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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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OSHUG #42 — Chips Pt. 3, Thursday 18th June.
by Andrew Back 29 May '15

29 May '15

Hello, Registration is now open for the June meeting, details of which can be found below. Cheers, Andrew // Event #42 — Chips Pt.3 (BERI, Do we need separate Hardware Construction languages? OpenTransputer) 18 June 2015, 18:00 - 20:00 at BCS London, 1st Floor, The Davidson Building, 5 Southampton Street, London, WC2E 7HA. Registration: http://oshug.org/event/42 This will be the third OSHUG meeting exploring the topic of silicon chip design, with talks on the Bluespec Extensible RISC Implementation, another asking whether we need separate hardware construction languages, and a third talk on an open source implementation of the Transputer. — BERI: An open RISC softcore for research and experimentation BERI (the Bluespec Extensible RISC Implementation) is a softcore processor jointly developed by SRI International and The University of Cambridge. It implements a superset of the MIPS III ISA in Bluespec, a high-level HDL and supports a fully open source, permissively licensed, software stack comprising the FreeBSD operating system and the LLVM compiler suite. This talk will describe the design of the BERI processor and its use. BERI was created to facilitate experimentation at the boundaries between CPU architecture, operating systems, and programming languages. It runs in Altera and Xilinx FPGAs, including the NetFPGA 10G board. At 100MHz, it is fast enough to use as a real computer (albeit a fairly slow one). The talk will discuss the BERI softcore, jointly developed by The University of Cambridge and SRI International and the associated open source software stack. BERI, the Bluespec Extensible RISC Implementation, is a 64-bit MIPS implementation in Bluespec, a high-level hardware description language. It implements the instruction set that debuted in the MIPS R4000 core in 1991, and therefore a set that is free of patents owing to its age. In spite of this, it is a relatively modern 64-bit architecture and is well supported by open source systems. The FreeBSD port to BERI required minimal changes, which were shipped as part of the FreeBSD 10.0 release, and runs unmodified userland 64-bit MIPS code. BERI can run in simulation at a speed acceptable for testing but not for general usage or in an FPGA at 100MHz. The BERI design supports multiple cores on a single FPGA and work is ongoing to support multicore across boards connected with a low-latency interconnect. Jonathan Woodruff received his undergraduate degree from the University of Texas, and Masters and PhD from the University of Cambridge. Jonathan is a key developer of the BERI open-source research processor and its CHERI extension for memory safety. Jonathan is interested in hardware prototyping in FPGA to support full-system design exploration and has implemented a variety of flexible hardware components, including a many-core cache emulator, a multi-threaded ARM core, and many components of the BERI ecosystem. — Do we need separate Hardware Construction Languages? Modern Hardware Construction Languages, including Chisel, HML and the functional subset of Bluespec, provide powerful circuit description facilities for netlist printing in the style of the generate statements found in RTL. The earliest mainstream example was perhaps Lava. They do not support data-directed control flow, and so differ greatly from both conventional RTL and C-to-gates or scientific acceleration HLS (high-level synthesis) tools such as LegUp and Kiwi. In this talk, Greaves will illustrate the essential differences between these styles and discuss the motivation for separate languages, which is a surprising departure when one considers that a major selling point of Verilog and VHDL was they almost seamlessly integrated simulation, generative constructs and algorithm expression. He will also discuss the need for higher-level concurrency primitives and how they might be provided in hardware construction languages. David Greaves, PhD, MIET, is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Cambridge with interests in compiler and hardware design. He has considerable industrial experience at the CTO/Chief Scientist level and has led the design of many hardware systems in areas such as professional audio and broadband access. His current research area is tooling for high-level simulation and energy instrumentation for system-on-chip based on transaction-level modelling (TLM). These enable new hardware architectures to be rapidly explored under real-world workloads, including accelerators for scientific workloads. — OpenTransputer: Reinventing a parallel machine from the past The OpenTransputer is a re-implementation of the Transputer, a pioneering microprocessor architecture first released in the 1980s. The original Transputer was considered revolutionary at its time for its integrated memory and serial communication links intended for parallel computing. Including memory and external links on the same chip made the Transputer essentially a computer on a chip. This allowed information systems to be designed at a higher level – the Transputer functioning as a building block for parallel computing networks. Over the last few years, with the shift to cloud computing there has been a trend in the world of computing of building large clusters of powerful computers that serve data to an ever-growing number of client devices, which themselves only feature tiny and low-power processors. These include mobile phones and tablets, but will soon also comprise every other device that connects to the internet, ranging from washing machines to cars. We think that the Transputer and its unique feature set make it an excellent processor for the emerging Internet of Things (IoT), specifically for the connected homes and wearable computing applications. The OpenTransputer maintains all the ideas of the original device for concurrency management and interprocess communication. However, the serial links that were used to connect multiple Transputers are replaced by a switch that routes messages between cores. Furthermore, we introduce a new I/O interface that is compatible with the vast majority of hardware components such as accelerometers and gyroscopes. Note: Please aim to arrive by 18:15 as the event will start at 18:30 prompt.

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OSHUG #41 — Wiring the Internet of Things with Raspberry Pi & Node-RED, Thursday 21st May.
by Andrew Back 23 Apr '15

23 Apr '15

Hello, Registration is now open for the May meeting, which will take the form of an afternoon workshop providing an introduction to Node-RED. if you are planning on attending, registering sooner rather than later is highly recommended. However, please don't register if you there is a chance you won't make it, as spaces are limited and it would be a terrible shame if some miss out due to the event being booked up, then on the day we end up with empty chairs. Cheers, Andrew // Event #41 — Wiring the Internet of Things with Raspberry Pi & Node-RED 21 May 2015, 12:30 - 18:30 at Fab Lab London, Off Old Jewry, 1 Frederick’s Place, London, EC2R 8AE. Registration: http://oshug.org/event/41 Node-RED is a visual tool for wiring together hardware devices, APIs and online services in new and interesting ways. Used together with Raspberry Pi it provides a compact, powerful platform that is able to read sensors, control outputs, and send and receive data to and from the Web and other systems. This workshop will provide an introduction to Node-RED and integrating simple sensors and outputs, applying basic processing and publishing data to the Web. No prior experience with either Node-RED or electronics is required. However, while not strictly necessary, some experience of JavaScript would be beneficial as this is used to implement custom functionality within Node-RED. The introduction to Node-RED will be presented by Andy Stanford-Clark. Andy Stanford-Clark is a Distinguished Engineer in IBM's global Internet of Things team. He is an IBM Master Inventor with more than 40 patents. Andy is based at IBM's Hursley Park laboratories in the UK, and specialises in the Internet of Things, remote telemetry, energy monitoring and management, Smart Metering and Smart Grid technologies. He has a particular interest in home energy monitoring, home automation and driving consumer behaviour change. Andy has been working on what we now call the Internet of Things for more than 15 years: he co-developed the MQTT messaging protocol in 1998. Andy has a BSc in Computing and Mathematics, and a PhD in Computer Science. He is a Visiting Professor at the University of Newcastle, an Honorary Professor at the University of East Anglia, and a Fellow of the British Computer Society. Please bring a laptop and, if you have a Raspberry Pi, bring this along with any useful sensors and LEDs. However, note that boards and sensors etc. will also be made available for use by those who do not have these. An SD card image will be provided with Node-RED and associated software pre-installed. Note: Please aim to arrive by 12:15 as the workshop will start at 12:30 prompt. Jointly hosted by the BCS OSSG, IBM UK and OSHUG. With support from the Knowledge Transfer Network and hardware sponsored by RS DesignSpark.

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OSHUG #40 — Hackerspace/makerspace/fablab panel discussion, Thursday 16th April.
by Andrew Back 22 Mar '15

22 Mar '15

Hello, Registration is now open for the April meeting, details of which can be found below. Cheers, Andrew // Event #40 — Hackerspace/makerspace/fablab panel discussion 16 April 2015, 17:30 - 20:00 at BCS London, 1st Floor, The Davidson Building, 5 Southampton Street, London,WC2E 7HA. Registration: http://oshug.org/event/40 For the fourtieth meeting we will be hosting a panel discussion which will explore the organisation, operation, challenges and benefits of creative spaces known as hackerspaces, makerspaces and fablabs. There will be representatives from Makespace Cambridge, South London Makerspace, So Make It (Southampton), Fab Lab London, London Hackspace and the UK's innovation agency, Innovate UK. — Makespace Cambridge Dr Laura James is co-founder and Director of Makespace Cambridge, a non-profit community inventing shed and hackspace. She is currently consulting on a variety of technology and innovation activities. Laura has worked in technology and leadership roles in a wide variety of organisations. After R&D work at AT&T Labs in both Menlo Park and Cambridge, Laura developed high speed optical networks with Intel Research for her PhD. She was the first employee and VP Engineering at AlertMe.com, developing an easy to use innovative connected home platform and security system. At True Knowledge, Laura was part of the senior management team leading the company through a pivot, to apply their unique semantic technology to next generation search, creating Evi, a revolutionary conversational search app. Laura has also worked as Chief Operating Officer at CARET, a dynamic innovation department of the University of Cambridge, developing open source systems to support teaching and research. Most recently, Laura was CEO of Open Knowledge, a civil society organisation dedicated to opening up knowledge to empower people. Laura is an advisor to Open Knowledge, Product Health, Good Night Lamp, and the ContentMine. Laura holds Masters and PhD degrees in Engineering from the University of Cambridge, received the Royal Academy of Engineering Leadership Award and a NESTA Crucible Fellowship, and is a Chartered Engineer. — South London Makerspace Tom Lynch is a Designer/Maker based in London, after completing his MA at the Royal College of Art he went on to start Elephant & Castle Mini Maker Faire at the London College of Communication where he now works as a Physical Computing Specialist Technician. Living in South London, Tom is a founder and trustee of South London Makerspace, a social, community workshop in Herne Hill. — So Make It Jem Gillam is an iOS programmer turned stay at home mum, and a trustee at So Make It. She has always had an interest in programming and hardware hacking, her first projects involving circuit bending and wearable electronics. Her current project is working with a large team to build a life size remote control Dalek, which meant finally learning to use the power tools at the makerspace! — Fab Lab London Tony Fish is co-founder of Fab Lab London, investor, entrepreneur and an author with a background in electronics, computing and design. — London Hackspace Jonty Wareing is co-founder and trustee of London Hackspace, and co-founder of Electromagnetic Field. He is currently hacking on IRC Cloud after three years at Lumi, and five years at Last.fm. — Innovate UK Nikos Pronios is Lead Technologist for Information & Communication Technologies (ICT) at Innovate UK which he joined in early 2014. He has a diverse background in the ICT sector with experience in US and Europe, both in the industry and academia. After obtaining his PhD from the University of Southern California, he worked for Bell Communication Research in New Jersey, before moving to INTRACOM in Greece. Nikos has worked in various industry positions covering before moving to INTRACOM in Greece. Nikos has worked in various industry positions covering civilian and defence sectors, and he is currently using his diverse experience of more than 20 years to help organisations innovate and compete. — Chaired by: Dr Jeremy Bennett is Founder and CEO of Embecosm, an open source compiler and silicon chip modeling consultancy, that are a strong supporter of the makerspace movement as sponsor of So Make It, Chip Hack and regular workshops that serve to introduce people to embedded computing. Note: Please aim to arrive by 18:15 as the event will start at 18:30 prompt. //

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OSHUG #39 — Radio Pt. 3, Thursday 19th March.
by Andrew Back 24 Feb '15

24 Feb '15

Hello, Registration is now open for the March meeting, details of which can be found below. Cheers, Andrew // Event #39 — Radio Pt. 3 (OpenBeacon, HPSDR, Building Things) 19 March 2015, 17:30 - 20:00 at BCS London, 1st Floor, The Davidson Building, 5 Southampton Street, London, WC2E 7HA. Registration: http://oshug.org/event/39 The thirty-ninth meeting will feature an update on the HPSDR project, which we first heard about back in October 2010 at OSHUG #5. There will also be talks on Bluetooth Low Energy programming and OpenBeacon, and Building Things. — Low Power to the People - take back Bluetooth Low Energy control! ** Programming BLE the hard way: bare metal programming of nRF51 BLE tokens for fun and profit. The talk will start with a brief overview of the Bluetooth Low Energy advertisement protocol and how to implement bare-metal BLE on top of the ARM-based nRF51 chip — without using the manufacturer provided Bluetooth stack. The general development flow will be explored along with some useful examples, closing with some mischief that can be caused using this knowledge :-) The latest version of the OpenBeacon tag design is supposed to be the ultimate hacking, fuzzing and pen testing tool for Bluetooth Low Energy. The hardware schematics and the PCB layout were released under the CC attribution license. We strongly believe that the future of the Internet of Things can be privacy enabled and can work distributed, without selling your soul to large cloud services. Milosch Meriac has over 20 years experience in the information security business and hardware design. He is currently living in Cambridge where he works for ARM on securing the Internet of Things. In his private time he loves making and grokking things. He is currently playing with RGB strips to create light paintings. Milosch is the co-founder of active and passive RFID open source projects like Sputnik/OpenBeacon, OpenPCD and OpenPICC, and is committed to RFID related security research. He broke the iCLASS RFID security system and was involved in breaking Mifare Classic security. As a member of the Blinkenlights Stereoscope Core Team Milosch designed the 2.4GHz OpenBeacon-based dimmmer/Ethernet dardware that was used in the Toronto City Hall Installation. As one of the three maintainers of the former Xbox-Linux Project he helped to break Xbox security and to port the first Linux system to the Xbox. His focus is on hardware development, embedded systems, RF designs, active and passive RFID hardware development, custom-tailoring of embedded Linux hardware platforms, real time systems, IT-security and reverse engineering. — OpenHPSDR Update A review of hardware and software progress of the High Performance Software Define Radio, an open source hardware and software project being developed by an international group of ham radio enthusiasts. John Melton has held a ham radio license since 1984 and has developed several open source Linux applications, including ground station software for working digital satellites and software defined radios. He is a retired software engineer after 48 years developing software for several computer manufacturers including Burroughs Corporation, ICL, Sun Microsystems and Oracle Corporation. — Building Things Creative communities are having an ever increasing influence on the way in which global companies like Microsoft, Samsung and Google go about developing new products. Access to open source technology creates new ways for inventors, makers and coders to turn ideas into things others want to use or buy. Embarking on the journey of turning an idea into a product comes with numerous hurdles, including: access to expensive machinery, technology, or skills which just aren’t readily available to many. Miles and Will from Wireless Things (formerly Ciseco) will describe how ‘Building Things’, their latest open source hardware, will help people build their own cool wireless devices. Current CEO of Wireless Things, Miles Hodkinson previously made a living selling and supporting scalable IT infrastructure. Whilst Head of Software Security for Egg PLC he always harboured a passion for tinkering. Miles has transformed his passion from a hobby in his garden shed, to one of the ‘go-to’ companies for people building IoT solutions, all manufactured in his home town of Nottingham. Head of Channel Strategy for Wireless Things, Will Stone has spent the last decade between running an outsourced sales company and in engineering recruitment. Will teamed up with Miles at the beginning of 2014 and is responsible for commercial aspects of the business, including the management of their rapidly expanding chain of partners and distributors. Now with 40 recognized distributors across 21 countries, Wireless Things has a growing presence and reputation in the Internet of Things. Note: Please aim to arrive by 18:15 as the first talk will start at 18:30 prompt. //

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OSHUG #38 — Energy, Thursday 19th February.
by Andrew Back 28 Jan '15

28 Jan '15

Hello, Registration is now open for the February meeting. Details below. Cheers, Andrew // Event #38 — Energy (Exploring "open" in energy, Electricity from Woodchips, OpenTRV) 19 February 2015, 17:30 - 20:00 at BCS London, 1st Floor, The Davidson Building, 5 Southampton Street, London, WC2E 7HA. Registration: http://oshug.org/event/38 The thirty-eighth meeting will take a look open source technologies in support of the generation and efficient use of energy. — Exploring "Open" in Energy Arcola Energy builds energy systems using fuel cells powered by hydrogen. Fuel cells are one of those great ideas that has yet to gain much traction in real markets. They put men on the moon, but since then commercial progress has been slow. One way of opening up uses of fuel cells is to involve a much wider developer community. To explore this Arcola has developed a fuel cell developer kit and started on the road to working with open source groups. This talk will look at our journey, the success to far and the challenges ahead. Richard Kemp-Harper is a former research scientist who spent several years managing web development, including open source systems at Oxfam. He then moved into technology and innovation, working at Innovate UK running innovation programmes in intelligent mobility, rail and energy. He specialises in not being a specialist. — Electricity from Woodchips — An Edwardian Idea — Tamed with 21st Century Microelectronics First studied in the 1820s, gasification is the process of converting a hydrocarbon solid fuel, such as coal or wood, into a low calorific value gas suitable for running an internal combustion engine. Used for vehicle transportation during World War 2 — gasification has enjoyed a renaissance at the start of the 21st Century. Low cost, open source microelectronics are used to tame this technology, from a labour intensive manual process, to a fully automated turnkey system. In January 2012, Ken Boak quit his UK electronic design job and travelled to Berkeley, California, to work on a new biomass energy project — an open source, microcontroller based control system for a wood chip fired CHP system. The company — an East Bay area start-up — "All Power Labs", had a compact, self-contained biomass gasification system, close to commercialisation. In the 6 month contract, Ken productionised the open source, control and automation system, using standard, globally available components and rationalised the wiring loom so that low cost, modular assembly was practical. Ken started his 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 and telecomms. Ken tries to live a low impact lifestyle in a modest Edwardian house in Surrey, with a little help from modern electronics. — Scratching the itch: saving the planet When BigCo and .gov are not sorting your problem then open everything makes it easier for you to scratch your own itch, especially with the very positive innovation support around right now, possibly the best for 30 years. And when you can save the planet, be your own boss, and meet and work with lots of fabulous interesting people, what’s holding you back? 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. Note: Please aim to arrive by 18:15 as the first talk will start at 18:30 prompt. //

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OSHUG #37 — Open Source in Business, Thursday 22nd January.
by Andrew Back 06 Jan '15

06 Jan '15

Registration is now open for the first meeting of 2015, which will be hosted at Sheffield Hallam University and in conjunction with the BCS OSSG. Details and a link to registration can be found below. In February we will return to hosting meetings at the BCS offices in Covent Garden. Regards, Andrew // Event #37 — Open Source in Business 22nd January 2015, 17:30 - 20:30 at Owen Lecture Theatre, 1028 Owen Building, Sheffield Hallam University, Howard Street, Sheffield, S1 1WB. Registration: http://oshug.org/event/37 An evening of talks exploring different commercial aspects of open source — hardware and software — including crowdfunding an open hardware microenterprise, navigating licensing issues, trade associations, and building a business on free software. Hosted in conjunction with the BCS Open Source Specialist Group. — Open Source Consortium - an introduction OSC is a trade association which represents companies and individuals delivering solutions and advice based on Open Standards and Free & Open Source Software. As a trade association, OSC gives its members greater influence than they could achieve alone by providing a collective voice, and by supporting initiatives such as the implementation of open standards in public sector IT, the inclusion of open standards in school curricula and levelling the gender balance in the industry. At the core of its vision, OSC campaigns for the use of Open Standards in all aspects of public and commercial life, promoting the unique advantages of Free & Open Source Software and the independent expertise offered by members. Irenie White has been Chair of the Open Source Consortium since 2013 after working with the organisation for 3 years. This year she was appointed as MD of credativ, a free software consulting and services company, after running operations there for 6 years. As a STEMNET Ambassador and through her work with Advancing Women in IT, Irenie is committed to supporting bottom-up growth in the wider technology industry. Outside of work her family comes first, music a close second. — Notes from the first three months of an Open Source Microenterprise * How I learned to stop worrying and love the Kickstarter Starting an Open Source Hardware business is lot of work, even if you've spent 11 years running a different one. There are all sorts of things you've forgotten about and there are a whole host of new challenges as you try to do things the right way from the start. None of it is easy, but all of it beats having a 9-5. Benjamin Gray is a proponent of Open Hardware, founder of MeArm, an open source robot arm manufacturer and phenoptix a recently 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. — But I didn't mean *that* Accidents and incidents exploring relationships between corporations and the licenses they use to share, from Creative Commons to GPL. Paul Beech used his graphic and web design skills to co-found Pimoroni, a maker company that does Raspberry Pi and Arduino stuff. Code: open source. Hardware: less so. — Giving it away: Free Software as a business strategy Bytemark Hosting has been involved in building, fixing and publishing Free Software since its foundation in 2002. Back then, free Software was seen as an unquestionable part of a winning business strategy for big firms, but within years firms that bet too much on it were brought down to earth. Matthew Bloch, Bytemark's MD, narrates his own company's successes, profitability and changes in strategy around this important social movement. Matthew Bloch is MD and co-founder of Bytemark Hosting, one of the UK's oldest and best-respected hosting and cloud providers, with its own data centre in York and staff of 23. Previous to Bytemark Matthew worked as a programmer on several Java virtual machines, and the PC emulator for Acorn computers. Compered by: Gareth Halfacree is a freelance technology journalist and the co-author of the Raspberry Pi User Guide, alongside project co-founder Eben Upton. He also writes the maker-centric Hobby Tech column for Custom PC Magazine, as well as numerous features in magazines including PC Pro, Linux User & Developer, Micro Mart, Computeractive and others. Formerly a system administrator working in the education sector, Gareth's passion for open source projects has followed him from one career to another and he can often be seen reviewing, documenting or even contributing to projects including GNU/Linux, LibreOffice, Fritzing and Arduino. He is also the creator of the Sleepduino and Burnduino open hardware projects and numerous small software tools, all released under permissive licences. Note: Please aim to arrive by 17:45 as the first talk will start at 18:00 prompt.

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Superoptimization and supercomputing talks, Wed 26th November at The RSA.
by Andrew Back 13 Nov '14

13 Nov '14

Hello, There are no hardware talks this month, but the BCS OSSG is hosting two talks on open source software with a "super" theme — supercomputing and superoptimization. Details and a link to registration are below. Also note that this month the venue is the Royal Society of Arts on The Strand, and not the BCS! Cheers, Andrew //// Location: The Prince Philip room Royal Society of Arts 8 John Adam Street London WC2N 6EZ Date: Wednesday 26 November Time: 6:00pm for 6:30pm start Price: Free for BCS members and non-members Booking link: https://events.bcs.org/book/1320/ (Please remember to book your place.) N.B. Note the change of venue, due to a double booking at the BCS. The RSA is just the other side of the strand from the BCS. map: RSA, 8+John+Adam+St,+London+WC2N, This month we have two talks on a "super" theme. Talk 1: Superoptimization: How fast can your code go. Speaker: James Pallister, University of Bristol Modern compiler optimization can take almost any code and produce a reasonably efficient binary at the end. However compiler "optimization" doesn't make your code "optimal", just better. In contrast, superoptimization can produce perfect code - the fastest, the smallest or the most energy efficient code. The technique, first introduced in the late 80s found in some cases it could do 25% better than the best assembly programmer, and 40% better than the best compiler at the time. Free software has always played a central role in superoptimization research, with the GNU Superoptimizer being one of the very first tools constructed. However there is a downside. Superoptimization today is incredibly demanding of compute time, so currently it is limited to short instruction sequences. At present it is most valuable in optimizing code hotspots and key library routines, and can also be a valuable aid to the compiler writer for peephole optimization. Recent research has developed new techniques that can make superoptimization more applicable to general code. In this talk I will introduce superoptimization and give some examples of the weird and wonderfully short sequences of code it produces. I will introduce the GNU superoptimizer and show how it is used, including some of the recent improvements I have contributed. The final part of my talk will look at the latest research including machine learning and constraint solving, and show how in future superoptimizers may be able to optimize much larger programs. Talk 2: Open-source Software in UK Scientific HPC Speakers: Neil Morgan and Phil Ridley, Hartree Centre, STFC Daresbury There are hundreds of scientific applications, libraries and tools that are used within the UK's academic HPC community and a large number of these are open-source. To demonstrate this usage and the benefits of open-source to this community, a short review of some of these will be given. Applications will be included which are used for performing atomistic and molecular simulations, computational fluid dynamics, and statistics for bioinformatics. All of these are able to utilise the capabilities of high end computing architectures with thousands of cores to facilitate new science. Furthermore, since efficient object code is of greatest importance in HPC, the use of open-source in compilers, tools and libraries will also be described. N.B. Note the change of venue to the RSA. Booking link: https://events.bcs.org/book/1320/ (Please remember to book your place.)

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