of all hardware, actuators, solenoid valves, relay boards, power supplies etc. Choice of sensors for temperature, humidity and water flow EMI testing, analogue R.C filtering and digital filtering of the analogue inputs from the sensors The design of a capacitance probe for measuring both pond water level and soil moisture level * Rod Moody worked as an electrical engineer in the manufacturing industry primarily building diesel-engine driven electrical generators ranging from a few kW to a few MW for both base load and standby applications. At 15 years of age he started an electrical engineering apprenticeship and through day release and night class gained an HNC in electrical engineering. At the age of 19 he was the companies test department manager, this soon led to many trips around the world to provide commissioning, trouble shooting and training. In his mid-twenties he moved into R&D and designed many control systems using relay logic. As technology advanced, and as a self-taught electronics engineer, he designed complex control systems using CMOS logic. In his thirties he was promoted to the company's engineering director. He retired at the age of 60, some 17 years ago. -- Andrew Back http://abopen.com

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OSHUG 58 — Getting started with NetBSD on embedded platforms Pt. 2, Thursday 18th May.
by Andrew Back 09 May '17

09 May '17

Hello, Registration is now open for the fifty-eighth meeting, which will provide a hands-on introduction to NetBSD on embedded platforms, picking up where the workshop left off at the previous meeting in April. Regards, Andrew // Event #58 — Getting started with NetBSD on embedded platforms Pt. 2 On the 18 May 2017, 17:30 - 20:00 at BCS London, 1st Floor, The Davidson Building, 5 Southampton Street, London, WC2E 7HA. Registration: http://oshug.org/event/58 — Workshop scope Following on from the previous workshop, we will be continuing with the theme of NetBSD on embedded platforms. This time covering GPIO access with lua and rapid development with Rump kernel, which we did not get to in the previous workshop due to the lack of time. If you did not get to attend the previous workshop, not to worry, notes are available [1] and assistHello, Registration is now open for the fifty-eighth meeting, which will provide a hands-on introduction to NetBSD on embedded platforms, picking up where the workshop left off at the previous meeting in April. Cheers, Andrew // Event #58 — Getting started with NetBSD on embedded platforms Pt. 2 On the 18 May 2017, 17:30 - 20:00 at BCS London, 1st Floor, The Davidson Building, 5 Southampton Street, London, WC2E 7HA. Registration: http://oshug.org/event/58 — Workshop scope Following on from the previous workshop, we will be continuing with the theme of NetBSD on embedded platforms. This time covering GPIO access with lua and rapid development with Rump kernel, which we did not get to in the previous workshop due to the lack of time. If you did not get to attend the previous workshop, not to worry, notes are available [1] and assistance will be provided on the day. [1] http://oshug.org/pipermail/oshug/2017-April/000608.html — Participant requirements You will need to bring: * Your own laptop (running Windows, Linux or Mac OS X); * A Raspberry Pi or BeagleBone Black; * An appropriate SD card for your board; * USB card reader to write a new OS image onto said SD card; * An ethernet cable to connect board to laptop and/or a USB UART/FTDI adapter to access the board via the serial console. — Windows 10 users Install Windows Subsystem for Linux. — Windows 10 / Linux (Debian/Ubuntu) users Install the following packages: * build-essential * zlib1g-dev * flex * libc6-dev-i386 — Mac OS X users Install GCC or clang via Xcode or command line tools. — All Everyone should fetch the source code for NetBSD: Download all source archives (.tgz files) from http://nycdn.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD-daily/HEAD/201704270800Z/source/sets/ . (It is likely the above URL will become invalid as old builds are purged and new ones are generated. Substitute 201704270800Z with the most recent release available on http://nycdn.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD-daily/HEAD). Any questions should be directed to the discussion list. — Hosted by 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. Note: Please aim to arrive by 17:15 as the workshop will start at 17:30 prompt. ance will be provided on the day. [1] http://oshug.org/pipermail/oshug/2017-April/000608.html — Participant requirements You will need to bring: * Your own laptop (running Windows, Linux or Mac OS X); * A Raspberry Pi or BeagleBone Black; * An appropriate SD card for your board; * USB card reader to write a new OS image onto said SD card; * An ethernet cable to connect board to laptop and/or a USB UART/FTDI adapter to access the board via the serial console. — Windows 10 users Install Windows Subsystem for Linux. — Windows 10 / Linux (Debian/Ubuntu) users Install the following packages: * build-essential * zlib1g-dev * flex * libc6-dev-i386 — Mac OS X users Install GCC or clang via Xcode or command line tools. — All Everyone should fetch the source code for NetBSD: Download all source archives (.tgz files) from http://nycdn.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD-daily/HEAD/201704270800Z/source/sets/ . (It is likely the above URL will become invalid as old builds are purged and new ones are generated. Substitute 201704270800Z with the most recent release available on http://nycdn.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD-daily/HEAD). Extract all fetched source code files. In your terminal, enter: for file in *.tar.gz do tar -xzf $file done Any questions should be directed to the discussion list. — Hosted by 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. Note: Please aim from 17:30 onwards for an 18:00 start. -- Andrew Back http://abopen.com

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OSHUG 57 — Getting started with NetBSD on embedded platforms, Thursday 20th April.
by Andrew Back 20 Mar '17

20 Mar '17

Hello, Registration is now open for the fifty-seventh meeting, which will be an evening workshop, providing a hands-on introduction to NetBSD on embedded platforms. Details of which can be found below. Regards, Andrew // OSHUG #57 — Getting started with NetBSD on embedded platforms On the 20 April 2017, 17:30 - 20:00 at BCS London, 1st Floor, The Davidson Building, 5 Southampton Street, London, WC2E 7HA. Registration: http://oshug.org/event/57 — Workshop scope You're hired at the latest startup as a hardware engineer and required to build the firmware which will run on "The Greatest Next Generation Appliance" (GNA). The GNA boots, prints a message and interacts with a device (in this case an LED). In this workshop we cover how a person with an interest and a focus on hardware can make progress with the software side by using the NetBSD operating system and the features it offers to save considerable time and effort. * NetBSD supports a wide & diverse range of systems & CPU architectures. * Support for cross compilation is offered by default and works out of the box. * There is a high level language interface to interact with the system internals. * File integrity verification support to detect tampering of binaries and preventing execution is builtin. * An instance of the kernel can be run as a user process on different operating systems where rapid development can take place. Things we will cover: 1. An introduction to cross-compilation with build.sh and constructing an image to boot on your hardware. 2. Interacting with the system using Lua (which is embedded in the kernel, avoiding having to write C or have knowledge of OS internals) to e.g. access GPIO. 3. Preventing the execution of tampered or unauthorised binaries with veriexec. 4. Using rump kernel for rapid development away from a potentially slow dev board. ** Note: Due to budgeting cuts, "The Greatest Next Generation Appliance" has not yet been purchased, so, the workshop will target the development of the firmware on a Raspberry Pi or BeagleBone Black.** — Participant requirements You will need to bring: * Your own laptop (running Windows, Linux or Mac OS X); * A Raspberry Pi or BeagleBone Black; * An appropriate SD card for your board; * USB card reader to write a new OS image onto said SD card; * An ethernet cable to connect board to laptop and/or a USB UART/FTDI adapter to access the board via the serial console. — Hosted by 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. Note: Please aim to arrive by 17:15 as the workshop will start at 17:30 prompt. -- Andrew Back http://abopen.com

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OSHUG 56 — An introduction to software-defined radio with LimeSDR (workshop), Fri 24th March.
by Andrew Back 13 Feb '17

13 Feb '17

Hello, Registration is now open for the fifty-sixth meeting, which will be a one day workshop, providing a hands-on introduction to software-defined radio with the LimeSDR. This will cover key concepts and LMS7002M FPRF IC architecture, and include simple digital radio examples along with a demonstrations of advanced systems, such as 4G femtocell. Details can be be found below. Regards, Andrew // OSHUG #56 — An introduction to software-defined radio with LimeSDR On the 24 March 2017, 09:00 - 17:00 at BCS London, 1st Floor, The Davidson Building, 5 Southampton Street, London, WC2E 7HA. Registration: https://events.bcs.org/book/2451/ A Software-Defined Radio (SDR) is a highly reconfigurable radio that can be used for many different radio applications through simply changing the software that links with it. An example of such a reconfigurable radio is the LimeSDR, which can both transmit and receive data and voice, using just about any wireless system. The LimeSDR was launched by Lime Microsystems in May 2016 via a crowdfunding campaign, and is now shipping to over 3,500 customers worldwide. It is based on the Lime Microsystems LMS7002M Field Programmable RF (FPRF) 2x2 MIMO transceiver, which continuously covers frequencies from 100kHz to 3.8GHz. The LMS7002M has been successfully used in a wide range of digital radio applications, including 2G/4G Femtocell base stations, GNSS, DAB, DVBT receivers and RF test and measurement equipment. The LimeSDR also includes an FPGA and USB 3.0 to provide host connectivity. — Workshop scope The heart of the day is to provide a practical ‘hands-on’ afternoon session using the LimeSDR with the Lime Suite GUI and FFT Viewer. Then to use GNU Octave and Pothos to make some very simple digital radio examples. To facilitate this, the morning will include introductory talks explaining the purpose of the various analogue and digital blocks included in the LMS7002M. It will also include tutorial material covering the key concepts required to understand modern digital radio transceivers, and how to use them, as well as practical issues associated with radio reception. In addition the day will feature some advanced demonstrations showing the full capabilities of the LimeSDR and its LMS7002M transceiver, including 4G Femtocell, as well as educational examples such as a simple OFDM transceiver data link. — Participant requirements ** Participants are required to bring a laptop computer with USB 3.0 ** Minimum computer hardware requirements are USB 3.0 capability and 2GB RAM. Although no prior knowledge of radio is required, an awareness of basic terminology will be very helpful. Basic computer programming and administration skills will also be helpful. The software that will be used must be installed prior to the event. For details see: https://wiki.myriadrf.org/LimeSDR_Workshop — What is provided * LimeSDR 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 led by Dr. Danny Webster, who has over 25 years of experience in the field of RF design covering varied applications from military radio to cellular infrastructure. Danny Graduated from Swansea University in 1988 and was awarded a PhD from University College London in 1995. From 1995 he worked as a Research Fellow at University College London and was a consultant to companies such as Nokia, Roke Manor Research and Agilent in Santa Rosa. From 2001 he was with Hipertech and joined Lime Micro in 2005 as Principle Design Engineer (RF) working on Field programmable RF ICs. Danny is a senior member of the IEEE. This workshop is free to attend and hosted by Lime Microsystems in partnership with the BCS Open Source Specialist Group and the Open Source Hardware User Group. 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 2017 (2nd & 3rd Sept) Call for Participation.
by Andrew Back 09 Feb '17

09 Feb '17

Hello, This year Open Source Hardware Camp will take place over the weekend of Saturday 2nd & Sunday 3rd September, hosted as part of the Wuthering Bytes festival in Hebden Bridge, which in 2017 will take place over the course of 10 days (again!) We will be returning to the Birchcliffe Centre in Hebden Bridge, which benefits from the convenience of adjoining, budget accommodation. Proposals for talks and workshops for OSHCamp 2017 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 contact me off-list. **** Note that the deadline for submitting titles and abstracts is Monday 1st May. If you would like to discuss ideas etc. please get in touch sooner, rather than later. **** Other events running as part of Wuthering Bytes 2017 and which may be of interest: * Fri 1st: Wuthering Bytes Festival Day * Wed 6th & Thurs 7th: Chip Hack (http://chiphack.org/) * Thurs 7th PM & Fri 8th AM: EDSAC Challenge * Fri 8th AM - Sunday 10th PM: GNU ORConf (http://orconf.org/) Further details on these events to be provided in due course. Cheers, Andrew PS. If you are planning on coming along and thinking of staying at the adjoining hosted, it is worth noting that this can book up quickly. http://www.hebdenbridgehostel.co.uk/ PPS. Super Early Bird tickets for the super organised: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/open-source-hardware-camp-2017-tickets-31845… -- Andrew Back http://abopen.com

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OSHUG 55 — FPGA projects past, planned and possible, Thursday 16th February.
by Andrew Back 07 Feb '17

07 Feb '17

Hello, Registration is now open for the February meeting, details of which can be found below. We also still have space for 1 or 2 more short talks of 10-15 minutes, so if you have an idea for a talk, get in touch! regards, Andrew // Event #55 — FPGA projects past, planned and possible On the 16 February 2017, 18:00 - 20:00 at BCS London, 1st Floor, The Davidson Building, 5 Southampton Street, London, WC2E 7HA. Registration: http://oshug.org/event/55 The fifty-fifth meeting will feature a series of shorter talks that explore past, planned and possible projects which use FPGAs. — FPGA Projects - What would I build and why would I want to PLAs have been interesting ever since the 70s when digital logic often became complex, consuming unnecessary space and power. Back then the cost of PLA deployment was high and it has continued to be high until recently. Now that we have powerful, low cost development platforms and relatively cheap FPGAs the cost equation has shifted radically. * Paul Tanner is a consultant, developer and maker in wood, metal, plastic, electronics and software. His day job is IT-based business improvement for SMEs. By night he turns energy nut, creating tools to optimise energy use. Paul graduated in electronics and was responsible for hardware and software product development and customer services in several product and service start-ups, switching to consulting in 2000. — Using FPGAs to solve realtime problems Microcontrollers a great platform to solve basic control problems in electronics, with simple motor drivers and sensors readily avaiable and easy to integrate. However, when the motor control becomes more complex with BLDC and FOC things get much more tricky. When you have to use multiple BLDC motors and more complex sensors with image processing the poor microcontroller quickly becomes to swamped to provide control in realtime. This is where adding FPGA technology makes a great deal of sense particularly in mutli-discipline projects like robotics where many sensors, motors and image processing will need to be managed and controlled concurrently. A robotics platform must therefore contain both concurrent hardware resources, algorithmic control through soft or hard cores along with communication protocols. * 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, inference and image processing for embedded applications using FPGA and multi-cores. He is a long term advocate and moderator (aka Folknology) for xCORE and other opensource communities, as well as a founder of Surrey and Hampshire Makerspace and myStorm FPGA development boards. — FPGAs in the Cloud? It is no secret that FPGA based computing machines are great at dealing with certain types of workloads that conventional CPU based machines can not efficiently handle. These machines, alongside their GPU and even custom ASIC based brethren, have been filling up racks in large data centres all over the globe helping speed up systems that have components of machine learning, complex analytics and even video processing. This short talk will have a look at the state of FPGAs in the datacenter and discuss the recent developments around the availability of FPGA equipped computing nodes in commodity cloud providers. * Omer Kilic is an Embedded Systems Engineer who enjoys working with small connected computers of all shapes and sizes. He works at the various intersections of hardware and software engineering practices, product development and manufacturing. — Chip Hack 2017 & EDSAC Challenge This talk will introduce and issue a call for participation for two events that are being hosted as part of the Wuthering Bytes technology festival, that will take place in Hebden Bridge in September, in the week following Open Source Hardware Camp 2017. Chip Hack is a two day hands-on workshop that provides a gentle introduction to programming FPGAs and is aimed at novices with no prior experience of Hardware Description Languages (HDLs) or FPGAs. This will be followed immediately by a challenge event, during which a small team of experts will work to extend a basic functional FPGA model of EDSAC — the pioneering computer designed and constructed at Cambridge University, and which was operational by 1949. * Dr Jeremy Bennett is founder and Chief Executive of Embecosm, a consultancy implementing open source compilers and chip simulators for major corporations around the world. He is a author of the standard textbook "Introduction to Compiling Techniques" (McGraw-Hill 1990, 1995, 2003). Contact him at: jeremy.bennett(a)embecosm.com. Note: Please aim to arrive by 18:15 as the event will start at 18:30 prompt. // -- Andrew Back http://abopen.com

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Personal Privacy Online (The Dark Web, Investigatory Powers Act), Thursday 19th January.
by Andrew Back 14 Jan '17

14 Jan '17

Hello, There are no hardware talks this month, but there will be an excellent series of 3 talks hosted by the BCS OSSG next Thursday, on theme of personal privacy online. Details below. Regards, Andrew // Personal Privacy Online (The Dark Web, Investigatory Powers Act) On the 19 January 2017, 18:00 - 20:00 at BCS London, 1st Floor, The Davidson Building, 5 Southampton Street, London, WC2E 7HA. Registration: https://events.bcs.org/book/2408/ We explore the theme of personal rights and privacy on the modern Internet, with a talk on The Dark Web, covering insights on one of the larger anonymous marketplaces online and another on the new Investigatory Powers Act. — The Investigatory Powers Act: What is it? The Investigatory Powers Act also known as the Snoopers Charter is now law, find out what that means for you and your company. The Snoopers Charter would require metadata on every email, website visit and social media log to be recorded. It covers hacking and mass hacking performed by Government agencies. Its powers can be enforced across the world. It contains over 270 clauses and dwarfs the computer misuse act in terms of size, so this is going to be a speed run covering some of the high points. * Glyn Wintle is a security evangelist and software engineer. He has given evidence in Parliament, frequently gives technical talks about security and is well know for his work with the Open Rights Group. — The Dark Web Within the last years, governmental bodies have been futilely trying to fight against dark web hosted marketplaces. Shortly after the closing of “The Silk Road” by the FBI and Europol in 2013, new successors have been established. Through the combination of cryptocurrencies and nonstandard communication protocols and tools, agents can anonymously trade in a marketplace for illegal items without leaving any record. This talk will presents a research carried out to gain insights on the products and services sold within one of the larger marketplaces for drugs, fake ids and weapons on the Internet, Agora, and on new developments after the demise of Agora. The team behind the research included Andres Baravalle, Sin Wee Lee, Germans Zaharovs (research intern) and Mauro Lopez Sanchez (final year project). The work has been featured on the front page on The Times and on the Guardian, amongst other media. * Andres Baravalle works in the in the University of East London as Senior Lecturer in Computing. He has been working in academia since 2004 (University of Turin, University of Sheffield, Open University, University of East London), while also working as a contractor in industry. Andres has been developing in LAMP environments since 1999 and managing development teams since shortly after. In the past years he has been combining his expertise in web technologies with an interest on security and data science. “ He once made a student cry - by praising his work. 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 #54 — Educating the Next Generation, Thursday 1st December.
by Andrew Back 01 Nov '16

01 Nov '16

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

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

01 Nov '16

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

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