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OSHUG #24 — Lightning Talks, Wednesday 20th March.
by Andrew Back 08 Mar '13

08 Mar '13

Hello, Registration is now open for the March OSHUG meeting, details of which can be found below. Regards, Andrew // OSHUG #24 — Lightning Talks Wednesday 20th March 2013, 18:00 - 20:00 at Centre for Creative Collaboration, 16 Acton Street, London, WC1X 9NG. Sponsored by Embecosm: http://www.embecosm.com Registration: http://oshug.org/event/24 For the twenty-fourth OSHUG meeting we've decided to try something new and we will be hosting a series of lightning talks. The first six talks have been confirmed and details of these can be found below. Offers of additional talks of between five and ten minutes are invited and proposals can either be submitted in advance via e-mail or made on the night (please arrive early). Note that this month the meeting takes place on a Wednesday. - FUNcube Satellite FUNcube-1 is a UK amatbur radio educational satellite that is due to be launched later this year, and that uses open source hardware to bring real-time space based experiments to classrooms around the globe. Three members of the on-board computer team will discuss project goals and progress. - 64-core Parallella Prototype Simon Cook will be demonstrating one of only two 64-core Parallella prototypes in the UK. - PCBmodE — a PCB design tool written in Python around JSON, SVG and Inkscape Saar Drimer will be talking about an open source PCB design tool, that reads shape and placement information stored in JSON files to produce an SVG graphical representation of them. Routing is drawn with Inkscape, then extracted by PCBmodE and stored in an input JSON file that's used for the next board generation. A post-processor 'gerberises' the SVGs into "Extended Gerbers" (RS-274X) for manufacturing. - Interfacing High-performance Low-cost Embedded Systems with FPGAs Mustafa H. Yuce will be talking about an open source project that interfaces embedded systems including BeagleBone and Raspberry Pi with FPGAs, to enable the implementation of high-speed parallel processing applications such as computer vision. - Flux Alan Wood will be talking about the recently developed Flux series of boards that are used for motion control applications. - Open Source Junction 4 Report Paul Tanner will be providing a report from the OSS Watch two day workshop, Open Source Junction 4: Open Source Hardware meets Open Source Software. Note: Please aim to arrive for 18:00 - 18:20 as the event will start at 18:30 prompt. Registration: http://oshug.org/event/24

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OSHUG #23 — Products (Nanode, Industry Perspective, Licensing Update), Thursday 21st February.
by Andrew Back 29 Jan '13

29 Jan '13

Hello, Registration is now open for our first meeting of the year, details of which are below. Regards, Andrew // OSHUG #23 — Products (Nanode, An Industry Perspective, Licensing Update) 21st February 2013, 18:00 - 20:00 at Centre for Creative Collaboration, 16 Acton Street, London, WC1X 9NG. Sponsored by DesignSpark: http://www.designspark.com Registration: http://oshug.org/event/23 Coming up for a year ago, at OSHUG #16, we heard three first-hand experiences of developing open source hardware designs into finished products. At the twenty-third meeting we'll further explore this topic through reflections on the Nanode project as it approaches its second anniversary, and an industry perspective on developing open source hardware. There will also be an update on developments in open source hardware licensing, a subject that was explored at the second OSHUG meeting back in May 2010. - As Nanode Approaches Two With the second anniversary of the Nanode project approaching and in excess of 2,500 sold worldwide, this talk looks at the initial aims, commercialisation and spin-offs as a typical open source hardware design. Exploring the concept, start-up phase and challenge of maintaining momentum in a constantly evolving open source marketplace. Ken Boak has worked in electronics hardware design for 25 years. Initially with BBC Research Department where Ken worked on early HDTV digital picture processing systems. In 1998 Ken embarked on ten years in telecommunications and volume product production in the Far East. Recently Ken has worked on scientific and educational instruments, and open source systems both in the UK and USA. - Open Source Hardware Licensing Update It's been a busy time in open source hardware licensing - CERN's Open Hardware Licence has been undergoing a lot of work behind the scenes, and a new version is about to be released. There are rumours of a new version of the TAPR Open Hardware licence, and the debate between copyleft and academic licences rages on. Andrew Katz has been involved of all of these activities and will provide an update on the current state of licensing, and some pointers on the best licence to adopt. Andrew Katz is a partner at boutique law firm Moorcrofts LLP in the Thames Valley. He specialises in IT/IP work, and in particular advises clients on licensing and liability issues around open source software.He was involved in drafting both GPL3 and the England and Wales version of the Creative Commons licence as well as all major open hardware licences. Many years ago, he designed and built a Z80 SS50 bus-based computer system, created a lightweight version of the Citroen Dyane, mainly by ripping it body off, and hacked together an air compressor from bits and pieces found in a scrapyard. He is currently part-time interim COO of the Maria DB foundation. - Developing Open Source Hardware: an Industry Perspective RS Components have developed a new platform for which the hardware design will be published under an open source licence. This talk will provide an overview of this exciting new development and provide an insight into the motivations for making the design freely available to all. The product development and manufacturing process will also be covered in brief along with some of the challenges experienced, and the broader project goals and ongoing commitment to the open source community. Mike Brojak is responsible at RS Components for the development of free resources for electronics engineers, and believes in helping engineers to be more productive in order to achieve their highest potential. His technical background is in hardware and software for embedded systems, primarily for mobile automation control. He has an Electronics Systems Design degree from Oxford Brookes University. Note: Please aim to arrive for 18:00 - 18:20 as the event will start at 18:30 prompt. Registration: http://oshug.org/event/23

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OSHUG #22 — Embedded (Erlang, Parallella, Compiler Options and Energy Consumption).
by Andrew Back 22 Oct '12

22 Oct '12

Hello, The next OSHUG meeting will be on Thursday 15th November (but not at our usual venue!) Details and registration link below. Regards, Andrew // OSHUG #22 — Embedded (Erlang, Parallella, Compiler Options and Energy Consumption) 15th November 2012, 18:45 - 20:30 at Erlang Solutions, New Loom House, 101 Back Church Lane, London, E1 1LU, UK. Sponsored by Electronics, Sensors, Photonics KTN: http://www.espktn.org — Registration: http://oshug.org/event/22 Embedded systems continue to grow in importance as they play an ever-increasing role in everyday life: more computing is done on the move as smartphone functionality catches up with desktops and services move to the Cloud; the Internet of Things is set to herald an age in which networked objects create and consume data on our behalves. These, and many other applications, are driving an insatiable demand for more powerful and energy-efficient embedded solutions. At the twenty-second OSHUG meeting we will hear how Erlang can be used to bring concurrency to multi-core embedded systems, we will learn about the Parallella project which aims to make parallel computing accessible to everyone, and we will hear about vital research into optimising compiler options for energy-efficiency. - Erlang Embedded — Concurrent Blinkenlights and More! Managing the resources and utilising the increasingly popular multi-core and heterogeneous aspects of modern embedded systems require new sets of tools and methodologies that differ from the traditional C/C++ flow. Erlang provides features that are highly relevant to solve these issues and yet it is pretty much unknown in the embedded domain — which is surprising considering that it was originally designed for embedded applications at Ericsson! This talk aims to provide an overview of Erlang and the current state of its usage in the embedded domain and talk about our plans to help speed up the adoption rate of Erlang in embedded projects. Omer Kilic works on Erlang Embedded, a Knowledge Transfer Partnership project in collaboration with University of Kent. 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. Prior to 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 as part of his PhD thesis (which he intends to submit soon!) Omer likes tiny computers, things that 'just work' and real beer. - Parallella — Supercomputing for Everyone The Parallella computing platform is based on the Adapteva Epiphany processor. Implemented in 65nm or 28nm silicon, Epiphany offers 16 or 64 cores and delivers up to 50 GFLOPS/watt, and the entire Parallella board complete with a dual-core ARM A9 host will consume around 5 watts. This talk will present the Epiphany architecture and explore the challenges of developing an effective GNU tool chain, and discuss the use of open source, and an approach to engineering that developed one of the fastest chips in the world from concept to second generation silicon for just a few million dollars. Dr Jeremy Bennett is the founder of Embecosm, and an expert on hardware modelling and embedded software development. Prior to founding Embecosm, Dr Bennett was Vice President of ARC International PLC and previously Vice President of Marconi PLC. In his earlier academic career, he pursued academic research in computer architecture, modelling and compiler technology at Bath and Cambridge Universities. He is the author of the popular textbook "Introduction to Compiling Techniques" (McGraw-Hill 1990, 1995, 2003). Dr Bennett holds an MA and PhD in Computer Science from Cambridge University. He is a Member of the British Computer Society, a Chartered Engineer, a Chartered Information Technology Professional and Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. - Measuring the impact of compiler options on energy consumption in embedded platforms Energy efficiency is the highest priority for modern software-hardware co-design. The potential for compiler options to impact on power consumption of running programs has often been discussed. However there has never been a comprehensive analysis of the magnitude of that impact, or how it varies between processor architectures and compilers. This presentation will describe a project undertook during the the Summer of 2012 at the University of Bristol Department of Computer Science and funded by Embecosm, to explore the effect of compiler options on energy consumption of compiled programs. The talk will discuss the accurate measurement of power consumption on a range of small embedded systems. The whole setup was under control of an XMOS board, making it possible to run the tens of thousands of tests needed for statistical robustness in just a few weeks. The results of these tests will be discussed, the implications for compiling embedded systems, and the potential for future research in this area. This research was unusual, in that it was funded as a completely open project. A wiki detailed progress from week to week, the relevant open source communities were kept regularly informed, and the results will be published in open access journals. The talk will also cover the issues around funding and running an academic research project in this manner. James Pallister is a graduate of the University of Bristol, where he achieved joint First Class Honours in Computer Science and Electronics. During the summer of 2012, he led Embecosm's research program into the impact of compilers on energy consumption in embedded systems, which was a development of James' work at the University of Bristol with the XMOS multi-core processor. Mr Pallister has returned to Bristol in October 2012, where he is studying for a PhD in low-power multi-core system design. He remains a Technical Advisor to Embecosm. Simon Hollis is a lecturer in the Microelectronics Research Group, Department of Computer Science, University of Bristol. His interests lie in the creation of energy-efficient embedded systems, processor interconnects and parallel languages and run-times. He is the creator of the RasP and Skip-link Networks-on-Chip, and is currently working on the Swallow many-core system, which targets 480 processing cores in under 200W. A main aim of the research is to re-investigate the memory/communication balance in large scale computing systems. Note: Please aim to arrive for 18:45 or shortly after as the event will start at 19:00 prompt. — Registration: http://oshug.org/event/22

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Fwd: Chris Anderson founder of DIYdrones cofounder of 3DRobotics in London
by Andrew Back 18 Sep '12

18 Sep '12

Hello, Firstly, thank you to all those who helped to make this year's Open Source Hardware Camp better than we could have ever imagined! There won't be a meeting in October as we need to recharge our batteries, but do plan to be back in November. In the meantime, Anish has asked me to forward details of a dinner with Chris Anderson of DIYDrones fame (this Thursday!), which sounds like it will be a lot of fun. Best, Andrew ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Anish Mohammed <anish.mohammed(a)gmail.com> Date: 18 September 2012 15:23 Subject: Chris Anderson founder of DIYdrones cofounder of 3DRobotics in London To: Andrew Back <arback(a)gmail.com> Hi all, I thought of dropping in a note to let you know that Chris Anderson of DIYDrones/3d robotics would be in town on Thursday. The plan was to catch up with him in some place in central London for dinner at 18:00. Traditionally any questions on UAV and technology would be entertained. Thought I should share the same with you, as I remember quite a few folks from OSHUG were interested in autonomous vehicles. I have created a meetup event here "http://www.meetup.com/DroneZone/events/78015662/" to get sense of numbers. PS:- general tradition is Chris pays for the dinner , don't qoute me on this ;) -- Anish Mohammed http://uk.linkedin.com/in/anishmohammed @anishmohammed

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Open Source Hardware Camp, 15-16th September 2012.
by Andrew Back 26 Jul '12

26 Jul '12

Hello, Registration is now live for this year's OSHCamp, details of which are pasted below. The cost for attending is £10, and this includes lunch and tea/coffee on the Saturday, and there will be an OSHCamp goody bag kindly supplied by SK Pang and Oomlout. For those that require accommodation the Hebden Bridge Hostel (http://www.hebdenbridgehostel.co.uk/) adjoins the venue and looks pretty good. Most of the dorms are 4 bed and discounts are available for group bookings, plus they also have double/twin rooms. And for those on a very tight budget a dorm bunk can be had for £12.50, although this does require that you bring a sleeping bag. Further local information will be posted to the website in due course, and there will be some sort of social event on the Saturday evening (a round about way of saying the pub!) Please feel free to contact me should you have any questions, or alternatively to post them to the discussion list: http://oshug.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/oshug Regards, Andrew // Open Source Hardware Camp 2012 On the 15th September 2012, 09:00 - 16th September 2012, 16:00 at The Birchcliffe Centre, Birchcliffe Road, Hebden Bridge, West Yorkshire, HX7 8DG, UK — Registration: http://oshug.org/event/oshcamp2012 Open Source Hardware Camp 2012 will take place place in the north of England in the Pennine town of Hebden Bridge. Building on the success of last year's OSHCamp, it will be a weekend long event with nine talks on the Saturday and four parallel workshops on the Sunday. Hebden Bridge is approximately 1 hour by rail from Leeds and Manchester. Budget accommodation is available at the Hebden Bridge Hostel which adjoins the venue, with discounts available for group bookings. - Practical Experiences with the Google Android Accessory Development Kit (ADK) The ADK is an exciting development platform that makes it possible to easily combine Android applications with custom hardware built around Arduino. Such combinations have the best of both worlds by enabling the creation of a mobile phone application with access to peripheral devices that is only limited by your imagination. This talk will cover two projects that extend what the phone can do by integrating both input and output devices. And will cover some of the dos and don'ts of using the ADK and associated IDEs. If time permits there will also be a demonstration with a quick run through of the code. 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. If you can't wait to get your hands on the ADK software browse to http://developer.android.com/tools/adk. - The Internet of Things and Arduino As connecting hardware to the network becomes cheaper and cheaper we're seeing the rise of what is being called the Internet of Things, or “IoT” for short. This talk will give an introduction to the Internet of Things and explain how open hardware platforms such as Arduino are helping it grow. With plenty of examples of IoT projects, from using sensors to map global radiation levels to bakeries that tweet when the bread is fresh out of the oven. Adrian McEwen has been connecting odd things to the Internet since the mid-90s. Starting with cash registers, and then as part of the team who were first to put a web browser onto a mobile phone. As the mobile phone and set-top box work became more mainstream he dropped down a level to Arduino which led to Internet-enabled bubble machines and chicken-food silos... Adrian has been working with Arduino since 2008 — which is when Bubblino, the aforementioned bubble machine which watches twitter, was created — and is charge of the Arduino Ethernet library. He is based in Liverpool, where he runs MCQN Ltd, a company that builds IoT devices and products. - Developing Linux on Embedded Devices This talk will provide an introduction to developing Linux on embedded devices. Firstly we will look at the capabilities of popular boards such as the BeagleBone and the Raspberry Pi. Then using the example of a BeagleBone controller for a 3D printer the talk with explain how to develop for an embedded device. It will consider what comprises an embedded Linux software stack. The talk will discuss boot loaders, kernels and root filesystems. We will discuss what are the minimum software packages required in a root file system. The talk will then go on to consider the tools required to develop for an embedded target. It will look at what tools are available to help the embedded developer and speed up this development process. Once you have developed your software you need to debug it. The talk will look at what debugging tools are available for debugging 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. - Interfacing the Raspberry Pi to the World — Everything you need to know about P1 You've received your Pi, set up a web server on it and maybe played a few rounds of Quake. You're looking for a new challenge and suddenly the header on the corner of the board catches your eye. A quick Google search for "P1 Raspbery Pi" gets you to the eLinux wiki page on Low level peripherals, and you suddenly realise that you can do all sorts of fun stuff by adding extra bits to your Raspberry Pi using this magical expansion port. Where do you start? Is it safe to connect a motor directly to the pins? What sort of interesting components are out there? In this talk we will look at the ways we can communicate with the outside world using the GPIO pins on the Raspberry Pi. We will explore the mechanical, electrical and software side of things and talk about a few example projects you can try at home, and the hardware limitations will be covered and workarounds provided. Omer Kilic is theoretically still a research student at the University of Kent, although he intends to submit his thesis (which is about a reconfigurable heterogeneous computing framework) pretty soon. He likes tiny computers, things that 'just work' and beer. He currently works for Erlang Solutions in London, exploring the use of Erlang programming language in the Embedded Systems domain and develops tools and support material to help the adoption of this technology. This talk will also serve as an introduction for the Raspberry Pi workshop on the Sunday, where we will explore the example projects covered in more detail. - Sensing Wearable Technology An introduction to wearable technology that will include examples which incorporate sensors, plus work which makes use of the LilyPad Arduino, an open source, sewable microcontroller. Rain Ashford creates wearable technology & electronic art, her most recent work involves investigating physiological sensing technologies and how they can be applied to wearable artworks to measure and interpret moods, health and lifestyle data. Rain also creates fun, interactive and aesthetically pleasing works that include gaming and musical elements. She is keen to demonstrate that electronics, components and circuitry doesn't have to be regarded as cold, boring, hard and boxy and instead can be fun, colourful and elegant, plus be integrated into an overall design of a work. Rain’s background is in developing online activities for the BBC as a Senior Producer at BBC Learning and also as Technologist at BBC R&D, co-running BBC Backstage. She currently works as a freelance consultant for the Open University and for Technocamps designing and leading workshops in coding and electronics in the form of wearable technology for 11-19 year-olds, plus is a PhD researcher, peering into wearable electronics & art. - Running OpenBTS in the Real World This talk will explore the OpenBTS project and describe how it uses software-defined radio and open source Internet telephony to create a small but complete GSM mobile phone network. Experiences of operating OpenBTS installations on the Pacific island of Niue and at the Burning Man festival in the Nevada desert will be covered, along with how OpenBTS has been integrated with other systems for use in disaster relief. Licensing permitting there will also be a live demonstration. Tim Panton is a software engineer with a particular interest in projects that blend web applications and person-to-person speech into an integrated user experience. He has many years hands-on experience with the OpenBTS project, working closely with the core development team on numerous installations. Tim is currently working on the Phono.com, Tropo.com and Rayo.org products at VoxeoLabs, producing web developer-friendly APIs by using XMPP protocols to drive innovative telephony applications that can be used anywhere by anyone. - The 3D Printed Revolution Over recent years Open Source 3D printers have quickly developed alongside their commercial counterparts offering affordable and accessible alternatives. This talk will cover experiences using commercial printers and how the speaker's interests have moved to open source designs and how the two compare. Examples will be shown of projects using these technologies, such as "Fable", a clock manufactured by Selective Laser Sintering, and a wrist watch designed to be printed on a RepRap. There will also be a run through of the design considerations and how files were created, fixed and sliced in preparation to print on a RepRap. Mark Gilbert graduated in 2000 from Sheffield Hallam University with a degree in Industrial Design Innovation. After several years working as a design engineer, Mark started working as a freelance industrial designer for several companies in the Northwest. Over the last 6 years he has also worked closely with the Bolton Science and Technology Centre as the "Designer in Residence" where he has developed workshops around the centre's 3D printing and CAD facilities. In 2008 Mark set up the design studio Gilbert13 with his wife Angela where they design and develop products inspired by experimentation into digital manufacturing processes, 3D printing and additive manufacturing. Recent projects have taken their experience from rapid prototyping to use 3D printing as a manufacturing tool that can change the way people design, co create and distribute objects. - The Bots are Coming In the last two decades we have seen software and data change the fabric of economics, and the advent of personal computing and the Internet enable many new business models. However, the next two decades will be even more radical as that wave of innovation shifts from the virtual domain to a physical manifestation. Atoms are the new bits and the open sourcing and democratisation of bot technology is allowing us to enter into an era of personal production. And this talk will explore how 3D printing and additive manufacturing are revolutionising production as we know it. Alan Wood originally trained in systems engineering, got lost in software engineering and open source for a decade, before returning back to his hardware roots via the open source hardware and makers movement that has gathered momentum over the last few years. - DIYBIO - The Next Frontier DIYBIOMCR is an public group based at MadLab dedicated to making biology an accessible pursuit for citizen scientists, amateur biologists and biological engineers who value openness and safety. This talk will give an overview of the movement, and what is going on at MadLab involving not only biology but also diverse fields such as hardware-hackers, artists, journalists and the open-source movement. Hwa Young Jung is a co-founder and a director of MadLab, a community centre for creative, tech and science based the Manchester. Over 50 user groups meet once a month, including DIYBIOMCR, initially a joint funded project with MMU and the Wellcome Trust. ** Sunday Workshops Workshops will be reasonably informal and shaped by the participants, and details are subject to change depending upon the level of interest expressed. Please feel free to bring along equipment and components provided that you are able to take full responsibility for your own personal safety and that of others. Common sense should be exercised! - Practical IoT Applications with the Google ADK and Arduino Hands on IoT building sessions that follow on from Saturday's ADK and Arduino talks. - Interfacing the Raspberry Pi to the World - Here you will learn how to connect a selection of devices to your Raspberry Pi utilising the methods discussed during Saturday's talk. We will have a few Raspberry Pi boards available for the workshop but please bring your own if you were one of the lucky ones to have received one. - Building GSM Networks with Open Source A look at the practical steps involved in creating a low power GSM network using open source technology. Note: this workshop will be subject to a spectrum licence being granted. - Practical 3D Printing Details TBC. Note: * Please aim to arrive for 09:00 on the Saturday as the event will start at 09:30 prompt. * A light lunch and refreshments will be provided on the Saturday. Sponsored by: Capital SCF: http://www.capitalscf.com DesignSpark: http://www.designspark.com Cosm: https://cosm.com OSHCamp kit bags provided by: SK Pang: http://www.skpang.co.uk Oomlout: http://oomlout.com

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OSHUG #20 — Drones (UDB4, OpenRelief, ARDrone + Kinect), Thurs 21st June.
by Andrew Back 11 Jun '12

11 Jun '12

Hello, The next OSHUG meeting will be on Thursday 21st June. Details and registration link below. Regards, Andrew // OSHUG #20 — Drones (UDB4, OpenRelief, ARDrone + Kinect) On the 21st June 2012, 18:00 - 20:00 at Centre for Creative Collaboration, 16 Acton Street, London, WC1X 9NG (51.529049, -0.116436) Sponsored by Embecosm: http://www.embecosm.com — Registration: http://oshug.org/event/20 Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), or drones, are increasingly making the news, but when they do so it's usually because of their use in warfare. However, drones can be put to use in many other, far more positive applications. And at the twentieth OSHUG meeting we will hear talks on an experimental attitude and heading reference system (AHRS), using open source technology to build drones for use in disaster relief, and on a fun and novel method of flying drones via gesture control. - Using UDB4 for an Experimental AHRS The UAV Development Board is a very versatile development board that has been around for the past five or so years, and which has been supported by small team led by William Premerlani. The board comes with a dsPIC30F4011 microcontroller, an MMA7260 three axis accelerometer and two dual-axis Inversense IXZ500 gyroscopes. It has supported various forms of platforms ranging from inverted pendulums to multicoptors. It has primarily been a development platform for experimenters and it is in its fourth major revision. The talk intends to give a high level view of the MatrixPilot firmware as a general introduction to autopilots, with a demonstration of the Hardware in loop simulation to show how it behaves in flight for a fixed wing aircraft. Anish Mohammed has been an electronics hobbyist and software hacker since his early teens. He spent almost a decade in research and development in security and cryptography, and these days he works for the Big Five in consulting. He is a confirmed UAV addict who owns a dozen AHRS/Autopilots, both open and partially closed, with interests in multicopters, fixed wings and rovers. - OpenRelief — Open Source Software and Open Hardware For Frontline Disaster Relief This talk will explore how the OpenRelief team, inspired by challenges seen during the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake, is using Open Source Software and Open Hardware to create disaster relief tools. The first step is to develop a small drone that can take off from anywhere, recognize roads, people and smoke while also measuring weather and radiation. It can be built for less than 1,000 USD, and easily shares information with Open Source and proprietary disaster management systems. The goal is to gather critical information for relief workers on the ground, and contribute to getting aid where it is needed. Karl Lattimer is an engineer who started early with electronics and programming, and has worked on all kinds of projects for many companies developing software to solve a wide variety of problems. He currently works for Codethink Ltd, an engineering firm based in Manchester, UK. Karl is enthusiastic about Artificial Intelligence, Computer Vision, Robotics and related engineering disciplines. He is a firm believer that we can engineer a future that is more sustainable, adaptive and integrated. His interest in OpenRelief stems from a desire to engineer solutions to the problems faced in disaster scenarios, and the desire to drive the permeation of robots into our everyday lives. - Flying an ARDrone Like a 7-year Old Child Controlling a Parrot ARDrone using URBI, python and an MS Kinect camera, allowing people to fly it by holding their arms out and pretending to be an airplane like a small child. This was in truth an exploration in how to couple independent projects and to explore and exploit the APIs presented by the kinect and the drone's software. Ben O'Steen is a freelance developer with an interest in the fuzzy divide between physical and digital spaces, such as how we perceive and use objects differently based on how they are (re)produced, presented or controlled. Currently, he can be found working on digital library and archive projects for academic institutions, art installations and his newly completed 3d printer. — Registration: http://oshug.org/event/20

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OSHUG #19 — Kits (Homesense, Quick2Wire), Thursday 31st May.
by Andrew Back 24 May '12

24 May '12

Hello, The next OSHUG meeting will be on Thursday 31st May. Details and registration link below. Regards, Andrew // OSHUG #19 — Kits (Homesense, Quick2Wire) 31st May 2012, 18:00 - 20:00 at Centre for Creative Collaboration, 16 Acton Street, London, WC1X 9NG, [map] (51.529049, -0.116436) Sponsored by DesignSpark: http://www.designspark.com/ — Registration: http://oshug.org/event/19 For those that are new to hardware development it can prove a daunting prospect, and kits that address the needs of those with little or no experience in this area have a vital role to play. At the nineteenth OSHUG meeting we will be hearing about two such kits, one that was designed to support user-led smart home innovation and that was based around the Arduino platform, and an experimenters kit for the Raspberry Pi that is currently in development. - The Homesense Project The Homesense project was a European user-led, smart-home development project employing open source hardware. The project was led by Tinker London and EDF and engaged households supported by local experts in the design and development of smart home concepts. The project was developed as a reaction to top-down design approaches commonly observed in technological development and home building. Most early research viewed smart homes as a single complex system that is designed and constructed from the ground up, and assumes that most aspects (physical building, digital infrastructure, furniture, appliances) are under the control of a single smart-home developer. (Kortuem et al. 2010) In the contrasting reality however of multi-vendor development and retrofitting this is rarely the case. Inspired also by an argument that smart homes are developed by experts in a top down approach subsequently living with a smart home is acknowledged to be problematic to non-experts who lack control over respective technologies. The Homesense project was therefore designed to enable user-led innovation within the home environment, building alongside existing environmental and social conditions allowing end-users to address their own concerns in their physical and ‘lived in’ space. Homesense sought to bring the open collaboration methods of online communities to physical infrastructures in the home. Designing a toolkit to support this approach is explored as a topic of this presentation. Natasha Carolan is a PhD student at HighWire Doctoral Training Centre, Lancaster University where her research considers commodification of design and production processes in the digital economy. A product designer by background, her research explores open and user innovation, service design and value co-creation in areas of NPD and manufacturing. Natasha co-designed the Homesense toolkit by situating the toolkit as a cultural probe a strategy that Natasha believes is important in placing open source hardware in a democratic system as a tool for learning and empowerment. - Quick2Wire Quick2Wire Limited is a start-up that is developing a range of OSH/OSS add-on products for the Raspberry Pi. The first product is an experimenter's kit, contaning an expansion board, a set of components with which to experiment, software to drive the Pi, and an instruction manual. This will be followed by a series of expansion kits, using I2C and SPI to add capabilities like ADC, DAC, PWM and stepper motor drivers. All the hardware and software will be released under open source licences. The presentation will conclude with a demonstration using hardware prototypes driven by a Raspberry Pi. Romilly Cocking spent the ten years before his 'retirement' as an agile software developer, coach and trainer. He spent the first two years of retirement experimenting with robotics. Then Raspberry Pi came along, and now Romilly works full-time running Quick2Wire. Note: Please aim to arrive for 18:00 - 18:20 as the event will start at 18:30 prompt. — Registration: http://oshug.org/event/19

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OSHUG #18 — Energy-efficient Computing, Thursday 26th April.
by Andrew Back 11 Apr '12

11 Apr '12

Hello, Just to let folks know that registration is now open for this month's meeting, which will also be our second anniversary! And with thanks to SK Pang for kindly sponsoring OSHUG this month. Cheers, Andrew -- OSHUG #18 — Energy-efficient Computing (Open Compute, BeagleBoard, Event-driven XCore) On the 26th April 2012, 18:00 - 20:00 at Centre for Creative Collaboration, 16 Acton Street, London, WC1X 9NG (51.529049, -0.116436) // Sponsored by SK Pang Electronics: http://www.skpang.co.uk // - Registration: http://oshug.org/event/18 At the eighteenth OSHUG meeting we will hear how open source collaboration is being used to transform data centre design, and how open source hardware and software have been used to enable low cost ARM development. It will also be the OSHUG 2nd anniversary, and two years on we are delighted to welcome back XMOS, who will be giving us an introduction to event-driven programming with XCore. — The Open Compute Project Facebook uses a lot of servers, and those servers use a lot of energy. To minimise the costs associated with those servers and data center facilities, Facebook engineers came up with a fresh design. To build a community around that design it has been open sourced via the Open Compute Project (OCP). OCP is now involved in taking the requirements of many large data center users, and turning them into designs for servers, the racks that hold them, the facilities that power and cool them, and the management interfaces that control them. This presentation will give an overview of what Facebook have built, and how OCP plans to transform data centers elsewhere. Chris Swan has been an electronics hobbyist and software hacker since primary school. These days he's an IT guy at a large bank, focussed on security and innovation - including mobile, consumerisation and cloud computing. Alongside his day job Chris chairs the infrastructure working group at the Open Data Center Alliance (ODCA), which is partnered with the Open Compute Project (OCP). — BeagleBoard.org Community - Open Hardware, Open Software, Open Platforms BeagleBoard.org has created a number of products since its conception a few years ago, from the initial 'BeagleBoard' single board computer, through to the enhanced 'BeagleBoard-xM' with more performance and connectivity, and its most recent and expandable platform, the 'BeagleBone'. All of these have set out to achieve a goal of bringing high performance ARM-based processing technology to a wide 'community' of developers and users, in low-cost 'open' platforms, giving access to as much of the system-on-chip features as possible. The recent launch of the 'BeagleBone' was a great testament to this vibrant 'community', key to Beagleboard.org, which enabled a wealth of advanced platform and application software to be immediately available, and a large amount of hardware expertise providing feedback and ready to start building add-ons and clones. This was exactly what was hoped for when the project was initially conceived by a couple of engineers discussing at the coffee machine about how their technology could be made more widely accessible. The community continues to grow each day, with more and more exciting and innovative uses for these low-cost, open platforms revealed on the various mailing lists and chat rooms - from 'football playing robots' to 'media servers', the list, expertise and imagination seems endless! This presentation hopes to give an overview of the BeagleBoard.org community project and how the products have been created and supported. There have been many exciting moments, many challenges and many lessons learned throughout this project - some of which will hopefully be covered during this presentation and discussion. Roger Monk is a System Applications Engineer for Texas Instruments, and has spent the last 10+ years working closely with customers to build hi-tech electronic products based around Texas Instruments Embedded Processing technology across a range of application areas. Roger is passionate about open-source technology and the ability for it to help deliver higher quality, more innovative products to market quickly. He has been closely involved with the BeagleBoard.org community project since its conception. — Event-driven Programming with XCore XMOS designs concurrent, event-driven processor cores. Because of the deterministic nature of the architecture both real-time algorithms and hardware interfaces can be developed as software. The event-driven nature of the processor means that all programs pause until they need to perform a task, making them inherently efficient. In this talk we will discuss events, concurrency, and how hardware interfaces can be programmed in software. We will then show the design of the slice-kit development system, which enables XCores to be easily attached to peripheral PCB's containing, for example, an Ethernet PHY. Henk Muller is currently the Principal Technologist at XMOS Ltd. In that role he has been involved in the design and implementation of hardware and software for real time systems. Prior to that, Henk worked in Academia for 20 years in computer architecture, compilers, and ubiquitous computing. He holds a doctorate from the University of Amsterdam. Note: Please aim to arrive for 18:00 - 18:20 as the event will start at 18:30 prompt. - Registration: http://oshug.org/event/18

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OSHUG #17 — Practical System-on-Chip, Thursday 29th March.
by Andrew Back 06 Mar '12

06 Mar '12

Hello, Registration is now open for the March OSHUG meeting. Regards, Andrew -- OSHUG #17 — Practical System-on-Chip (Program your own open source FPGA SoC) 29th March 2012, 18:00 - 20:00 at Centre for Creative Collaboration, 16 Acton Street, London, WC1X 9NG (51.529049, -0.116436) // Sponsored by DesignSpark: http://www.designspark.com // - Registration: http://oshug.org/event/17 At the ninth OSHUG meeting we were given an introduction to FPGA development, and to the OpenCores community and the OpenRISC 1000 open source processor family. At the seventeenth OSHUG meeting we will be given a comprehensive introduction to the practicalities of programming your own open source FPGA system-on-chip. — How to Program Your Own Open Source FPGA System-on-Chip It is possible to buy a FPGA prototyping board like the Terasic DE0-nano, capable of running a complete 32-bit System-on-Chip for around £50. Even larger boards with the memory capacity to bring up a full Linux system on the design cost a few hundred pounds. In this talk Julius Baxter and Jeremy Bennett will present the OpenRISC architecture and OpenRISC Reference Platform SoC (ORPSoC), and show how to take this open source design and get it running on an FPGA board. This is a practical evening, aimed at users who have never done any chip design. Using a Xilinx ML501 prototyping board, Julius Baxter will demonstrate all the steps from obtaining the initial hardware design through to bringing up the board and booting a full Linux system. The following topics will be covered: * an overview of OpenCores and the OpenRISC project * an introduction to the Verilog Hardware Design Language * how to synthesize the design into a FPGA bitstream * what needs modifying to run on different boards * how to get software running * porting a simple (newlib) library to the board * demonstration of Linux booting // Note that this will be an interactive session, and participants are encouraged to bring their along own FPGA dev boards and laptops and to join in, should they wish. If you have a board that is not listed as having a preconfigured ORPSoC build, or you have any other questions concerning the practicalities of this, you should direct your question to the OSHUG discussion list. // Julius Baxter has been involved with the OpenRISC project for 4 years, and during that time he's worked on everything from processor Verilog RTL to the Linux kernel port. After finishing undergraduate studies in his native Australia, he then studied a System-on-Chip design Master's at KTH in Stockholm, Sweden, while working at ORSoC AB - the owners and operators of OpenCores.org. Now living and working Cambridge, Julius maintains a role as an active developer and maintainer on the OpenRISC project, largely dealing with RTL, toolchain and architecture work. Dr Jeremy Bennett is Chief Executive of Embecosm which provides open source services, tools and models to facilitate embedded software development with complex systems-on-chip. He has been involved with OpenCores for the past decade, and is responsible for much of the software tool chain. Contact him at jeremy.bennett(a)embecosm.com. Note: Please aim to arrive for 18:00 - 18:20 as the event will start at 18:30 prompt. - Registration: http://oshug.org/event/17

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OSHUG #16 — Manufacturing, Thursday 23rd February.
by Andrew Back 15 Feb '12

15 Feb '12

Hello, Registration is now open for the February OSHUG meeting and details are below. Regards, Andrew -- OSHUG #16 — Manufacturing (Breadboard to Finished Product, Arduino Shield, Modular RepRap Electronics) On the 23rd February 2012, 18:00 - 20:00 at Centre for Creative Collaboration, 16 Acton Street, London, WC1X 9NG (51.529049, -0.116436) Registration: http://oshug.org/event/16 At the sixteenth OSHUG meeting we will be hearing about first-hand experiences of taking an open source hardware design from being a project to a product. With insights into prototyping, some of the manufacturing options available and the challenges that may be encountered. — From Breadboard to Finished Product You have a cool project, people are sending you emails asking where they could get their hands on one and you find yourself googling "electronics manufacturing"... Should you get yourself a toaster oven and start a miniature production line in your living room or should you just outsource it? What challenges await you if you decide to go down the contract manufacturing route? This talk aims to give the audience an overview of the electronics manufacturing process, using a project recently completed by the speaker as a case study. Omer Kilic is theoretically still a research student at the University of Kent, although he intends to submit his thesis (which is about a reconfigurable heterogeneous computing framework) pretty soon. He likes tiny computers, things that 'just work' and beer. He currently works for Erlang Solutions in London, exploring the use of Erlang programming language in the Embedded Systems domain and develops tools and support material to help the adoption of this technology. — Arduino Shield: From Design to Manufacturing The Arduino CAN-Bus shield gives the Arduino CAN-Bus capability. In this presentation we will learn about the design process from PCB layout and prototyping, to testing with a simulator and eventually testing with a real car. And about the perils of using a simulator, small scale production and outsourcing. Sukkin Pang is a design engineer and a director at SK Pang Electronics Ltd. He graduated from the University of Hertfordshire and has over 20 years of industrial experience. He is passionate about open source hardware and has four Arduino shields published. He used to tinker in assembler on the Z80, 6502, PIC and AVR, but nowadays he mainly uses C and C++. — Design and Build of Modular RepRap Electronics After meeting at OggCamp 2011 a number of people decided to form a Thames Valley area group for those interested in using and building RepRap 3D printers, and Thames Valley RepRap User Group (TVRRUG) was born. Alan Wood offered to help out with the electronics side of printer builds, expecting that only a handful 3D printing geeks would join up. One month later the group were organising a build of 20 RepRaps and 30 complete sets of electronics! They had originally decided to go with a kit-based approach for this, but couldn't find a modular candidate that would meet their requirements. So they took matters into their own hands and Alan and the group designed a new modular kit [See: DSMM and OMC] that can be used both with RepRap and other Cartesian robotic platforms. In this talk Alan will go through the distributed design and build process they adopted, as well as covering details of the design itself. Alan Wood originally trained in systems engineering, got lost in software engineering and open source for a decade, before returning back to his hardware roots via the open source hardware and makers movement that has gathered momentum over the last few years. Note: Please aim to arrive for 18:00 - 18:20 as the talks will start at 18:30 prompt. Sponsored by: DesignSpark — http://www.designspark.com Registration: http://oshug.org/event/16

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