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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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OSHUG #44 — Security, Thursday 21st January.
by Andrew Back 05 Jan '16

05 Jan '16

Hello, Registration is now open for the January meeting, details of which can be found below. Cheers, Andrew // Event #44 — Security (Hardware RNG, PGP key signing party) On the 21 January 2016, 17:30 - 20:00 at BCS London, 1st Floor, The Davidson Building, 5 Southampton Street, London, WC2E 7HA. Registration: http://oshug.org/event/44 The theme for the forty-fourth OSHUG meeting is security and it will feature a talk on hardware random number generation, plus a PGP key signing party. — Hardware random number generation In this talk we will take a look at what makes a good random number, why you might want a reliable source of them and some methods of generating random numbers in hardware. Mark Longstaff-Tyrell has a degree in Electronic Engineering and a masters in Intelligent Systems from UCL. He has extensive experience in app development and as well as working at several blue chip companies was part of the team that launched the BBC's flagship iPlayer app for Android in addition to leading the teams that delivered the mobile apps for BBC News. He has designed electronics kits under the Denkimono label, and has recently co-founded and launched a tech-fashion brand in the UK. Mark is also a consultant for small businesses and start-ups on apps, mobile and hardware development. — PGP key signing party There will be a quick introduction to PGP, The Web of Trust, public/private key cryptography and key signing. Following this there will be a key signing party and everyone is invited to participate! The idea of a key signing party is to help build and strengthen the "Web of Trust". The PGP Web of Trust is used extensively in Free and Open Source communities in order to verify the authenticity of software distributions and e-mail. Participating in the Web of Trust by having your key signed and by signing other keys, establishes your identity as a member of the community and increases the likelihood that you will be able to verify the signatures that are often included on messages sent to mailing lists. In order to take part in the key signing party you need to: 1. Have a PGP key. If you do not have one already and need assistance, please e-mail Andy Bennett (a(a)jpb.li) and he will help you get started. 2. Submit your key to Andy Bennett (a(a)jpb.li) before Friday 15th January 2016, so that he can compile the key list. 3. Be physically present at this meeting! 4. For keys containing your real name, bring government issued photo ID. For pseudonymous keys please bring appropriate evidence that you are allowed to use that name and assert that identity. 5. Have details of the key you submitted: key ID, key type, key fingerprint and key size. You can get this information from GPG by using the following command: gpg your.email(a)address.dom. 6. Bring a printed copy of the key list that will be circulated between 16th and 20th January. Note: Please aim to arrive by 18:15 as the event will start at 18:30 prompt.

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Open Source Hardware Camp 2015, Sat 26 & Sun 27th September.
by Andrew Back 12 Aug '15

12 Aug '15

Hello, Registration is now open for OSHCamp 2015. This year we will have 13 talks and 6 workshops, details of which can be found below. The Wuthering Bytes Festival Day programme has also been published and details can be found at: http://www.wutheringbytes.com/days/festival/talks.html Cheers, Andrew // OSHCamp 2015 — 26th & 27th September at Hebden Bridge Town Hall, St. George's Street, Hebden Bridge, HX7 7BY. Registration: http://oshcamp2015.eventbrite.co.uk/ Open Source Hardware Camp will take place in the Pennine town of Hebden Bridge. For the third year running it is being hosted as part of the technology festival, Wuthering Bytes. Note that a social is planned for the Saturday evening. Hebden Bridge is approximately 1 hour by rail from Leeds and Manchester. Budget accommodation is available at the Hebden Bridge Hostel, with private rooms available and discounts for group bookings. Details of other local accommodation can be found at www.hebdenbridge.co.uk. Any questions should be directed to the Discussion List. — Saturday :: Talks * Research led reality – how rhetoric and research shapes the maker movement Over the past 10 years there has been an exponential rise in research about makerspaces, alongside rhetoric about the ‘maker movement’ going mainstream. This talk will give a sweeping overview of the past decade, focusing on the relationship between rhetoric, research and reality – (is there more to it than alliteration?) It will attempt to answer these three questions: What are the promises of the maker movement and does the evidence built up by the research so far prove them? What does the research tell us about the differences between the UK and USA maker movement? Who is funding all the research and what are their motivations and agendas? Hannah Stewart is a Research Associate at the Royal College of Art and an independent researcher. Alongside Andrew Sleigh she was commissioned to produce the UK Makerspaces Open Dataset for NESTA. Her Phd research with the Creative Exchange focused on the values and practices of the makerspace, indieweb and open data communities. * Confusion of Things — The IoT Hardware Kerfuffle While the definition of the term IoT (i.e: Internet of Things) is as cloudy as the “cloud”, everyone seems to be doing it. With excitement levels reaching stratospheric levels, the amount of buzzword-driven articles and colourful (and oh so unnecessary) abstract vector drawings that depict toasters communicating with cars have essentially made lives of many engineers who just want to build things a living hell. This talk will strip back the layers of marketing and aim to answer the question: “Which hardware platform should you use for building connected devices?”. With the plethora of chips/single board computers and specifically IoT-branded offerings out there, the platform choice does get a little difficult at times. By breaking down the application at hand into certain key requirement categories, this process could be simplified. There will also be mention of some of the most popular hardware platforms and how they differ from each other. 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 and likes good beer. * Disrupting the IoT by leveraging the ESP8266 for big data The ESP8266 is as a cheap, self-contained WIFI module; for £3 you can add WIFI to your microcontroller project. Recently, the toolchain for compiling custom firmware for the module's SOC has been ported to the Arduino IDE, making it possible for beginners to deploy the ESP8266 as a complete IoT wireless sensor/actuator. This talk will cover: ESP8266 capabilities, the rest of the ESP8266 family members, using the module as a WIFI gateway with AT commands, uploading your own firmware using the recent Arduino port, and projects utilising the module. Matthew Venn is a freelance engineer and workshop facilitator. As a qualified electronic engineer, he has worked with Arcola Energy, BOC, RS, Sustrans, Bristol Braille Technology and others on various projects ranging from bicycle powered cinemas to fuel cell theatre lighting. Matthew's hands-on STEM workshops have proven successful with over 5,000 children taking part worldwide over the last 3 years. Recent workshops include the London School's Hydrogen cell Challenge, an aerial photography project for Island Hydrogen and building solar mood lamps for the Abu Dhabi Science Festival. When he's not inventing new ways of getting people excited about engineering, Matthew plays music, invents puzzle boxes, practices martial arts and is a director of Bristol Hackspace. * Controlling a CNC milling machine with a BeagleBone Black and Machinekit A journey into the wonderful world of CNC machining. This talk will look at the modification of an old milling machine, retrofitting it with new electronics for improved performance and open source software control. Also covered will be things learnt along the way and how to take an idea through to machined part. Stuart Childs enjoys designing and building physical projects, has exhibited at every Maker Faire UK event and worked at Arduino specialists, oomlout. He is a supporter of Open Knowledge and has helped in running their annual OKFest and OKCon events in 2012, 2013 and 2014. * Speculative Hardware in Abstract Culture Derek will talk about open hardware as a speculative practice in abstract culture. Derek's talk will be grounded in his experience with the Arts Council England R&D projects at the Digital Research Unit 10 years ago that commissioned innovative DIY/open hardware and audiovisual software tools and software art released under a free/open licenses. His talk will work with the design-fictional concept of noise to explore the function of open hardware in abstract culture. In the talk Derek will give a brief account of abstract culture in contemporary practice where artists are directly involved in making hardware and software works realised by the use of free and open source technologies. Derek Hales is an independent researcher in the field of abstract culture. He has worked in academic and para-academic contexts of artist-led R&D and cultural production. He co-founded the Digital Research a semi-autonomous art-technology research facility based at the media centre Huddersfield and at Bates Mill, Huddersfield until 2009, where he worked on projects with the universities of Leeds, Bradford and Huddersfield. He has previously been funded by Arts Council England, the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the Engineering and Physical Science Research Council and the Higher Education Innovation Fund. His pataphysical take on speculative hardware in abstract culture was recently published as a chapter in the book ‘Deleuze and Design’ (2015) by Edinburgh University Press. Derek is currently completing his Phd with the Royal College of Art. He is a director of Bridge Rectifier, Hebden Bridge Hackspace. * How to Openwash Your Product and Make Your Millions! Open Hardware has sparked a home brew electronics revolution. The current wave of 3D printers, drones and development boards are in the most part built on Open Hardware. As a result Open Hardware or Open Source Hardware have become terms with which many new products would like to be associated with, it’s rare to see an electronics Kickstarter project without the claim of being Open Source. It would seem however that in some cases the understanding of what constitutes Open Hardware is different to the original definition. Openwashing is a term that refers to dubious vendor claims about openness, and assumes, perhaps wrongly, that the misunderstanding of the Open Source definition is intentional. Benjamin Gray is a proponent of Open Hardware, founder of MeArm, an open source robot arm manufacturer and phenoptix, a now retired maker business. Ben graduated from the University of Exeter with a chemistry degree and a fledgling phenoptix before moving to Nottingham to complete a PhD in theoretical physical chemistry. With 11 years of Maker business experience under his belt he's set out on a new adventure manufacturing the MeArm, a pocket sized robot arm. * Simulating and benchmarking the Adapteva Parallella board The Adapteva Epiphany is a fascinating combination of old and new: a brand new, energy-efficient SoC processor that makes use of an old idea in concurrency: communicating sequential processes. This talk will be a deep-dive into the design of the Epiphany from the point of view of a software developer. We will look at the design of the Epiphany through the lens of a new simulator for the chip, and explore the SDK through a series of new benchmarks. Sarah Mount is a Senior Lecturer in Computer Science at the University of Wolverhampton, with particular interests in concurrency, parallelism and dynamic languages. * Introducing a fun documentation standard to share your project DokuBricks is a new open source hardware (OSH) documentation software we developed to make it easier for you to document your project well. After all, sharing instructions in a way that is useful to others is the whole purpose of OSH! With the tool, you click together your documentation in a descriptive and modular fashion and create dependencies. An associated database allows to easily reuse functional modules of projects, which in turn grows the impact and recognition of the creator of the original project. The ideas behind this free and open source documentation standard will be presented along with other OSH projects of ours in the Cambridge network. Our vision is to make OSH development and sharing easier and specifically more attractive to scientists - a group that develops a large amount of functional devices on a routine basis but rarely shares that insight. Tobias Wenzel "Tobey" is a Winton Scholar at the University of Cambridge who channels most of his enthusiasm into his Bioengineering work. He has build a range of equipment but is generally more involved in meta-projects that enable greater community impact to further technological development and access to it. He is a passionate promoter of hands-on education and loves to socialise with people sharing his can-do attitude. The DokuBricks project is a collaborative effort involving the IRNAS institute, OpenPlants, Tobey's colleague, Johan Henriksson, and more enthusiastic helpers. * C88 — possibly the world's lowest spec PC What happens when somebody designs a CPU simply to prove to themselves that they can? The result is minimal and has few practical applications but could be a great learning tool. C88 is an 8 bit computer with only 8 bytes of memory, it represents a bare minimum computer architecture. It was inspired by the world's first stored-program computer, the SSEM, more commonly known as The Manchester Baby. It's fully open source and there is even a simulator that runs in your browser. Daniel Bailey is studying electronics at the University of York, has a scholarship with ARM and is a member of York Hackspace. * Using open source processors and fabrics for scale-out compute Using open source processors and fabrics for scale-out compute systems. This talk will give an overview of the challenges faced by the industry and the technical approach we are taking. Rob Taylor has been working commercially with Linux and Open Source technologies since the late 90's. He founded two Open Source consultancies, Collabora and Codethink, and is now founding a new company to bring Open Source Hardware to the enterprise market. * WSPR, You Versus the Atmosphere: Pushing the limits of radio with minimal hardware WSPR is a transmission protocol designed to test the radio propagation properties of the atmosphere using very low powered transmission. This talk will describe the problem of unpredictable atmospheric propagation, give an overview of WSPR, and show some of the ways to set up a WSPR station as both a transmitter or a receiver. * Jenny List is an electronic engineer and radio amateur who has worked in the is an electronic engineer and radio amateur who has worked in the start-up, Language Spy, aiming to democratise access to language corpora and lexical data. * Low level Ethernet on micros and FPGA Forget about ISO 7 layer abstractions, Berkley sockets, huge APIs and even operating systems. This is about taking direct control of Ethernet hardware with a micro or even an FPGA and finding that it’s not that hard. Standard C code running on an ARM CortexM4 micro supporting ARP, UDP and enough ICMP to PING ! And a quick tour of doing the same thing in VHDL on a low cost FPGA. Michael Kellett is an independent Electronic design engineer with analogue and digital hardware experience starting with HiFi audio in the 1970s, though designing microphones, accelerometers, test gear and active suspension controls. Now he’ll design anything electronic (nothing evil) for anyone but with a preference for low power analogue, small micros and things with FPGAs in them. * Open Hardware Licensing - it’s easier than you think There are several hundred different free and open source software licences making licence compatibility a nightmare, but at the moment only a handful of open hardware licences (and let’s hope it stays that way). Andrew explains why licences are important, how to select a suitable licence for your project, and how to avoid getting too ambitious about what a licence can actually achieve. Andrew Katz is a lawyer with 21 years' experience in technology law. He has advised a number of open source software projects, and more recently has become active in open hardware licensing. He’s been involved in drafting the Solderpad Licence, and the CERN Open Hardware licence and has published and lectured widely. Andrew is Managing Partner of Moorcrofts LLP, a boutique corporate/tech law firm based in the Thames Valley. * Compered by: Dr Jeremy Bennett is founder and Chief Executive of Embecosm, a consultancy specializing in the development of open source compiler tool chains. — Sunday :: Workshops Some workshops will provide tools, boards and components etc. However, subject to demand this may involve an element of sharing and please feel free to bring along equipment and components, but note that you must be able to take full responsibility for your own personal safety and that of others in respect to these. Common sense must be exercised! * 3D modelling with Node.js Come along and learn how to use the open source Frameworx library and some simple Javascript code to quickly build beautiful and intricate 3D models ready to send to your printer or favourite 3D print agency. Fractal trees, structural trusses, jewellery, molecular models - if it's made of sticks Frameworx can model it! Ben Jefferson is a software engineer who initially trained as an architect (as in buildings not Ben was tech director at Leeds based web agency Sense Internet for 10 years and is now a freelance software engineer and IT consultant. His combined interest in structures, fractals, computing and innovation set Ben on a mission to model and 3D print a "Fractal Truss". After trying many different open source 3D modelling packages Ben found that none of them leant themselves to fast algorithmic generation of multi-million facet 3D models - thus Frameworx was born. Frameworx is now used all over the world including in labs working at the cutting edge of 3D printing technology. Workshop notes: bring along a laptop which has node.js and MeshLab (or similar STL file viewer) installed. A basic knowledge of Javascript coding is required. * A hands-on introduction to ESP8266: Sensors for the Home This workshop will introduce attendees to the popular low-cost WiFi enabled ESP8266 platform and go through a series of practical exercises focusing around a sensor device for the home. The device will get temperature/humidity, PIR activity and ambient light readings from the sensors on the purpose built demo board and report them back to the local “hub” and/or a cloud service. The exercises will run on the NodeMCU firmware, which is based on the Lua programming language. Before we get to the sensor readings part, there will be a quick introduction to the language and the platform with trivial exercises such as controlling GPIOs, using timers and various other fundamentals. Run by: OmerKilic. Workshop notes: bring along a laptop (Windows/Linux/OSX), your charger and a Micro USB cable. Please have your root/admin credentials handy in case you need to install any required software components during the workshop. * Learn KiCad by building an ESP8266 sensor board The ESP8266 is a WIFI gateway for microcontrollers. It can also have its firmware replaced with custom code that makes it even easier to build distributed sensors. KiCad is a free, open source, electronics CAD tool for designing circuit boards. It's recently undergone a rapid expansion and change due to CERN funding. Consequently lots of documentation is now out of date. In this workshop you'll learn how to use the new KiCad by building a circuit board that provides the ESP8266 with 3.3v regulated power from a 5v input (easily powered with a phone charger), headers for serial programming and a temperature or light sensor. Thanks to our workshop sponsors OSHPark, each participant will get vouchers to have their board made free of charge. Run by: Matthew Venn. Workshop notes: please bring a laptop computer with KiCad installed. Note that installation can take quite a while as it needs to be compiled from source code. * A £100 3D printed digital microscope, anyone? 3D printing brought incredible examples of Open Labware to life. My personal favourite (to be published soon): My colleague Richard Bowman's Raspberry Pi driven digital microscope, about the size of two fists, which allows a sample positioning of 1micrometer for X,Y and Z axis with its 3-printed flex-structures. Fun for you and Christmas for your kids! The kit (3D printed components and other bits including an optional raspberry pi) will be made available. The exact cost will depend on the 3D printing contractor I will use but should lie significantly under £100. At home you can extend the microscope in order to automate the three axes, if you wish. Run by: TobiasWenzel. Workshop notes: please bring a laptop and, if you like, your own raspberry pi. A steady hand will be beneficial for the assembly! * Arduino-based wearable electronics with the Seahorse The Seahorse is a flexible kit based on the Shrimping.it breadboard design and Cuttlefish PCB. The kit allows you to create a fully functional Arduino compatible computer, powering two LEDs and an IR receiver and transmitter. The board is fully extensible, making it easy to connect to a range of other peripherals via conductive thread. During this workshop, which lasts for the complete afternoon, you will solder up the circuit board, program it, and then sew it to a T-shirt. Run by: Dr Jeremy Bennett. Workshop notes: please bring a T-shirt or other item of clothing to which you wish to attach the seahorse. * Assembling the OSHCamp kit Get help with assembling this year's kit. Chelsea Back is a trainee engineer and is working towards a degree in Electronic Engineering. She enjoys building microcontroller projects and teaching people how to solder, and is currently getting to grips with schematic capture and PCB layout. Workshop notes: bring along the OSHCamp 2015 kit. NOTE: - There are separate tickets for Friday, Saturday and Sunday. - A light lunch and refreshments will be provided each day. - Please aim to arrive between 09:00 and 09:15 on the Saturday as the event will start at 09:20 prompt.

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OSHCamp 2015 CFP.
by Andrew Back 09 Jun '15

09 Jun '15

Hello, This year Open Source Hardware Camp will be taking place over the weekend of 26 & 27th September, and once again hosted as part of the Wutehring Bytes festival at Hebden Bridge Town Hall (HX7 7BY). Proposals for talks and workshops 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 Saturday 27th June. If you would like to discuss ideas etc. please get in touch sooner, rather than later. **** Cheers, Andrew

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