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OSHUG #36 — Chips Pt. 2, Thursday 23rd October.
by Andrew Back 07 Oct '14

07 Oct '14

Hello, Registration is now open for the meeting October meeting. Details below. Regards, Andrew // Event #36 — Chips Pt.2 (Chip Design for Teenagers, Cocotb, lowRISC) 23rd October 2014, 18:00 - 20:00 at BCS London, 1st Floor, The Davidson Building, 5 Southampton Street, London, WC2E 7HA. Registration: http://oshug.org/event/36 Back in April 2011 we had our first meeting on the theme of open source chip design, and then around one year later we took a closer look at the OpenRISC Reference Platform System-on-Chip. The thirty-sixth meeting will feature talks on chip design for teenagers, an open source verification framework, and a fully open source system-on-chip that will be manufactured in volume. — Silicon Chip Design for Teenagers These days we expect school students to learn to write code, and teachers are turning to tools like Scratch (for primary education) and Python (for secondary education). But why stick to software languages. Why not teach coding in Verilog and get children to design silicon chips. Earlier this year Dan Gorringe attended Chip Hack II in Cambridge. Inspired by this he spent two weeks work experience at Embecosm in August 2014 modifying the Chip Hack materials for use by Year 9-11 students. His resulting application note, "Silicon Chip Design for Teenagers", is to be published very shortly by Embecosm. In this talk, Dan will share his experience of learning silicon chip design, using Verilog for his first serious attempt at coding and encountering Mentor Graphics EDA tools for the first time. Dan Gorringe has just started year 11 and faces the horrors of GCSE exams in 8 months time, so silicon chip design is just light relief. He has aspirations to a career in computing. — Cocotb, an Open Source Verification Framework Verifying hardware designs has always been a significant challenge but very few open-source tools have emerged to support this effort. The recent advances in verification to facilitate complex designs often depend on specialist knowledge and expensive software tools. In this talk we will look at Cocotb, an open-source verification framework, and explore whether Python is a viable language for verification. Chris Higgs has over a decade of experience working with FPGAs in various industries. His software background has shaped his approach to RTL design and verification and he now spends his time trying to bridge the divide between hardware and software development. — lowRISC — a Fully Open Source RISC-V System-on-Chip The lowRISC project has been formed to produce a System-on-Chip which will be open source right down to the HDL, implementing the open RISC-V instruction set architecture. Volume manufacture of silicon manufacture is planned, along with creating and distributing low-cost development boards. This talk will describe the aims of the lowRISC project, summarise its current status, describe some of the features that are being implemented, and give details on how you can get involved. Alex Bradbury is a researcher at the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory where he works on compilation techniques for a novel many-core architecture. He writes LLVM Weekly, is co-author of Learning Python with Raspberry Pi, and has been a contributor to the Raspberry Pi project since the first alpha hardware was available. Note: Please aim to arrive by 18:15 as the first talk will start at 18:30 prompt. //

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Open Source Hardware Camp 2014, Sat 16 & Sun 17th August.
by Andrew Back 01 Jul '14

01 Jul '14

Registration is now open for OSHCamp 2014, this year we will have a total of 12 talks and 8 workshops and details can be found below. Details for the Wuthering Bytes Festival Day which will take place on the Friday before (15th August) are yet to be announced, but there are some fantastic talks lined up on topics ranging from development and testing of rocket engines, to experiences of being a computer programmer in the early 1960s. Speakers for the Festival Day include Sophie Wilson, co-inventor of the ARM processor, and Ruth Coustick-Deal of Open Rights Group. If you are considering attending Friday also, I wouldn't hang about as tickets are limited and likely to go fast once announced! Regards, Andrew // OSHCamp 2014 — 16 & 17th August at Hebden Bridge Town Hall, St. George's Street,Hebden Bridge, HX7 7BY. Registration: http://oshug.org/event/oshcamp2014 Open Source Hardware Camp will take place in the Pennine town of Hebden Bridge. For the second year running it is being hosted as part of the technology festival, Wuthering Bytes. However, this year OSHCamp will have the Waterfront Hall to itself on the Saturday and Sunday, with a separate Festival Day taking place on the Friday and with talks on a broader selection of technical topics. Details of the OSHUG talks and workshops can be found below and the Wuthering Bytes website will be updated in due course with details of the complete programme of events. Note that socials are planned for both the Friday and Saturday evenings, with the former being hosted at the Town Hall and where there will be a bar, food available and music and a live performance, and the latter will be hosted at a local hostelry that serves food. 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. — Saturday :: Talks * Linux bootloaders and kernel configuration Linux is popular in embedded devices, but most use it once the kernel has booted and don't consider how it was started. This talk explores just what happens when you first start an embedded device that is running Linux, and will look at common bootloaders, such as U-Boot, along with kernel boot options. Finally, we will look at useful kernel configuration options for embedded devices. Melanie Rhianna Lewis started a life long love of electronics as a child when her Dad helped her make a "crystal" radio with an ear piece, a coil of wire, a diode and a radiator! At the same time the home computer revolution started and she would lust after the "build your own computers" advertised in the electronics magazines of the time. She never got one but did end up the proud owner of a BBC Micro. Melanie learnt everything she could about the machine and including assembler, operating systems, drivers, interrupt, and, thanks to the circuit diagram in the Advanced User Guide, digital electronics. After the BBC Micro came the Acorn Archimedes and so started a long relationship with ARM processors. In the 90s Melanie became interested in Linux and then developed one of the first ARM Linux distributions running on an Acorn RISC PC. The hobby became a job and Melanie currently works for an embedded device consultancy near Bradford where a lot of her work is still with ARM processors. Recently Melanie became a sporty person and now spends a lot of her time hitting girls. She will probably bore you with tails of roller derby! * Open source archaeological geophysics - is it achievable? The advance of technology into Archaeology has allowed geophysical surveys to "peer into the ground" and direct the diggers to the most likely "targets". However, as anyone whose watched Time Team will know, using Resistivity and Magnetometry doesn't always guarantee results. Such equipment is not usually within the financial reach of most hobbyists. However, the recent explosion of the Arduino, Pi and other cheap electronics has meant making such surveying equipment may be possible. A small research project involving an informal collaboration between members of the Derbyshire Archaeological Society (DAS) & Derby Makers is exploring whether a high accuracy GPS unit, Magnetometer and a resistivity probe can be made and yield worthwhile results within a budget of £1,000. DAS has kindly funded this research and we are about 50% of the way through the GPS project. This talk will introduce the project and take a look at progress to date. Tony Brookes was firstly an engineer and then worked in IT for a while (!) Now working part-time, hobbies easily fill the time available. Drawn to archaeological and historical research by way of Time Team, he now tries to apply open source software (Scribus, Inkscape, Qgis) and hardware (Arduino, et al) to investigating parish history and other interesting topics. * An open source aquaponics control system Aquaponics is a closed system of food production that farms fish alongside vegetables, and this talk will look at the development of an open source aquaponics control system for the Incredible AquaGarden project in Todmorden, highlighting certain features of the design and exploring some of the difficulties encountered and how these have been addressed. A control and monitoring system with an event-driven 'flowchart' interface will be presented, where data about aspects such as pH, temperature and light level etc. are collected and logged in order to monitor the environment. The system responds dynamically to control the level of water in the plant growing bed, to maximise the yield. Some design decisions and technical aspects of the system will be demonstrated and discussed, together with the open source model for sustaining the project. Finally, we will look at the operational Node-RED installation in Todmorden, showing how the system is collecting readings and controlling the water level, and we'll talk about how MQTT has been used to loosely couple the code running on the Arduino with Node-RED on a Raspberry Pi. Gareth Coleman is a inventive hardware hacker who's talent lies in connecting diverse devices. Dr Naomi Rosenberg is a freelance software developer with a background in formal logic who works on a wide variety of platforms. They both get a especially enthusiastic about open hardware, free software and empowering humans. * From Idea to Finished Product: A Tale of DFM and CEM With numerous easily accessible embedded platforms around and concepts such as rapid prototyping and crowdfunding now being useful things as opposed to just buzzwords, designing the Next Big Thing without leaving your study is becoming a common story for makers and tinkerers. While it is true that going from an idea to a finished product has never been easier thanks to the abundance of design resources and affordable manufacturing services, designing for volume manufacturing requires a different mindset that usually does not apply to casual weekend hacks. From component choice to packaging and logistics, there are several elements that needs to be taken into consideration, as they may cause significant headaches otherwise. This talk will provide an overview of electronics manufacturing process, covering details such as managing design data, handling dependencies, component and process choices, testing and certification and several other aspects of DFM: Design for Manufacturability. Omer Kilic is an Embedded Systems hacker who likes tinkering, a lot. He also likes tiny computers, things that just work and good beer. * Driving milling machines with Linux Driving a milling machine with Linux is fairly easy and LinuxCNC (previously known as “EMC”) even provides a real-time distribution install disk. However, driving the machine is only half the story and gcode generation is at least as important. This talk will share experiences using a mill and a router with Linux, looking at PCB manufacture, engraving, 3D milling, casting, tool paths, materials, tools and parametric design. Matt Venn has run hundreds of creative science workshops for thousands of children and adults around the world. For the last year, he has been working with teachers in preparation for the computer science curriculum changes; creating and leading courses, workshops and projects. When he's not inventing new ways of getting people excited about science, Matt plays music, invents puzzle boxes, practices martial arts and maintains bikes. * Oxford Flood Network - easier to Apologise Than to Ask Permission Oxford Flood Network is a citizen sensing project which monitors water levels around the city, in streams, rivers and even under floorboards, sending water levels back to the Internet using low-powered wireless. The network explores the possibilities of a smart city that is created by its citizens, rather than a more typical top-down deployment. Sensor networks are generally used to collect data about us for reasons and agendas chosen by others, but we can build sensor networks too; crowd-sourced data can be gathered for your agenda — providing evidence for your issues. In this talk we will hear how Oxford Flood Network has developed an open source model for hardware and software, and the challenges of sticking mysterious boxes under bridges. Ben Ward is founder of Love Hz, promoting the use of white space spectrum for open innovation in the Internet of Things. A survivor of the dotcom bubble, subsea bandwidth glut and the UK broadband wars, he's still surprisingly optimistic about the future. * An introduction to writing applications for the Parallella board Parallella is a credit card-sized computer with a many-core accelerator that allows it to achieve high floating-point performance while consuming only a few watts. In this talk we will take a look at the Epiphany architecture and how to use the eSDK to write highly parallel applications for it, using hardware and software features to benchmark code and optimise performance. Simon Cook leads Embecosm's work on LLVM and is author of the standard guide to the LLVM assembler. He is also an expert on low-energy compilation and is lead engineer on the MAGEEC project. Simon holds a double first class honors degree in Computer Science and Electronics from Bristol University. * Radio Then and Pararchive: decentralised, pervasive, and open story telling Radio Then is a citywide cultural history experience, telling stories about Manchester’s jazz and popular music heritage using a small, Arduino-powered radio. Participants explore the city and tune in to archival broadcasts related to places, people, and events of note. In actual fact, the ‘radio’ contains GPS and audio breakouts to track its location and cue audio tracks depending on its coordinates. The project is being created to showcase findings from Pararchive, an AHRC project being conducted by the University of Leeds, in partnership with the BBC, National Media Museum, Science Museum Group, and Manchester Digital Laboratory, among others. Pararchive represents an opportunity for members of the public to engage with archives, decentralising the material from archive holders, and offering alternative and personal perspectives on events. James Medd is an artist, musician, and maker based in Manchester. He teaches all things digital in the north west of the UK, and creates whimsical, entertaining, and accessible interactive artworks. He currently leads Arduino Manchester, a community group for Arduino users in Manchester, and will be developing more interactive audio experiences at Watershed’s Pervasive Media Studio later this year, as a winner of their graduate and new talent competition. * Commercialising your ideas Whether you're taking the time to build something fun, or have a solution to a problem you have faced, you are 'in your own right' an inventor. One of the biggest challenges inventors face isn't making their product work, it's generating a living to continue inventing. Having spent over a decade in both sales and business development I have witnessed people use various methods to overcome this hurdle. I hope to share with you some of my experiences to provide you with some ideas you can take away and use when looking to turn a hobby or bright idea into a financial success. Our topic of conversation will take us from having a light bulb moment, to securing orders and reaping the rewards. William Stone is the Head of Channel Strategy for hardware manufacturer, Ciseco. He is responsible for various commercial areas of the business including the very familiar responsibility of growing Ciseco's rapidly expanding chain of partners and distributors. Now with 36 recognized distributors worldwide, Ciseco has a growing presence and reputation in electronics manufacturing and Internet of Things (IoT). * OpenTRV: energy technology that saves householders money The OpenTRV project aims to provide software, hardware designs and excellent interoperability to allow UK and EU householders to as much as halve their heating bills and carbon footprint with simple to fit hardware costing around £100 per house. Everything is freely available under liberal licensing — even our 3D printed enclosures — to enable adoption and cost savings. Damon Hart-Davis gets excited about electronics, parallelism, robotics, distributed systems and resource efficiency, and solar PV and halving space-heating carbon footprint with cheap microcontrollers (OpenTRV) are two of his current passions. Damon has been working on “mission-critical” systems in banking for most of the last 20 years and before that founded one of the first UK Internet Service Providers. * Interfacing with SPI and I2C SPI and I2C are industry standard methods of interfacing IO devices to micro-controllers and CPUs using just a few connections. SPI requires four wires and I2C just two. This talk introduces SPI and I2C. It describes how they work and how you use them. It will look at common IO devices that connect via SPI or I2C. Finally it will look at controlling SPI and I2C devices from two example controllers, the Arduino and the Raspberry PI, in languages such as C and Python. Speaker: Melanie Rhianna Lewis. * Concurrency in the real world with xCORE and XC There are many cases where a simple microcontroller won't cut it and the FPGA design route may be too drawn out and costly, particularly if your background is in software. With the XMOS multi-core microcontroller architecture and toolset it's now possible to tackle complex hardware problems using familiar software and algorithms, avoiding the need to work with Verilog or VHDL. The XMOS XS1 microcontrollers provide tens of nano second resolution and deterministic, predictable, real-time operation in software. The XMOS toolset enables designs to be simulated and analysed, and signals to be monitored and scoped all within the IDE. The XC extensions to C provide simple interfaces and tasks to write concurrent programs, taking care of nasty race conditions and parallel usage errors. xCORE open source libraries help break down complex domain-specific tasks, allowing you to focus on developing applications. While XMOS Links enable microcontrollers and boards to be chained together in a divide and conquer manner, allowing you to orchestrate your own hardware solutions. This talk will introduce the XMOS technology and explore a selection of real world applications. Alan Wood has been working with concurrent and distributed programming for over a decade. His recent work includes smart grid, control, and motion systems based on XMOS' concurrent technology. He is a long term advocate and moderator (aka Folknology) forxCORE and other SHW communities, such as TVRRUG, as well as a founder of hackspace, SHH. Compered by: Paul Tanner is a consultant, developer and maker in wood, metal, plastic, electronics and software. His day job is IT-based business improvement for SMEs. By night he turns energy nut, creating tools to optimise energy use. Paul graduated in electronics and was responsible for hardware and software product development and customer services in several product and service start-ups, switching to consulting in 2000. — 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! * Let's build a flood network for Hebden Bridge! Split into two teams, one will attempt to install flood sensors on the beautiful Hebden Water just outside the venue, while the other links these these to the Internet using readily available technology. Proven hardware designs will be used to show you how can send water levels back to the Internet using low-powered wireless links, and sustainable approaches to citizen sensing will be explored. Run by: Ben Ward. Workshop notes: you may want to bring wellies if you plan to join the sensor installation team! Also feel free to bring sensors and boards that you think may be useful. * Building applications that sense and respond to the real world Following on from their talk, Naomi and Gareth will be joined by Paulo Marini, the Tormorden project's resident aquaponicist. Together they will facilitate a hack session to help you build applications that respond to the real world. Run by: Gareth Coleman and Dr Naomi Rosenberg. Workshop notes: Bring your own hardware to work on, such as Raspberry Pi and Arduino etc. if you can, and they'll try to find ways to get your projects connected. * Do you want to build a robot? #meArm assembly workshop How about starting with an Arm? With just a screwdriver and enthusiasm you can build an Open Source Robot Arm. If you bring an Arduino or Pi with you, you're free to stay on with your meArm and tinker with the code too. The meArm is a project to get low cost robot arms into the hands of as many people as possible. Started in February this year it's made fast progress through open development. Already "home brew" (those not from the laser forges of phenoptix in Nottingham) versions have been spotted in the UK, Switzerland, the USA and Mexico! Ben Gray is a proponent of Open Hardware and founder of phenoptix, a maker business based in Beeston, Nottinghamshire. 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. Through the open hardware movement he has been able explore the wonderful world of electronics and take phenoptix from a pocket money project to the full time job it is today. Workshop notes: Bring along a laptop and, if you like, an Arduino or Raspberry Pi. * Introduction to Bus Pirate The Bus Pirate is a universal open source hardware device that can be used to communicate using various buses, such as SPI, I2C, UART and JTAG, with various devices. The Bus Pirate is, per the designers, intended to "Eliminate a ton of early prototyping effort with new or unknown chips." This tutorial will introduce the Bus Pirate. Describe how to configure it and install the software required to use it. It will then look at some basic interfacing to devices via SPI and I2C. It will work through how you can 'sniff' buses. Finally it will look at use the Bus Pirate as a simple frequency measurement and generator device. Run by: Melanie Rhianna Lewis. Workshop notes: bring along a laptop (Bus Pirate is supported under Windows, Linux and OSX) and, if you can, some hardware to debug. There will be a limited number of Bus Pirates available, but if you have one please bring it along. * Building your first Parallella application This workshop follows on from the previous day's talk and participants will build a simple project which targets the Parallella board and uses all 16 cores of the Epiphany floating-point accelerator. Run by: Simon Cook. Workshop notes: Please bring along a laptop and, if you have one, a Parallella board (a limited number of boards will be available for use by those who do not own one). The real world works concurrently and so can you This workshop will take you through the basics of embedded concurrent programming using an XMOS multi-core startKIT. We will cover basic parallel processing extensions to C (XC) using tasks, interfaces, timers and ports. We will also get some insight into our running code using xSCOPE, a real-time debugging system built in to the XMOS tools. In addition we will use software modules to drop in rich functionality from the open source xCORE libraries. Run by: Alan Wood. Workshop notes: bring along a laptop and any devices you would like to interface. * Design a PCB Shrimp and have it fabricated The Shrimp is a super low cost Arduino clone. It makes an excellent teaching resource, and is usually delivered as a 'breaded shrimp' - using a breadboard. For hackers, it's a great way to knock up a quick, cheap microcontroller circuit. In this workshop we'll make a PCB version of the shrimp — a more robust and Arduino shield compatible version — and you will be guided through the process of drawing the schematic, laying out the PCB and optionally placing an order with OSHPark for your very own PCB shrimp. Participants will be working in pairs. Boards will cost about £6 each. Kits of components can conveniently be ordered from shrimping.itfor £4. Run by: Matt Venn. Workshop notes: bring along a laptop. * OpenTRV build and getting started Kits will be available to solder and boards and cables to buy, along with valves that will be used to demonstrate how you can use Arduino-based technology to halve your heating bill. Run by: Damon Hart-Davis. Workshop notes: Please bring your own soldering iron, solder and AA batteries if you would like to build a kit to take away, and be aware that SMD soldering experience and a steady hand will be required to solder the TMP112 temperature sensor. 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. With thanks to sponsors: * DesignSpark - http://www.rs-online.com/designspark/electronics/ * XMOS - http://www.xmos.com

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OSHCamp 2014 (16-17th August) CFP.
by Andrew Back 02 Jun '14

02 Jun '14

This year OSHCamp will be taking place over the weekend of 16-17th August and once again hosted 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! Please note that the deadline for submitting titles and abstracts is Saturday 14th June (yes, only 2 weeks away!) If you would like to give a talk on the Saturday and/or run a workshop on the Sunday contact arback(a)computer.org.

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OSHUG #34 — Teaching, Wednesday 21st May.
by Andrew Back 08 May '14

08 May '14

Hello, Registration is now open for the meeting May meeting. Details below. Regards, Andrew // Event #34 — 21st May 2014, 17:30 - 20:30 at BCS London, 1st Floor, The Davidson Building, 5 Southampton Street, London, WC2E 7HA. Registration: http://oshug.org/event/34 The thirty-fourth OSHUG meeting will feature three talks that each explore approaches to teaching electronics and programming. — Teaching with the LilyPad Arduino In this talk we will hear about experiences of teaching basic electronics and coding principles via wearable technology and e-textiles, using the LilyPad Arduino — a sewable microcontroller — in workshops with people of all ages at universities, schools at hackspaces. Rain Ashford designs and constructs wearable technology, e-textiles and interactive artworks. A PhD candidate at Goldsmiths, where she is investigating the possibility that wearable technology can be used to augment new forms of non-verbal communication, particularly in the areas of body language and emotion, by the amplifying and visualising of physiological data. She has studied Fine Art, Multimedia, and Electronics Engineering, which has led to her work developing as a convergence of art, programming and electronics. — Raspberry Pi in education Challenges, benefits and experiences with the Raspberry Pi as an educational tool. Matt Venn has run hundreds of creative science workshops for thousands of children and adults around the world. For the last year, he has been working with teachers in preparation for the computer science curriculum changes; creating and leading courses, workshops and projects. When he's not inventing new ways of getting people excited about science, Matthew plays music, invents puzzle boxes, practices martial arts and maintains bikes. — MzTEK: festivals, workshops and take away technologies MzTEK is a non-profit organisation that aims to redress the imbalance of women artists working in the fields of new media, computer arts, electronics and technology. Based in London and supported by Hackney arts institution [ space ], and Centre for Creative Collaboration in Kings Cross, and hosting a range of workshops, talks and self-initiated tinker sessions. In collaboration with partner organisations, MzTEK develop interesting, accessible and curiosity igniting workshops that can be delivered in short time frames and engage a wide audience with varying skills. Working with open source technologies and tools to help ensure that participants continue making and tinkering with the technologies they encounter long after workshops. Furthermore, doing this at festivals and events where the hope is to encounter a broad range of participants and unpredictable work environments! This talk will discuss some previous projects such as the Hacked Human Orchestra, a wearable electronics project devised in collaboration with Guerrilla Science, and suggest ways that thematic focus, together with a well balanced combination of skill acquisition, creativity and fun can enhance workshop delivery. Shauna Concannon is an interdisciplinary researcher interested in communication spaces and constructive disagreement. She has been working with MzTEK for the past few years, developing and facilitating workshops in Processing, Arduino and wearable electronics. She is currently undertaking a PhD in Media and Arts Technology at Queen Mary University of London. Note: Please aim to by 18:15 as the first talk will start at 18:30 prompt.

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OSHUG #33 -- Radio Pt.2 (Networking Literacy Project, Everyone has a radio in them)
by Andrew Back 06 Apr '14

06 Apr '14

Hello, Registration is now open for the April meeting. Details below. Cheers, Andrew // Event #33 -- Radio Pt.2 (Networking Literacy Project, Everyone has a radio in them) Thursday 24th April 2014, 17:30 - 20:30 at BCS London, 1st Floor, The Davidson Building, 5 Southampton Street, London, WC2E 7HA. Registration: http://oshug.org/event/33 The thirty-third OSHUG meeting will be the second on the theme of radio, with talks on a bold vision for a project that aims to increase understanding of personal networking, and on a toolkit that lets you build your own physical Internet radio. -- The Networking Literacy Project "Beep-BEEP!" - Some of us will remember the distinctive click when throwing the power switch of a BBC Micro, and the immediate gratifying sounds it made. Thirty years ago, public awareness of personal computing was low, and civil society acted to raise literacy in anticipation of the coming boom. Today, computers are pervasive in everyday life, and their function is increasingly to deliver distributed computing applications. Indeed, we are on the cusp of another era of personal technological progress and growth, this time for personal networking. Understanding and literacy about this is low, while importance and opportunity are high. This talk will explore some of the learning opportunities, and how the technology community could contribute to eliminating the widespread functional illiteracy in this important area of technology. Martin Geddes is an authority on the future of the telecoms industry, ranging from emerging business models to new network technologies. He is a futurologist, writer, speaker, consultant, and technologist. Martin is currently writing a book, The Internet is Just a Prototype, on the future of distributed computing. -- Everyone has a radio in them, it turns out Inspired by the challenge of making a physical radio device that did anything interesting and web friendly, a small team within BBC R&D spent a few days building an Archers Avoider using off the shelf components and free software alongside BBC created custom services for controlling audio IP streams. "Radiodan" is now at v2.0 and consists of open source web-developer-friendly software designed to work on a Raspberry Pi, used for controlling audio streams, getting a device on a wifi network, and controlling buttons, dials and leds, plus a kit of parts, a case and some instructions. This talk will take a look at some of Radiodan's technology, in the context of our goal of making it something that anyone can start to build a radio with. It will also explore why it's important and interesting to widen the pool of people who can make radios, and how a new field for us has changed the way we work. Libby Miller is a producer and developer working in the BBC R&D Central Lab. She currently works on Radiodan, a project about cheap, rapid prototyping for radios. She also works on the VistaTV EU project on the use and visualisation of real-time IPTV statistics, and the MediaScape project, which is about developer-friendly standards for connected devices. Before that, she led the BBC's part of NoTube, including work on APIs to TV for second screens, resolution of broadcast metadata to web metadata, synchronised social experiences, and recommendations and serendipity. Note: Please aim to by 18:15 as the first talk will start at 18:30 prompt.

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OSHUG #32 -- Embedded Scripting, 27th March 2014.
by Andrew Back 06 Mar '14

06 Mar '14

Hello, Registration is now open for the March meeting. Details below. Regards, Andrew // Event #32 -- Embedded Scripting (Lua, Espruino, Micro Python) 27th March 2014, 17:30 - 20:30 at BCS London, 1st Floor, The Davidson Building, 5 Southampton Street, London, WC2E 7HA. Registration: http://oshug.org/event/32 The thirty-second OSHUG meeting will take a look at the use of scripting languages with deeply embedded computing platforms, which have much more constrained resources than the platforms which were originally targeted by the languages. -- Programming a microcontroller with Lua eLua is a full version of the Lua programming language for microcontrollers, running on bare metal. Lua provides a modern high level dynamicaly typed language, with first class functions, coroutines and an API for interacting with C code, and yet which is very small and can run in a memory constrained environment. This talk will cover the Lua language and microcontroller environment, and show it running on-off-the-shelf ARM Cortex boards as well as the Mizar32, an open hardware design built especially for eLua. Justin Cormack is a software developer based in London. He previously worked at a startup that built LED displays and retains a fondness for hardware. He organizes the London Lua User Group, which hosts talks on the Lua programming language. -- Bringing JavaScript to Microcontrollers This talk will discuss the benefits and challenges of running a modern scripting language on microcontrollers with extremely limited resources. In particular we will take a look at the Espruino JavaScript interpreter and how it addresses these challenges and manages to run in less than 8kB of RAM. Gordon Williams has developed software for companies such as Altera, Nokia, Microsoft and Lloyds Register, but has been working on the Espruino JavaScript interpreter for the last 18 months. In his free time he enjoys making things - from little gadgets to whole cars. -- Micro Python -- Python for microcontrollers Microcontrollers have recently become powerful enough to host high-level scripting languages and run meaningful programs written in them. In this talk we will explore the software and hardware of the Micro Python project, an open source implementation of Python 3 which aims to be as compatible as possible with CPython, whilst still fitting within the RAM and ROM constraints of a microcontroller. Many tricks are employed to put as much as possible within ROM, and to use the least RAM and minimal heap allocations as is feasible. The project was successfully funded via a Kickstarter campaign at the end of 2013, and the hardware is currently being manufactured at Jaltek Systems UK. Damien George is a theoretical physicist who likes to write compilers and build robots in his spare time. Note: Please aim to by 18:15 as the first talk will start at 18:30 prompt.

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OSHUG #31 — Privacy and Security, 20th February 2014.
by Andrew Back 24 Jan '14

24 Jan '14

Hello, Registration is now open for the first OSHUG meeting of 2014! Details below. Regards, Andrew // Event #31 — Privacy and Security (Security protocols in constrained environments, RFIDler, Indie Phone) 20th February 2014, 17:30 - 20:30 at BCS London, 1st Floor, The Davidson Building, 5 Southampton Street, London, WC2E 7HA. Registration: http://oshug.org/event/31 The thirty-first OSHUG meeting is dedicated to privacy and security, with talks on implementing security protocols in constrained environments, an SDR RFID reader/writer/emulator, and a new initiative that will use design thinking and open source to create a truly empowering mobile phone. — Security protocols in constrained environments Implementation of security protocols such as TLS, SSH or IPsec come with a memory and compute overhead. Whilst this has become negligible in full scale environments it's still a real issue for hobbyist and embedded developers. This presentation will look at the sources of the overheads, what can be done to minimise them, and what sort of hardware platforms can be made to absorb them. The benefits and potential pitfalls of hardware specific implementations will also be examined. Chris Swan is CTO at CohesiveFT where he helps build secure cloud based networks. He's previously been a security guy at large Swiss banks, and before that was a Weapon Engineering Officer in the Royal Navy. Chris has tinkered with electronics since pre-school, and these days has a desk littered with various dev boards and projects. — RFIDler: A Software Defined RFID Reader/Writer/Emulator Software Defined Radio has been quietly revolutionising the world of RF. However, the same revolution has not yet taken place in RFID. The proliferation of RFID/NFC devices means that it is unlikely that you will not interact with one such device or another on a daily basis. Whether it’s your car key, door entry card, transport card, contactless credit card, passport, etc. you almost certainly have one in your pocket right now! RFIDler is a new project, created by Aperture Labs, designed to bring the world of Software Defined Radio into the RFID spectrum. We have created a small, open source, cheap to build platform that allows any suitably powerful microprocessor access to the raw data created by the over-the-air conversation between tag and reader coil. The device can also act as a standalone ‘hacking’ platform for RFID manipulation/examination. The rest is up to you! Adam “Major Malfunction” Laurie is a security consultant working in the field of electronic communications, and a Director of Aperture Labs Ltd., who specialise in reverse engineering of secure systems. He started in the computer industry in the late Seventies, and quickly became interested in the underlying network and data protocols. During this period, he successfully disproved the industry lie that music CDs could not be read by computers, and wrote the world’s first CD ripper, ‘CDGRAB’. He was also involved various early open source projects, including ‘Apache-SSL’ which went on to become the de-facto standard secure web server. Since the late Nineties he has focused his attention on security, and has been the author of various papers exposing flaws in Internet services and/or software, as well as pioneering the concept of re-using military data centres (housed in underground nuclear bunkers) as secure hosting facilities. Andy Ritchie has been working in the computer and technology industry for over 20 years for major industry players such as ICL, Informix, British Airways and Motorola. Founding his first company, Point 4 Consulting at the age of 25, he built it into a multi-million pound technology design consultancy. Point 4 provided critical back end technology and management for major web sites such as The Electronic Telegraph, MTV, United Airlines, Interflora, Credit Suisse,BT, Littlewoods and Sony. Following Point 4 he went on to found Ablaise, a company that manages the considerable intellectual property generated by Point 4, and Aperture Labs. In his spare time he manages the worlds largest and longest running security conference, Defcon. Andy's research focuses on access control systems, biometric devices and embedded systems security, and he has spoken and trained at information security conferences in Europe and the US publicly and for private and governmental audiences. He is responsible for identifying major vulnerabilities in various access control and biometric systems, and has a passion for creating devices that emulate access control tokens either electronic physical or biometric. Andy has been responsible both directly and indirectly for changing access control guidelines for several western governments. Andy is currently a director of Aperture Labs Ltd, a company that specialises in reverse engineering and security evaluations of embedded systems. — Indie: a tale of privacy, civil liberties, and a phone Can a phone really help protect our civil liberties? Aral Balkan thinks so. And he’s embarked on an audacious journey to make one. Join us to hear the introduction of a two-year story that is only just beginning. Aral Balkan is is founder and designer of Indie Phone, a phone that empowers mere mortals to own their own data. Note: Please aim to by 18:15 as the first talk will start at 18:30 prompt.

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OSHUG #30 — Speed (overclocking, souped-up BBC Micro, compiler optimisation), 28th November 2013.
by Andrew Back 11 Nov '13

11 Nov '13

Hello, Registration is now open for the November OSHUG meeting — details below. Regards, Andrew // Event #30 — Speed (overclocking, souped-up BBC Micro, compiler optimisation) 28th November 2013, 18:00 - 20:00 at Erlang Solutions, New Loom House, 101 Back Church Lane, London, E1 1LU. Registration: http://oshug.org/event/30 The thirtieth OSHUG meeting is dedicated to the quest for computing speed. It will feature talks on a hardware design to aid overclocking, retrofitting a 30+ year old microcomputer with modern processors, and compiler optimisation. — Fast and Furious: Overclocking chips for fun and profit Due to the variance in silicon manufacturing technologies, integrated circuits used in everyday designs are usually spec'ed at lower speeds than their actual capabilities. It is, therefore, not unlikely for chips to run faster than their advertised speeds, sometimes at significant margins with a little push. The umbrella term used for this practice isoverclocking and it encapsulates a variety of techniques from simply increasing the clock speed to employing elaborate systems with liquid nitrogen cooling. This talk will provide an overview of overclocking and overvolting techniques — investigating the effects of forcing chips to run faster on the silicon level — and present vftweak: an open source hardware design that aims to simplify experimenting with circuits by providing a programmable interface and monitoring tools. Omer Kilic works on Erlang Embedded, a Knowledge Transfer Partnership project in collaboration with University of Kent and Erlang Solutions. The aim of this project is to bring the benefits of concurrent systems development using Erlang to the field of embedded systems; through investigation, analysis, software development and evaluation. Before joining Erlang Solutions, Omer was a research student in the Embedded Systems Lab at the University of Kent, working on a reconfigurable heterogeneous computing framework. Omer likes tiny computers, things that 'just work' and real beer. — Souping up the BBC Micro This talk will introduce a selection of projects which allow modern processors to be used with a 30+ year old BBC Micro, before exploring in more detail the speaker's own open hardware contribution to the options available. Jason Flynn creates open electronics designs for the amateur radio and retro computing. His main areas of interest are digital TV, microwave, satellite and most things related to Acorn and ARM. He previously held a post on the RSGB Data Communications Committee, is an honorary member of SSETI, has been committee of Martlesham Radio Society for 7 years, and is presently involved in setting up a hackspace in Ipswich. — How compiler optimisation helps you get the best out of your hardware This talk will give a high-level overview of compiler optimisation, covering general approaches used in both local and global optimisation, and also taking a look at the technique of superoptimization. The talk will conclude by looking at some of the 200+ optimisation passes used in GCC. The talk will be given by Jeremy Bennett, and he will be joined by Joern Rennecke and Simon Cook, who will take questions about optimisation in the compilers on which they are involved. Dr Jeremy Bennett is founder of Embecosm and an expert on debugging and silicon chip modeling. A former academic, Jeremy holds a MA and PhD from Cambridge University and is a Chartered Engineer, Chartered Information Technology Professional and Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. He is the author of the standard textbook, "Introduction to Compiling Techniques" (McGraw-Hill 1990, 1996, 2003). Simon Cook leads Embecosm's work on LLVM and is author of the standard guide to the LLVM assembler. He is also an expert on low-energy compilation, being lead engineer on the MAGEEC project. Simon holds a double first class honors degree in Computer Science and Electronics from Bristol University. Jörn Rennecke is an expert on compiler back-end optimization and also leads Embecosm's work on GCC. Over 18 years he has become one of the all-time largest contributors to the compiler. During 2006-9, Jörn was a major contributor to the EU-funded MILEPOST project, which developed the first machine learning compiler optimization framework. He is currently maintainer for GCC for the Epiphany and Synopsys ARC architectures and a major contributor to GCC for Atmel AVR. Note: Please aim to arrive for 18:15 as the event will start at 18:30 prompt.

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OSHUG #29 — Production by the Proletariat (RepRap, TVRRUG), 2nd October 2013.
by Andrew Back 19 Sep '13

19 Sep '13

Hello, Details of the next OSHUG meeting below. Note that at the time of writing there are just 7 places left! Regards, Andrew // Event #29 — Production by the Proletariat (RepRap, TVRRUG) 2nd October 2013, 17:30 - 21:00 at BCS London, 1st Floor, The Davidson Building, 5 Southampton Street, London, WC2E 7HA. Registration: http://oshug.org/event/29 For the twenty-ninth meeting we will be joining forces with the BCS Open Source Specialist Group, to host talks from the creator of RepRap, Adrian Bowyer, and Alan Wood of Thames Valley RepRapUser Group. — The Ownership of the Means of Production by the Proletariat Look at your computer setup. Imagine you hooked up a 3D printer. Instead of printing on bits of paper this 3D printer makes real, robust, mechanical parts. To give you an idea of how robust, think Lego bricks and you’re in the right area. You could make lots of useful stuff, but interestingly you could also make lots of the parts to make another 3D printer. That would be a machine that could copy itself. This talk will be about RepRap – the Replicating Rapid-prototyper. This 3D printer builds the component up in layers of plastic. This technology already existed before RepRap, but the cheapest proprietary machine then would have set you back £15,000. And it wasn’t even designed so that it could make itself. So what the RepRap team have done is to develop and to give away the designs for a much cheaper machine with the novel capability of being able to self-copy (material costs are about £300). That way it’s accessible to small communities in the developing world as well as individuals in the developed world. The RepRap machine is being distributed entirely free to everyone using open-source – so, if you have one, you can make another and give it to a friend… Adrian Bowyer holds a first degree and a PhD in engineering from Imperial College. He was an academic at the University of Bath for 35 years. He retired in 2012 to help to run the company RepRap Professional Ltd. Adrian's areas of research are geometric modelling and geometric computing in general (he is one of the authors of the Bowyer-Watson algorithm for Voronoi diagrams), the application of computers to manufacturing, and biomimetics. In 2004 he created RepRap – humanity’s first self-replicating general-purpose manufacturing machine. — Experiences from the Thames Valley RepRap User Group Thames Valley RepRap User Group (TVRRUG) was set up to provide support to those who wanted to build their own RepRap 3D printer, and to exchange information and ideas between those who had already successfully completed builds. TVRRUG has now organised three group build rounds, sourcing and printing parts, and resulting in many working printers. Along the way the group has produced extensive documentation, and designed its own electronics and a variant of the Prusa Mendel design. Alan Wood originally trained in systems engineering, and got lost in software engineering and F/OSS for a decade, before returning back to his hardware roots via the open source hardware and makers movement that has gathered momentum in recent years. Note: Please aim to arrive for 17:30 - 18:20 as the first talk will start at 18:30 prompt. Registration: http://oshug.org/event/29

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OSHCamp / Wuthering Bytes full schedule.
by Andrew Back 15 Aug '13

15 Aug '13

Hello, I just wanted to let folks know that the full schedule is now up on the Wuthering Bytes website. Recent additions include a workshop at which participants will learn how to use a £10 USB TV dongle to receive telemetry broadcasts from an amateur satellite. http://wutheringbytes.com/ We're also in the midst of planning a social for the Saturday evening which should be a lot of fun, and to host lightning talks in between this and the earlier formal part! With close to half the tickets gone it's probably best not to leave it until the last minute if you are intending to come along. Regards, Andrew

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