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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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Making the Laser Light Synths talk at OSHCamp 2016.
by Andrew Back 28 Jul '16

28 Jul '16

Hello, Please find details below of a twelfth talk which has been added to the Open Source Hardware Camp 2016 programme, on making laser light synths! Cheers, Andrew — Making the Laser Light Synths The Laser Light Synths are LED emblazoned musical instruments that anyone can play. Along with high power lasers, they form part of a large outdoor installation that switch the traditional roles of audience and performer. As an artist, Seb Lee-Delisle likes to make interesting things from code that encourage interaction and playfulness from the public. Notable projects include Lunar Trails, featuring a 3m wide drawing machine, and PixelPyros, the Arts Council funded digital fireworks display that toured nationwide.

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OSHUG #50 — Drones Pt. 2 (Captain Buzz, Whirly Blades of Death, Bounder), Thursday 16th June.
by Andrew Back 22 May '16

22 May '16

Hello, Registration is now open for the June meeting, details of which can be found below. Note that there are no meetings in July or August, and we return after summer with OSHCamp over the weekend of 3rd & 4th September. Cheers, Andrew // Event #50 — Drones Pt. 2 (Captain Buzz, Whirly Blades of Death, Bounder) On the 16 June 2016, 18:00 - 20:00 at BCS London, 1st Floor, The Davidson Building, 5 Southampton Street, London, WC2E 7HA. Registration: http://oshug.org/event/50 For the fiftieth OSHUG meeting we return to the theme of twentieth meeting back in June 2012, "drones", with a talk on Captain Buzz, a smartphone app that flies drones, another on what goes into making a quadrotor stay in the air, and a third talk on managing drone airspace. — Captain Buzz: Your smartphone’s real ‘airplane mode' In ten years time drones will be delivering Amazon packages to your door minutes after ordering them. Current drones are built using purpose-designed hardware and software with limited computational power. Moreover, adding features typically requires purchasing and connecting additional hardware modules. In this talk I present Captain Buzz: a smartphone app that flies a drone, eliminating the need for such dedicated hardware. I show that by mounting your smartphone on a drone, Captain Buzz can use the inbuilt sensors to calculate the drone's position and orientation. Captain Buzz then uses the headphone socket, connected to the drone's servos, to manoeuvre the drone in the air. By building drones using smartphones, we can leverage existing smartphone functionality: Internet connectivity, maps, cameras for novel uses of drones. With Captain Buzz your next smartphone might be delivered to you by your previous one! * Oliver Chick recently finished a PhD in Computer Science at the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory. His research concerns techniques for measuring the performance of software stacks executing in a virtual machine. Highlights of this work include a best paper at ApSys 2015 and publication in SIGOPS Operating Systems Review (OSR). Alongside this research, Oliver worked with colleagues on a “20%” project to build Captain Buzz, the subject of tonight’s talk. Since completing his PhD, Oliver has started working as a Teaching Associate at Queens’ College Cambridge, and Focal Point Positioning, a startup that is revolutionising positioning in difficult environments. — Whirly blades of death Since the availability of cheap MEMS sensor technology and powerful brushless motors, radio controlled flight has changed enormously. Quadrotors have been viable for several years now and have enjoyed an enormous rush of popularity due largely to their mechanical simplicity. That mechanical simplicity comes at the cost of considerable complexity in the control system. We will take a look at what goes into making a lump of metal with four whirly blades of death stay in the air. * Gavan Fantom is a professional embedded software engineer with a penchant for wielding screwdrivers and soldering irons. He has a keen interest in things that fly, things that make sound and things that make and receive light (ranging from the visible spectrum down to a few MHz). Some people are terrified of his oversized metal quadrotor, noting the fact that it looks menacing as well as expressing fear that he wrote the control software that keeps it flying. For some reason they seem to think it might decide that their face needs the spiral cucumber treatment, never realising that he feeds it pizza before letting it out in public to prevent this from happening. — Managing drone airspace Drones flying into controlled airspace have gotten attention in the media including the recent incident of drone in Heathrow. Ensuring that drones fly within an allowed zone and looking at the possiblity of managing the airspace with a platform to do this, is an interesting challenge. A quick survery of the area with a focus more the software stack of one of them, which was prototype build behind Bounder. High level overview of the choices and tradeoffs and hardware choices associated are discussed. * Anish Mohammed has been an electronics enthusiast and software hacker since his early teens. He endured medical school, before working in security and cryptography. He has spent half his career researching cryptographic algorithms and protocols at three different research groups, including Microsoft Research. He is also a self-confessed UAV addict who owns more than a dozen AHRS/Autopilots. His interests are mostly focused on navigation algorithms for unmanned vehicles. His research interests include AI and Ethics of AI, and he is one of the folks behind Bounder and Dexethics .These days he works for Lloyds, where he is involved with, among other things, internal innovation and Blockchain initiatives. Note: Please aim to arrive by 18:15 as the event will start at 18:30 prompt.

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OSHUG #49 — Open Source Chips Pt. 3 (AAP, FOSSi Foundation, Getting into FPGAs), Thursday 19th May.
by Andrew Back 04 May '16

04 May '16

Hello, Registration is now open for the May meeting, details of which can be found below. A reminder also that in addition to the monthly meeting, we're hosting a one day conference in partnership with NMI and BCS in just under one week, on 10th May: http://oshug.org/event/nmiopen Regards, Andrew // Event #49 — Open Source Chips Pt. 3 On the 19 May 2016, 18:00 - 20:00 at BCS London, 1st Floor, The Davidson Building, 5 Southampton Street, London, WC2E 7HA. Registration: http://oshug.org/event/49 At the forty-ninth meeting we will return to the topic of open source chip design, with talks on AAP — an open hardware processor architecture — and its simulation, the Free and Open Source Silicon Foundation (FOSSi), and getting into FPGAs. — AAP: An Altruistic Processor An Altruistic Processor (AAP) is an open hardware 16-bit architecture for deeply embedded applications running on small FPGA devices. It is somewhat configurable, with a minimum of 4 16-bit general registers, at least one word-addressed code space of up to 16Mword and at least one byte addressed data space of up to 64kbyte. The primary role of AAP is as a test bench for compiler backends. It encapsulates features found in a wide range of popular embedded processors which traditionally cause difficulties for compiler writers. In this talk we will discuss the motivation behind this project, our experience implementing and testing LLVM for this architecture, the architectural features unique to our processor and how these interact with LLVM. In AAP integers are less than 32-bits, pointers may be word addressed, and too large to fit in a registers (of which there may be very few), and have multiple function and code spaces that may be switched between at run time, each with their own addressing requirements. Edward Jones Edward Jones supports Embecosm's work on runtime libraries, LLVM toolchains and testing. Currently his work involves developing LLVM compiler support for embedded systems, as well as work on the TSERO project to develop tools which intelligently optimise compiled code. Other research topics include superoptimization, the art of finding the provably optimal instruction sequence for a given task. — AAPSim: Simulating Hardware in LLVM An Altruistic Processor (AAP) is an open hardware 16-bit architecture for deeply embedded applications running on small FPGA devices. It is somewhat configurable, with a minimum of 4 16-bit general registers, at least one word-addressed code space of up to 16Mword and at least one byte addressed data space of up to 64kbyte. A key part of any implementation of an embedded toolchain is a simulator of the architecture, both such that user written code can be run and so the compiler's implementation itself can be verified. As part of AAP, we have implemented a simulator based on LLVM MC that both runs standalone and as part of a gdb/lldbserver. This talk explores the design and experiences of using LLVM as the host for a simulator. Simon Cook has a background in low-power processors, with a particular focus on the energy constraints of code running in embedded environments. Since 2012, he has been working on LLVM for deeply embedded architectures, primarily focusing on optimization, but also on providing compiler support for unique hardware features. Most recently, he has been working on LLVM for AAP, a reference Harvard architecture with the aim of improving upstream support for more eccentric architectural features. — Open Source Silicon Design Ecosystem The talk will begin by surveying the current state of the open source chip design space and present some of the most exciting and interesting projects and communities which are contributing to the field. Next, the Free and Open Source Silicon Foundation (FOSSi) will be introduced as a group to help further the cause through LibreCores, amongst other initiatives. Julius Baxter has been involved in the OpenRISC project since 2008. Now working as a digital design engineer in Cambridge, he helps run the annual OpenRISC conference, ORCONF, which has since become a general open source digital design conference, and is one of the founders of FOSSi. — Getting into FPGAs; Why, what, how & where might this lead Why? Probably the biggest question I get with programmable logic and gate arrays is: why would I need to use an FPGA, when I can do so much with commonly available micro-controllers? In other words when doesn't a low cost Von Neumann chip do the job efficiently. What? A lightning tour of low cost FPGAs and their capabilities, classic applications and use cases that don't involve spending $millions on fabricating silicon chips. How? The field of FPGAs and chip design can appear big and scary at first. It can present a challenging environment to any newcomer and requires acquisition of multiple new disciplines and commercial tools. As a result many are put of by the steep learning curve and investment of proprietary tools and hardware. Icestorm is Clifford Wolf's an opensource project which combines tools like Yosys to provide a simple and open tool set supporting multiple vendors of FPGAs. Although it is at an early stage and only a small range of products are supported its a great tool to get started with on small projects and enables you to get close to the mechanicals. In addition to it's Verilog support, it also exposes some nice low level features that will result in more innovative and diverse open tools flourishing around it further down the road. Where? A glimpse at the part FPGAs might play in the emerging embedded intelligence market: Matrixed Open Turing Engines (Motes) enabling low powered smart controllers for robotics, devices and IoT. This illustrates at least one fascinating trajectory for FPGAS & ASICs in the opensource hardware community. 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. Note: Please aim to arrive by 18:15 as the event will start at 18:30 prompt.

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NMI Open Source Conference, Tuesday 10th May.
by Andrew Back 21 Apr '16

21 Apr '16

Hello, Please find details below of a one day conference that the NMI (http://nmi.org.uk/) are hosting in partnership with OSHUG and the BCS, on Tuesday 10th May. Note that there are also opportunities for providers of open source solutions and services to give a 2 minute pitch during in the morning! This event is free to attend. Regards, Andrew ** // NMI Open Source Conference // 10 May 2016, 09:30 - 17:00 at BCS London, 1st Floor, The Davidson Building, 5 Southampton Street, London, WC2E 7HA. Registration: http://oshug.org/event/nmiopen In partnership with the NMI and BCS, this conference explores the increasingly vital role of open source as an enabler in the world of electronic systems. It will provide attendees with an informative view of: * The benefits and challenges of using open source * Leading electronic systems organisation using open source today sharing their experience * The breadth of opportunities presented by open source, from application software down to silicon IP * Open source capabilities from a range of leading suppliers — Meet the Supplier Pitches Provider of open source solutions or services? Give a 2 minute pitch! — Session 1: Challenges & Opportunities - Open Source: The Enabler for IoT Greatness (and Mediocrity) Strip the layers of marketing fluff on the shiny new Internet of Things devices and you will find, in almost all cases, a slew of great Open Source projects powering these little gadgets, to perform their intended duties. Go up a layer and guess what — the cloud is full of Open Source too! This talks uses IoT as a case study in explaining how Open-Source makes rapid iterations and complex interconnected things happen very quickly. While this all sounds great, we will also look at how certain approaches in "openness" actually cause more problems than they solve especially when it comes to interoperability between ecosystems. Omer Kilic is an Embedded Systems Engineer who enjoys working with small computers of all shapes and sizes. He works at the various intersections of hardware and software engineering practices, product development and manufacturing. He is the Chief Hacker at Den Automation, an Internet of Things hardware startup in London. - Sailing the open seas Deciding to operate a business with an 'open source' mindset, and looking beyond "why would you give everything away for free?", there are interesting business models to be had. Those invariably come with challenges, but also have the benefits that are derived from maintaining a culture of openness. Boldport is a small business that open sourced their primary internal software tool, PCBmodE, and who releases all their hardware designs as 'open source hardware'. We'll discuss where 'openness' is challenging and where it has created opportunities, all with a hardware perspective. Saar Drimer combines his obsessive doodling, love for circuit design, programming, and problem solving into Boldport’s products and services. As an engineer he’s learned to appreciate the value of adopting industrial design thinking and making it an integral part of his design process. He studied electrical engineering at UC Santa Cruz, and researched the topic of hardware security for his PhD at the Computer Lab, University of Cambridge. — Session 2: Practical Solutions - Red, Amber, Green: Free and Open-Source Software in the Supply Chain – When to Avoid, Tread Carefully and Embrace Almost all software projects have an aspect of open source: and for very good reason. With reference to client case studies, Andrew considers how to maximise the utility of open source code, both in terms of the code itself, and engaging with the communities around it, and mitigating risk throughout the supply chain. Andrew Katz is a UK-based lawyer specialising in FOSS and open content. Prior to becoming a lawyer, Andrew Katz was a developer and has released software under the GPL. He advises individuals, corporations, foundations and public sector organisations on FOSS law issues, and is a visiting researcher at the University of Skövde, Sweden, and visiting lecturer at Queen Mary, University of London. He is a founder editor of the Free and Open Source Software Law Review. - Open Source Tools for the Electronics Systems Industry This talk will explore the huge range of open source tools that are available to electronics systems engineers; EDA tools such such as Icarus Verilog, GHDL, Verilator and SystemC, along with embedded software development tools such as GCC, LLVM, SDCC and Eclipse. We will consider their status, robustness as products and how to ensure they are supported for business critical use. We'll also look at the some of the important legal implications of adopting open source tools in your work flow, particularly when such tools are also supplied to customers. For example, does the source code of an open source compiler expose important information about your processor architecture that you would rather keep secret. The talk will conclude by looking at some of the open source tools projects under development, which while not ready for production use today, may bring about radical changes in the future. Dr Jeremy Bennett is founder and Chief Executive of Embecosm, which develops free and open source compilers and silicon chip models for companies around the world. Contact him at jeremy.bennett(a)embecosm.com. - Details of third talk in this session TBC — Session 3: First Hand Experiences and the Future - Establishing a Corporate Open Source Group: Journey and Lessons Learned Creating a dedicated Open Source Group within a large consumer focused company such as Samsung is both challenging and rewarding. This talk recaps a 3-years journey, lessons learned and highlights some of the significant challenges still remaining. The talk is particularly relevant to any organization that is relatively new to Open Source and uncertain about the practicalities of engaging in it. During this talk Gurj Bahia will cover various topics from process changes for open source contributions, legal aspects such as licenses and IP, cultural changes to learn why and how to deal with the open source community to technical changes to allow a smooth way of communicating and collaborating between your internal team and the external community. Gurj Bahia leads the European office of Samsung’s Open Source Group. He is helping to accelerate the use of and collaboration with open source software. With more the 20 years industry experience helping a number of companies to deliver mobile technology to market and working as a hands-on software architect and technical manager, Gurj is able to bridge the gap between traditionally closed downstream ways of working (most of his career) and the more modern open, collaborative methods (recent experiences). - Open Source Field Programmable RF Technology Driving Innovation in Wireless Networks The widespread use of programmable digital technology has enabled a vast array of new wireless applications to be created. In fact, much of the innovation in wireless networks that has supported such a growth in recent years could be attributed to ever increasing levels of functionality within the digital chipsets. On the other hand, RF technology has been providing fixed function for a given design with very little in the way of programmability and flexibility. As we move from one generation of wireless technology to another, this issue has become more prevalent to the extent that today’s RF technology has become a bottleneck, hampering innovation in the design and implementation of future networks.This talk presents the concept of Field programmable RF technology where flexibility is extended from digital to RF domain. Use cases and application areas where such technology is making a significant impact is also presented where the Open Source community are getting behind the technology and driving a Significant level of innovation in the field. Dr Ebrahim Bushehri is the founder and CEO of the field-programmable RF chip company Lime Micro. He is also the founder of the non-profit initiative MyriadRF which seeks to bring open source RF hardware to a wider audience through the development of low-cost, professional-grade hardware. Ebrahim’s experience spans over 25 years in directing and managing of design teams for the implementation of high performance ICs within the wireless communication market. He has worked with organizations such as Nokia, Qinetiq (formerly Defence Evaluation Research Agency) and Fraunhofer IAF. Ebrahim is a member of Institution of Electrical and Electronic Engineering (IEEE). - lowRISC – an Open-Source System-on-Chip Design lowRISC is a not-for-profit project aiming to produce the 'Linux of the hardware world', providing an open-source System-on-Chip design for industry, academia, and the wider open source community to build upon. This talk will update on lowRISC's current status and explore the challenges facing open source hardware projects along with the potential benefits of a more open hardware ecosystem. It will also briefly cover tagged memory and minion cores, both novel features which demonstrate the lowRISC approach to creating a secure, flexible, and extensible SoC architecture. Alex Bradbury is a researcher at the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory where he co-founded the not-for-profit lowRISC project to produce a fully open-sourced, Linux-capable, RISC-V based SoC design. He has a particular interest in compilers, doing substantial work with LLVM over the past 5 years as part of his research in to novel many-core architectures and also authors the popular LLVM Weekly newsletter. Alex was one of the key volunteers for the Raspberry Pi project, where he previously had the role of Lead Linux Developer, as well as co-authoring the book Learning Python with Raspberry Pi. — Panel Discussion Whilst this event provides a focal-point, the real opportunity lies in identifying actions that advance the capabilities of the electronic systems community in utilising the opportunities provided by open source software. The panel discussion will focus on the identification of some areas for further work. Note: Please aim to arrive by 09:15 as the event will start at 09:30 prompt.

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OSHUG #47 — Open Source Where You Least Expect It, Thursday 21st April.
by Andrew Back 07 Apr '16

07 Apr '16

Hello, Registration is now open for the April meeting, details of which can be found below. Cheers, Andrew // Event #47 — Open Source Where You Least Expect It On the 21 April 2016, 18:00 - 20:00 at BCS London, 1st Floor, The Davidson Building, 5 Southampton Street, London, WC2E 7HA. Registration: http://oshug.org/event/47 At the forty-seventh meeting we will take a look at the use of open source hardware and software in less obvious places. — Ownership and Gift; Open Source and God; How a Vicar values Open Source Do we really own anything, or is it a gift? When we try to claim ownership how does that affect our attitude and our freedom? Does my choice of software really have a spiritual dimension? How can I give something back? These are all questions which arise for an ex-compiler-writing Vicar who wants software which does the job at hand but also wants to live with integrity and Christian values. In his talk Rev Peter Salisbury explores these questions through examples of the way his church uses Open Source software and hardware. Peter Salisbury was an electronics geek in his teens just as logic chips first hit the Maplin catalogue. From building computers in a cupboard he went to study Computation at UMIST, graduating in 1980. He worked in system tools with Burroughs Machines, then moved to language design and compiler writing for a Project Management company. In 1989 he moved to Salisbury to study theology in preparation for becoming a vicar. He was ordained in 1992 and is currently Vicar of Lymington on the south coast near Southampton. He has never really forgotten he's a geek. — Open hardware for open science Is science open source and should it be? This talk will look at the current state of open software and hardware in scientific practice. Example open hardware projects from the worlds of biology, astronomy and computer science will be presented. Sarah Mount is a Research Associate on the Efficient Editing of Homogeneous Programs (Editors4) project. Previously, she was a Senior Lecturer at the University of Wolverhampton, and before that she held a number of positions at Coventry University. — Hacking the atmosphere The AirPi is an open source board he designed for measuring and recording air pollution and weather information. Despite its innocuous goal, that board has ended up in some fairly weird situations — come along to find out where! Tom Hartley is a student at Imperial College, currently sitting on the fence between software and hardware. Prompted by a mysterious fascination with the Raspberry Pi that lives on to this day, he developed the AirPi 2 years ago as part of a competition and went on to sell over 1,000 kits to people who care about the air they breathe. A devotee of open source, the code he writes and the boards he designs are all available freely online. Note: Please aim to arrive by 18:15 as the event will start at 18:30 prompt. //

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OSHUG #46 — Embedded Platforms, Thursday 17th March.
by Andrew Back 29 Feb '16

29 Feb '16

Hello, Registration is now open for the March meeting, details of which can be found below. Cheers, Andrew // Event #46 — Embedded Platforms (BSD, OpenWRT, Plan 9 & Inferno) On the 17 March 2016, 18:00 - 20:00 at BCS London, 1st Floor, The Davidson Building, 5 Southampton Street, London, WC2E 7HA. Registration: http://oshug.org/event/46 The forty-sixth OSHUG meeting will take a look at embedded platforms, with talks on the BSD family of operating systems, Linux and OpenWRT, and Plan 9 and Inferno in distributed systems. — The BSD Family of Operating Systems A familiar environment for your VAX, PIC32 or RISC-V ISA and many other platforms. The Berkeley Software Distribution started out as a patch set to AT&T UNIX in the 70's and grew to a complete Operating Systems. Today several projects continue to develop variant operating systems based on the work originally started by the Computer Science Research Group, each with a different area of focus. This presentation will cover some of the benefits these operating systems can offer to aid the workflow of a hardware project. Sevan Janiyan is founder of Venture 37, which provides system administration & consultancy services. As a fan of operating systems and computers with different CPU architectures, in his spare time he maintains builds of open source software on a variety of systems featuring PowerPC, SPARC and armv7l CPUs. He hopes to own a NeXTcube & OMRON LUNA-88K2 one day. — Developing Linux based products in the connected devices ecosystem -- The OpenWRT Approach Linux is accepted as a standard component of the Internet of Things domain. With the abundance of development platforms and the abhorrent state of vendor provided SDKs, getting started with and more importantly the maintenance of Linux powered devices is pretty much a dark art these days. This talk focuses on the mass market hardware platforms of interest to folks building the Next Great IoT ProductTM and how the development could be sped up with OpenWRT. To supplement the topic of product development, a couple of noteworthy System-on-Chip devices and how they could be adopted will also be discussed. Ivan Iacono is an Embedded Systems Engineer interested in the development of Linux based products and the surrounding periphery of embedded devices, cloud and the overall architecture of connected systems. He is the Firmware Wrangler at Den Automation. Omer Kilic is an Embedded Systems Engineer who likes tinkering with small computers of all shapes and sizes. He works at the various intersections of hardware and software engineering practices, product development and manufacturing. He is the Chief Hacker at Den Automation. — Embedded devices are often now part of a distributed system: my Pebble watch is linked to my Nexus phone, which is coupled to Google. Plan 9 and Inferno are two distributed systems originally developed by the Bell Labs research centre that produced Unix. They allow a single large system to be composed from smaller cooperating systems performing specific tasks. (In other areas they illustrate an alternative time line that diverged from strict adherence to Unix's details of the 1970's.) Distributed systems infrastructure often focuses on algorithmic aspects, such as Paxos, and the operating system is largely irrelevant when it is not merely obstructive. Plan 9 and Inferno provide structural support for distribution, at the operating system level. Their defining novelty is the representation of all distributable resources as hierarchical name spaces, which can be composed in useful ways, and simplify design, development, testing and integration. This talk will give a brief summary of both systems, then begin to name names, including their use in embedded appliances in distributed systems. Dr Charles Forsyth is a founder and Technical Director of Vita Nuova, which specialises in systems software and distributed systems. He is interested in compilers, operating systems, networking (protocols and services), security, and distributed systems and algorithms. He specialises in the design and implementation of systems software, from low-level drivers through compilers to whole operating systems. He has published papers on operating systems, Ada compilation, worst-case execution analysers for safety-critical applications, “resources as files”, and the development of computational grids. Note: Please aim to arrive by 18:15 as the event will start at 18:30 prompt.

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OSHUG #45 — Open Energy Tools & Interoperability.
by Andrew Back 03 Feb '16

03 Feb '16

Hello, Registration is now open for the February meeting — and preceding hack day! — details of which can be found below. Cheers, Andrew // Event #45 — Open Energy Tools & Interoperability (Open Inverter, OpenTRV, Heat Pump Monitoring) On the 18 February 2016, 18:00 - 20:00 at BCS London, 1st Floor, The Davidson Building, 5 Southampton Street, London, WC2E 7HA. Registration: http://oshug.org/event/45 For the forty-fifth meeting we will return to a topic which has been a recurring theme and of much interest at previous meetings, open energy platforms. There will be talks on Open Inverter, OpenTRV and heat pump monitoring, with a focus also on interoperability. The evening meeting will also be preceded by an interoperability hack day for project contributors. — Low power DC conversion using open source hardware The Open Inverter is a micro inverter designed to produce an AC power output of up to 250 VA. It uses modular, open source PCB designs for both it's controller and power boards — and is extendible to larger power outputs or for other power electronics projects, such as battery charging, DC ring mains and DC power transformation using buck-boost DC/DC converters. Open Inverter will provide an AC output from a single 250W photovoltaic panel, micro-hydro turbine. It also has applications in electric bike charging and DC power storage. The key PCBs are currently at either the layout or manufacture stage. The microcontroller board features an RFM69 low power wireless, making it compatible with the Open Energy Monitor ecosystem. Ken Boak started his professional career at BBC Research Department in 1986 working on digital signal processing systems for HDTV and subsequently over 30 years, a mix of 10 other technology companies, both UK and US based, in the fields of instrumentation, automation, telemetry telecomms. Ken has been interested in energy monitoring since the early 1990s, when he constructed a 4 seater electric car, and provided rudimentary energy analysis of the battery charge and discharge cycles. In 1998 he joined a South London company and designed a low power wireless, monitor device for automatic, remote gas and electricity meter reading. In 2009 Ken worked on the Onzo Energy Monitoring Kit, a commercial device that was ultimately distributed to Southern Electric customers. Then in 2010 he produced a series of educational devices to teach engineering undergraduates the principles of photovoltaic energy systems. Ken has continued his interests in energy monitoring, working collaboratively with Megni on the OpenEnergyMonitor project, the open Inverter Project and also for All Power Labs in Berkeley, California, where he was involved in power monitoring of wood gasifier generator sets. He tries to live a low impact lifestyle in a modest Edwardian house in Surrey, with a little help from modern electronics. — OpenTRV OpenTRV have a vision to make carbon cutting and energy saving easy and cheap for everyone, with a mission to take 8% out of the EU’s carbon emissions and in the order of £300 out of a typical UK home’s heating bill every year. Achieving this using a device that doesn’t need an instruction manual or a smartphone to operate. OpenTRV aim to eventually be managing 400 million home radiators across Europe. Their journey so far has taken them from “scratching an itch” with open source, to injection moulded plastics being made in Shenzhen, and attempting to build a growth business around their ideas, that could really make a difference to carbon and climate, while improving householder comfort and health. As part of their aim to make the world a better place, OpenTRV will keep as much as possible of their work in the public eye and liberally licensed, while interoperating with existing equipment and protocols so that there is no need to reinvent the wheel and the end user doesn’t get “locked in”. To that end, interoperability with OpenergyMonitor and OpenHAB are high on their wish list! Damon Hart-Davis is lead on the OpenTRV open source project created following his 2012 presentation to DECC's smart heating workshop. He has freelanced in technology for over 30 years, delivering mission-critical products from design to BAU in the City for more than 20 of those, and has founded and been involved in several start-ups over that time with his creations seen on TV, the Web, and his pioneering Internet Service Provider helping crack open that market more than 20 years ago. A previous virtual/on-line credit-card company start-up that he co-founded as CTO, Ixaris, turns over ~£10m. Mark Hill spent 15 years in the City after a solid grounding in IT at the chip level at the microprocessor manufacturer Inmos, designing and delivering highly complex systems. Project management, direction and governance are all part of his toolkit. He now speaks regularly about innovation, collaboration and IoT. Recently he founded a mobile phone software start-up and is now OpenTRV Ltd's co-founder. — OpenEnergyMonitor 5 years on OpenEnergyMonitor is a project to develop open-source tools to help us relate to our use of energy, our energy systems and the challenge of sustainable energy. This short talk will provide an overview of what has been achieved so far, what has been learnt and outline the project roadmap for the future. Topics will include: running an open-hardware business, local manufacture and electronic carbon footprinting and sustainability. Glyn Hudson is co-founder and full-time developer of the OpenEnergyMonitor project. — Heat pumps and heat pump monitoring Heat pumps are a key part of zero carbon energy plans, making it possible to provide heating from renewable energy in an efficient way. Heat pumps have a rocky track record in the UK and there are numerous stories of poorly performing systems, giving householders unexpectedly high electricity bills. However, there are also many systems that have been designed and installed well that do work effectively. This talk will give an example of using open source hardware and software tools to monitor and evaluate the performance of heat pumps, using the speaker's own air source heat pump system at home as a case study. Trystan Lea is co-founder and core developer on the OpenEnergyMonitor project. He is also testing out through his own life how it is possible to provide for our energy needs from sustainable sources, while using and developing open source energy modelling and monitoring tools, to understand and evaluate what is possible and how we might better design zero carbon energy systems. Trystan is currently testing heat pump heating, along with electric vehicle and solar photovoltaic at home. — Interoperability Hack Day The 18th February meeting will be preceded by a hack day, running from 09:00-17:00 and also hosted at the BCS offices in Covent Garden. This will aim to to foster collaboration between open energy platform projects, in support of a greater interoperability. There is a separate registration page for this part of the day, but please note that participants are expected to have experience of developing for a relevant platform, such as OpenEnergyMonitor, OpenHAB, OpenTRV, or some other open source energy or home automation etc. system. As such hose without suitable experience would not benefit from attending. https://events.bcs.org/book/1886/ Please note that the link at the top of the page should be used for registering for the evening talks. Note: Please aim to arrive by 18:15 as the event will start at 18:30 prompt.

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