oshug September 2018

oshug@oshug.org

5 participants
2 discussions

Building a Crystal Set / Transistor Radio
by Jeremy Bennett 01 Oct '18

01 Oct '18

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Hi all, @here When I was young I learned a lot from "The Boys Book of Crystal Sets" (https://www.americanradiohistory.com/Archive-Bookshelf/Technology/Boys-Book…) and the Ladybird book "Making a Transistor Radio" (https://archive.org/details/MakingATransistorRadio-LadybirdBook/page/n0). These are largely unusable today, primarily because you cannot get 500pF air spaced variable capacitors (they come up second hand on eBay sometimes at a price, but with little guarantee about actual capacitance values). Plus they are dependent on germanium technology, although that is accessible at least for the diodes. I have a 10 year old nephew who is very keen on electronics. I'd like to introduce him to the same sort of projects. Any suggestions what the modern equivalent would be? Thanks, Jeremy - -- Tel: +44 (1590) 610184 Cell: +44 (7970) 676050 SkypeID: jeremybennett Twitter: @jeremypbennett Email: jeremy.bennett(a)embecosm.com Web: www.embecosm.com PGP key: 1024D/BEF58172FB4754E1 2009-03-20 -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- iEYEARECAAYFAlut5XAACgkQvvWBcvtHVOFrnQCfeAqJ5QKdAXDI5BnlHTfSI9De yqcAnRtbnBiEnP5q9RyssOsN5Fqb/6Y/ =TjV4 -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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OSHUG #69 — Members' Lightning Talks, Thurs 16th Sept.
by Andrew Back 12 Sep '18

12 Sep '18

Hi All, Registration is now open for the 69th meeting, held in partnership with the BCS OSSG, and featuring a series of member lightning talks. Details below. Cheers, Andrew // Event #69 — Members' Lightning Talks 13 September 2018, 18:30 - 20:00 at BCS London, 1st Floor, The Davidson Building, 5 Southampton Street, London, WC2E 7HA. http://oshug.org/event/69 We don't usually do a September meeting, but we thought it would be interesting to hear from our members about the projects that they have been working on over the year. We're delighted to welcome a range of speakers who will spend 10 or 15 minutes discussing their projects. This is a joint meeting with the British Computer Society Open Source Specialist Group. — Hammerspoon: Staggeringly powerful macOS desktop automation Hammerspoon exposes many parts of macOS to the simple scripting language Lua. Its goal is to make the most powerful and flexible tool for serious power users to automate and customise as many things as possible. In this talk we'll look at the history of automation on Apple computers, how Hammerspoon works, and some of the excellent things it can help you do. Of course, it's Open Source, so you can also jump in and help make it even better! * Chris Jones has been creating, using, and advocating for Open Source software, since the mid-1990s. He's spent the last 12 years of his professional life working on/with Open Source - the first half at Canonical (creators of Ubuntu) and since then working on OpenStack at HP and Red Hat. After 13 years of zealously running only Linux on his desktops/laptops, he has spent the last 8 years recovering as a macOS user, but has nevertheless retained his passion for contributing to Open Source. — Cooking with a touch of science and a dash of engineering. Sous vide (under vacuum) is a technique that places food into a temperature controlled water bath. The vacuum bit isn't that important, and squeezing the air out of a zip lock bag is generally sufficient; but precise temperature control is essential to ensure that the right proteins are denatured. The thermostat in a typical piece of kitchen equipment is nowhere near good enough, but add a sensor (immersible temperature gauge), an actuator (433MHz remote control socket), some control software and a dev board to run it on and you have the ability to cook perfect steaks, eggs, fish or whatever. * Chris Swan has been tinkering with electronics since he was a small child, and got into software when he realised that it was necessary to make hardware do interesting things. In his day job as CTO for Global Delivery for DXC Technology he's bringing a large services company and its customers into a world of DevOps and Infrastructure as Code. On evenings and weekends he can often be found making some sort of project around a dev board, with a particular fondness for Raspberry Pis. — Building an Open Source Electric Surfboard With the increasing availability of 3D printers and the wide variety of components available over the internet, how hard is it to build an electric surfboard? This talk will cover the design and construction of an open-source electric surfboard from the concept to hitting the sea, including some of the challenges met along the way, especially those to do with managing lots of electricity very close to lots of water. The project can be found on GitHub at https://github.com/largeostrich/openelectricsurfboard and https://github.com/largeostrich/openwaterjet. * Peter Bennett (thelargeostrich) is currently studying Mining Engineering at Camborne School of Mines, University of Exeter. He has a long standing interest in open source technology, particularly 3D printing and electronics. He previously reimagined peripherals for the EDSAC using 3D printing and arduino for ChipHack at Wuthering Bytes 2017. — Jumbo Servo - I2C position control When Andy needed a really big servo, rather than spend a fortune on an industrial monster, he decided to make one. As it would be used with a Raspberry Pi or Microcontroller he decided it would be digitally controlled rather than the usual analogue pwm. * Andy Clark has been Making and Repairing in a shed at the bottom of the garden for the last 10 years. The code and designs for his often quirky and enchanting projects can be found on GitHub and documented on the Workshopshed blog. — Next Generation Storage Interfaces The efficient, convenient, and robust execution of data-driven workflows and enhanced data management are key for productive in computer-aided RD&E. Still, the storage stack is based on the low-level POSIX I/O (or objects in cloud storage). This talk introduces chances for establishing an open community-driven next-generation storage interface in a similar fashion to the existing forums. The forum would bring together vendors, storage experts, and users to discuss key features of the API and establish governance strategies. The envisioned coarse-grained API aims to overcome current obstacles for highly parallel workflows but would be beneficial also in the domain of big data and even desktop PC. It bears the opportunity to create a new ecosystem. * Dr. Kunkel is a Lecturer at the Computer Science Department at the University of Reading. Previously, he worked as postdoc in the research department of the German Climate Computing Center (DKRZ) that partners with the Scientific Computing group at the Universität Hamburg. He manages several research projects revolving around High-Performance Computing and particularly high-performance storage. Julian became interested in the topic of HPC storage in 2003, during his studies of computer science. Besides his main goal to provide efficient and performance-portable I/O, his HPC-related interests are: data reduction techniques, performance analysis of parallel applications and parallel I/O, management of cluster systems, cost-efficiency considerations, and software engineering of scientific software. — upspin.io: a personal storage and sharing system Details TBC — A Plan 9 C Compiler for RISC-V The Plan 9 operating system was developed at Bell Labs in the 1980s using a new C compiler written by Ken Thompson, which was also later used to implement the kernel of the Inferno operating system and to bootstrap early releases of the Go language. Like Plan 9 itself, the compiler is highly portable, elegantly minimalist, lightweight and quick. The ARM version, for example, is about 21,000 lines of code and compiles itself in 15 seconds on a Raspberry Pi 3. This talk will describe the exercise of re-targeting the Plan 9 C compiler to generate code for the RISC-V open instruction set architecture. * Dr Richard Miller learned C in 1977 while re-targeting (and re-hosting) Dennis Ritchie's original Unix C compiler from the PDP-11 to the Interdata 7/32. Since then he has re-targeted Unix and Plan 9 C compilers for various other CPUs from NS 16032 to Nios II. Note: Please aim to arrive by 18:15 as the event will start at 18:30 prompt. // -- Andrew Back http://abopen.com

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oshug September 2018