oshug July 2019

oshug@oshug.org

2 participants
5 discussions

Open Source Hardware Workshop Format
by David Anders 23 Aug '19

23 Aug '19

Greetings All, i am looking over the list of workshops being held on Sunday. i am not seeing what kind of format the workshops will presented in. for instance, is each workshop the entire day? are they presented one after another? will they be 1/2 day with some in the morning and some in the afternoon? there are a number of workshops i'd like to attend and i'd like to see how that works out schedule wise.... thanks Dave Anders

2 3

Open Source Hardware Camp 2019 — Sat 31st August & Sun 1st September, Hebden Bridge.
by Andrew Back 18 Aug '19

18 Aug '19

Hi All, I'm pleased to announce that we have a total of 11 talks and 6 workshops confirmed for Open Source Hardware Camp 2019! As in previous years, there will be a social event on the Saturday evening and OSHCamp is once again being hosted to coincide with the Wuthering Bytes technology festival. http://wutheringbytes.com/ Cheers, Andrew // Open Source Hardware Camp 2019 On the 31st August 2019, 09:00 Saturday morning - 16:00 on the Sunday afternoon at Hebden Bridge Town Hall, St. George's Street, Hebden Bridge, HX7 7BY, UK. Registration: http://oshug.org/event/oshcamp2019 Open Source Hardware Camp 2019 will take place place in the Pennine town of Hebden Bridge, where it will return to be hosted for the sixth year as part of the Wuthering Bytes technology festival. 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 private rooms available and discounts for group bookings. Details of other local accommodation can be found at www.hebdenbridge.co.uk. There will be a social event on the Saturday evening from 8PM.. *** Saturday :: Talks *** — Customising a RISC-V Core This talk walks through the RISC-V ISA and the microarchitecture of an open-source RISC-V core, to provide an understanding of how new instructions can be added to the hardware. RISC-V is an open Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) that can be implemented freely. The ISA is modular, providing a base set of integer instructions alongside standard extensions for multiplication, floating point, atomic operations, and many other categories. In addition to standard extensions, the ISA reserves space for user-defined extensions, providing the flexibility to add custom instructions that fulfil any purpose. There are many open-source implementations of RISC-V cores - in this talk we will look at a small core written in SystemVerilog that is simple enough to be understood by those relatively new digital logic design. We will walk through the different components of the core and how they fit together to build a picture of how instructions are decoded and executed, and go through an example of the changes to each component needed to support a custom instruction. * Dr Graham Markall is a software toolchain engineer at Embecosm, which provides open source toolchain services. Most of his work focuses on GNU toolchains (GCC, Binutils, GDB, etc.) and the use of cycle-accurate simulation for pre-silicon toolchain development and testing. His current projects focus on the development of customised toolchains for various RISC-V systems, ranging from small, deeply-embedded applications up to high-performance multicore systems. — Building A Network on a Chip for a Raspberry Pi Zero Cluster A Raspberry Pi cluster is a popular platform for experimentation and learning about parallel computing. The tiny Raspberry Pi Zero has no built-in ethernet capability, so a Pi Zero cluster needs an alternative way to connect the CPUs. By implementing a specialised local network on an FPGA chip, linked to a serial or SPI port on each CPU, we can avoid the need for bulky ethernet cables and switches, and build a very compact cluster with low cost and low power consumption. * As a member of Oxford University's Programming Research Group in the 1980s, Richard Miller wrote software for parallel computing systems from the transputer to the Cray T3D. More recently as a freelance software engineer, he ported the Plan 9 operating system to the Raspberry Pi. His current focus is on FPGA circuit design. — From humble beginnings to manufacturing the HILTOP open source test and measurement platform and the problems along the way! The story of how three entrepreneurs with a vision and willingness to succeed have carved out an open source test and measurement business and the details behind the hardware and software problems they had with early prototypes and product integration. * Tim Telford is a hardware engineer with diverse skill set and highly motivated self starter. Passionate about design detail and experienced in high reliability solutions for the Aerospace, Defence, Telecoms and Nuclear industries. Development of test equipment and measurement systems for Rolls-Royce Aerospace. Systems and Electronic engineering experience within the nuclear industry. Design of commercial test equipment and high integrity, high value projects. Analogue and Digital board level design, Schematics, PCB, FPGA development, DFM, DFT, Simulation, systems design and integration/testing. Requirements management, FMEA, WCA & PSA analysis techniques. * Joe Burmeister spent nearly 12 years in the console and PC game industry. He worked in a number of areas from graphics and animation engine to art and animation tools, finally file systems and databases. Joe comes from a multiple platform background, partly as consoles used to not be PCs, but also having grown up on RISC OS (Acorn’s desktop ARM OS), before moving to Windows for work then Linux for fun and finally work. For the past five years Joe has done work on GNU/Linux, often on ARM. Having started out bedroom programming, Joe is a strong believer that everyone should have the option of source code and learning how things work. — Linux on Open Source Hardware and Libre Silicon This talk will explore Open Source Hardware projects relevant to Linux, including boards like BeagleBone, Olimex OLinuXino, Giant board and more. Looking at the benefits and challenges of designing Open Source Hardware for a Linux system, along with BeagleBoard.org's experience of working with community, manufacturers, and distributors to create an Open Source Hardware platform. In closing also looking at the future, Libre Silicon like RISC-V designs, and where this might take Linux. * Drew Fustini is an Open Source Hardware designer at OSH Park, board member of the BeagleBoard Foundation, maintainer of the Adafruit BeagleBone Python library, and Open Source Hardware Association vice president. — Exploring the Gigatron TTL Computer The Gigatron TTL computer is an open source computer constructed almost entirely from TTL logic - without the need for a microprocessor. The unique design combines 36 standard 74HCTxx TTL devices with ROM and RAM chips to make a platform capable of colour VGA video and sound. The machine can host 1980's style games and can be programmed in interactive Tiny BASIC. In the last year, Ken has explored the architecture of this machine and achieves some performance gains by overclocking the cpu by over 200%. This has yielded a platform that is rated at about 2 to 3 times the performance of the classic 1980's machines, such as the C64, Spectrum etc. Working with an unfamiliar architecture has meant creating some programming tools and also simulating the machine behaviour on an ARM processor. Ken discusses the progress to date - and poses the question, "What would computers be like had the microprocessor not appeared when it did?" * Ken Boak began programming computers in 1979 at school, and has * continued to do so - somewhat infrequently over the last 40 years. The Gigatron rekindles old memories of TTL logic and working with resource limited computing. It illustrates just how much can be done with such a minimal machine. — Gearing up for Volume Manufacturing: Tales from China The journey of a design from engineering sign-off all the way to customer shipment takes many months of hard work and the smallest of hiccups could translate to severe delays. With many actors involved, how does it all work? What is involved in designing and shipping a consumer product with high volume manufacturing in mind? This talk will give the audience a behind the scenes look at what it takes to ship electronics products at scale, particularly focusing on the approach, dialogue and the processes required to run a successful manufacturing project. * Omer Kilic is an embedded systems engineer who works at the various intersections of hardware and software engineering practices, product development and manufacturing. — Saving Your Electronic Conference Badge From A Life On The Shelf As the creator of an electronic conference badge, you want to create something memorable, a badge with Wow! factor which will be remembered fondly and remain in use for years afterwards. Unfortunately so many badges end up sitting in drawers gathering dust, never to see the light of day again. Firmware,hardware, or documentation haven't been kind to the conference attendees, and though you've given them an amazing piece of hardware they just haven't been able to get a handle on it and use it in their own projects. This talk gives a few ideas about how that might be avoided, how an awesome badge can avoid being an ignominious piece of e-waste and become a valued piece of hardware used in projects for years afterwards. * Jenny List is an electronic engineer and technical writer who spent a long career in electronic publishing from CD-ROMs to dictionaries before breaking out and forming her own hardware business, and writing about hardware as a contributing editor for Hackaday.com. — What's So Good About The Z80 CPU Anyway? This talk will briefly cover the history of the Zilog Z80 CPU including early development, some predictable places where it turned up, as well as some more less expected uses. It will include a look at the architecture of the Z80 itself and then an overview of how to build a simple Z80 based computer and program it in BASIC. This will lead on to a description of the kit in your goodie bag and a plug for the workshop on the Sunday. * Spencer Owen like many kids in the 80s, loved his ZX Spectrum and other 8 bit computers. This set him up for a career in IT, and he worked as a server engineer and network engineer for many years. In 2013, in a bid to see if he really understood how computers worked at the lowest level, Spencer went back to his roots built a simple Z80 based machine on a breadboard. This was to mature in to the RC2014, which Spencer started selling in his spare time in 2015. Within a few months it was clear that the RC2014 was taking up more time than he had spare, so he quit network job and started a retro computer kit company. Spencer is now the largest supplier of Z80 computers worldwide. — Next Generation Open Source FPGAs After the success of Icestorm and the growth of the open source FPGA ecosystem, work started on the next generation of open source FPGA toolchains in 2018. This includes the next-generation place-and-route tool nextpnr, designed to support a wide range of FPGA architectures as well as producing higher quality results with less runtime. Combined with Project Trellis which provides bitstream documentation for the Lattice ECP5 FPGAs, a wide range of advanced projects such as Linux-capable RISC-V SoCs with fast memory, Ethernet and video interfaces are possible with an end-to-end open source flow. This talk will introduce these new tools and their capabilities, as well as discussing what lies ahead for open source FPGA tools, and how you can get involved in this exciting new open world! * David Shah is a engineer at Symbiotic EDA and a Electronic and Information Engineering student at Imperial College London. He entered the world of open source FPGAs by extending Project Icestorm, the iCE40 bitstream documentation project, to include the newer iCE40 UltraPlus FPGAs. As well developing Project Trellis, he has been involved in the development of a new open source FPGA place-and-route tool, nextpnr. — Heterogeneous design for embedded development Developing embedded solutions for today's challenging applications be them IoT, consumer, automation or robotics requires a heterogeneous technology approach involving hardware, FPGA, µC Firmware, and software combined at multiple levels. Concepts such as Machine Vision/Learning, Artificial Intelligence coupled with traditional embedded hardware and software stacks require hybrid approaches to design and implementation. I take a look at typical hardware being used and platform sweet spots I have been identified. I also take a look at some emerging tools and approaches for tackling these heterogeneous projects. * Alan Wood has been working with parallel distributed programming for several decades. His recent work includes smart grids, 3D printers, robotics, automation and biotec diagnostics. His current research is focused on machine learning for embedded automation using FPGA and µC. He is a long term advocate of open source communities, a moderator (aka Folknology) for xCORE, the co-founder of myStorm open hardware FPGA community, as well as a co-founder of Surrey and Hampshire Makerspace. — EMC Design for Open Source Hardware Many Open Source electronics designs start off as cool development tools and end up being integrated into commercial products due to their low barrier to entry and ease of development. Now your hardware becomes subject to various Regulatory requirements, Electro-Magnetic Compatibility (EMC) amongst them. Whilst it might not be viable for an Open Source project to undergo full compliance testing, there are things that can be done to improve the EMC performance of your system. In this talk, James gives an overview of common problems encountered during EMC testing of Open Source hardware and the fixes required to resolve them. We'll also look at some key electromagnetic concepts (don't worry, no scary maths) that will help you look at your designs in a new light. * James Pawson runs Unit 3 Compliance, a West Yorkshire EMC test lab and consultancy that offers practical advice and EMC problem solving for a wide range of electronics products. *** Sunday :: Workshops *** — Customising a RISC-V Core - workshop Starting from an Open-source RISC-V core, add a new instruction to it that you design! This workshop will walk through the process of getting started with simulating an open-source RISC-V core and making the necessary modifications to decode and execute a new instruction. A processor that supports a new instruction is not much good if you can't write any code for it, so the second part of the workshop will focus on adding support into the assembler for your new instruction, so that you can write a program using the instruction and see that it executes correctly (or does not, and helps you to work out the bugs in your implementation). The tutorial materials will provide enough of the implementation and sufficient guidance to be able to work through with a little experience of Verilog and C++. For those new to Verilog, the materials from last year's talk and workshop ("Introduction to cycle-accurate Verilog simulation" and "Open Source RISC-V core quickstart") will be available to provide a more accessible starting point. Participants should bring: - A laptop. * Run by: Graham Markall — A Crash Course in KiCAD A KiCAD basics workshop that will be a crash course covering the main aspects of schematic capture, PCB layout and generating the manufacturing outputs and 3D models etc. Participants should bring: - A laptop with KiCAD version 5 installed ready to go. * Run by: Tim Telford — Gigatron TTL Computer demo and hands-on There will be a demo of the machine and an opportunity to do some retro-programming. * Run by: Ken Boak — SMD Soldering In this workshop we will introduce common SMD soldering techniques, including stencils and solder paste usage in a hobbyist home-lab capacity. The format is a series of demonstrations followed by exercises. Participants will be provided with a kit of parts and will assemble their circuits taking turns on the equipment provided. There will be a mixture of hand soldering and hot plate/air reflow techniques covered and a variety of SMD packages including some fine pitch components will be used. Participant requirements: - Some familiarity with soldering and electronics in general would be beneficial. * Run by: Omer Kilic — Assembling Your RC2014 Z80 Based Computer This workshop will take participants through all the stages of assembling and getting started with the RC2014 kit. Some basic soldering experience is assumed and soldering irons and tools will be available for groups of up to 6 people at a time. There will be a nominal charge of £5 per person. Participants should bring: - A laptop. - An FTDI cable if they have one. — Heterogeneous embedded hardware example walk through A walk through a practical heterogeneous application and its development, based around the combination of a microcontroller and an FPGA along with mixed tooling. * Run by: Alan Wood NOTE: - There are separate tickets for Saturday and Sunday. - A light lunch and refreshments will be provided each day. - Delegates will receive an RC2014 Micro upon registration on the - Saturday! - Please aim to arrive between 09:00 and 09:15 on the Saturday as the event will start at 09:20 prompt. // -- Andrew Back http://abopen.com

1 2

OSHUG #75 — Inaugural London RISC-V meetup, Mon 22nd July.
by Andrew Back 16 Jul '19

16 Jul '19

Hi All, Registration is now open for the 75th meeting, held in partnership with the BCS OSSG. Details below. Cheers, Andrew // 22nd July 2019, 17:30 - 20:30 at IET London, Watson-Watt room, 2 Savoy Place, London, WC2R 0BL. http://oshug.org/event/75 This will be the inaugural London meetup for the RISC-V community, hosted by the BCS Open Source Specialist Group and the UK Open Source Hardware User Group. As with the other UK meetups, we provide an opportunity to share the latest ideas around the RISC-V ecosystem, combined with plenty of time for networking. However unlike other meetups, the London meetup will have a specific focus on the open source aspects of RISC-V. This is a joint meeting with the British Computer Society Open Source Specialist Group. — The LowRISC project Alex Bradbury will talk about lowRISC, a non-profit community interest company, using collaborative engineering to develop and maintain open source silicon designs and tools. Their expertise includes processor and SoC design, with a particular focus on hardware security, design verification, RISC-V tools, and the LLVM compiler. * Alex Bradbury (@asbradbury) is a Co-founder and Director of the lowRISC project. You may also be familiar with his LLVM work, and the LLVM Weekly newsletter. — The OpenHW Group Rick O'Connor will introduce the Open Hardware Group, an industry and academia grouping, aiming to provide high quality free RISC-V hardware and software IP. * Rick O'Connor is Executive Director of OpenHW. — The XCrypt instruction set extension Ben Marshall will talk about his work at Bristol University on the SCARV project: a side-channel hardened RISC-V platform. He’ll introduce the XCrypt instruction set extension for RISC-V. * Ben Marshall is a Research Associate on the SCARV project. Note: There is networking over tea, coffee & biscuits from 5:30pm. The talks will start at 18:00 prompt. There will be opportunity to network further from 19:30 at the IET, continuing later at the Coal Hole pub on the Strand. -- Andrew Back http://abopen.com

1 0

BCS Open Source SG/OSHUG meeting 22 July: RISC-V London Meetup
by Jeremy Bennett 16 Jul '19

16 Jul '19

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Hi all, We've been holding meetings on RISC-V since 2014. Next Monday, 22 July, we're holding another meeting, but this time it will be as part of the RISC-V Foundation global meetup series. Because the BCS London office is in the middle of moving, this event will be at the IET, 2 Savoy Place. We'll start half an hour earlier than usual with tea/coffee/biscuits at 5:30 and talks from 6:00. This will allow plenty of time for networking afterwards. We have three speakers: - - Alex Bradbury on the LowRISC project - - Rick O'Connor on the OpenHW Group - - Ben Marshall on the XCrypt instruction set extension Full details and registration here: https://ossg.bcs.org/blog/event/inaugural-london-risc-v-meetup/ I look forward to seeing you there. Best wishes, 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----- iEYEARECAAYFAl0tsD0ACgkQvvWBcvtHVOGbZwCgke8qynu/4fNntohuI+xg/cmB WtIAn3llTkpYVQx8bl1Y+TW3//hMDi9M =/vxx -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

1 0

OSHUG #74 — What's New In Cryptography & Security, Thurs 18th July.
by Andrew Back 08 Jul '19

08 Jul '19

Hi All, Registration is now open for the 74th meeting, held in partnership with the BCS OSSG. Details below. Cheers, Andrew // Event #74 — What's New In Cryptography & Security 18th July 2019, 18:30 - 20:30 at BCS London, 1st Floor, The Davidson Building, 5 Southampton Street, London, WC2E 7HA. http://oshug.org/event/74 Over the last few years the security landscape has changed in several major ways. The Internet Of Things has made security and privacy a major problem for everyone. The move to HTTPS on almost every site and the attacks on TLS have raised awareness of security on the web, As a result, there has been a renewed focus on open source cryptography libraries, including new forks and projects. This meeting will take a look at the current state of security and cryptography and we'll look at how open source is contributing to the solutions as well as the problems. This is a joint meeting with the British Computer Society Open Source Specialist Group. — Failures in Firmware, an analysis of common weaknesses in IOT devices The advent of the Internet of Things has created an industry filled with incredible technologies, and incredible vulnerabilities. This talk aims to outline common weaknesses in these devices that can occur even if the developers are trying their best to make a device secure. This will include problems that can occur when implementing standard functionality, such as authentication, firmware updates, secure communication and protection of sensitive data. This talk will cover the following topics, with demonstrations and recommendations: - The basics of cryptography, how it works, how it is implemented, and the different types of software which implement it. This will include an introduction to Open Source encryption libraries and the pitfalls that can occur when they are implemented incorrectly. - An introduction to Open Source libraries used for developing embedded software, including an assessment of example libraries for specific chipsets which contain known vulnerabilities. - Demonstration of weaknesses in firmware protection mechanisms, covering what happens when you don't secure your firmware, when you encrypt it, and when you sign it. This topic will cover exactly how an attacker could bypass protection mechanisms when they are incorrectly implemented, and how they can be implemented well. - An analysis of Linux vs Real Time Operating Systems, demonstrating the security strengths and weaknesses between the two approaches and what can be done to improve the security of both. - A demonstration of weaknesses that can occur in hardware, demonstrating what can occur when electronics are designed in a manner which allows for easy debugging, including a demonstration of how firmware can easily be removed from a device when it is not adequately secured. - A discussion of how Open Source libraries can both increase and decrease security in a product, and how they can be used effectively. Each element of this presentation will include working demonstrations in order to exemplify where the weaknesses lie in the standard approaches taken when creating an IOT product. * Christopher Wade is a seasoned security researcher and consultant. His main focuses are in reverse engineering hardware, finger-printing USB vulnerabilities and playing with Software Defined Radios, His key strength lies in firmware analysis, which he utilises as part of the hardware testing team at Pen Test Partners. — Should you choose Open Source Crypto? What are the arguments for and against for using open source crypto code and how have they changed over time. * Glyn Wintle is CTO at dxwcyber, a security consultancy focused on attack. He has extensive experience of breaking into computer systems in both the public and private sector. — Why and How you should start using Onion Networking The internet began as a network where any computer could communicate directly with any other; but today there are host firewalls, perimeter firewalls, content filters, NATs, DNS restrictions, BGP hijacks and all manner of other challenges that limit you and your computers' ability to communicate. The Tor "Onion" networking protocol is an alternate "disintermediated" layer 3 stack where you do not require permission nor (mostly) any setup in order to communicate directly from/to any well-known address, plus you gain a host of security & operational benefits. We describe this. * Alec Muffett has worked in host and network security for 30 years, more than 22 of those in industry, holding senior consulting, architecture and engineering roles at Sun Microsystems and Facebook. He is a member of the Board of Directors of the Open Rights Group, a member of the Security and Privacy Executive of the British Computer Society, and a security engineer at Deliveroo. Note: Please aim to arrive by 18:15 as the event will start at 18:30 prompt. -- Andrew Back http://abopen.com

1 0

2024

2023

2022

2021

2020

2019

2018

2017

2016

2015

2014

2013

2012

2011

2010

oshug July 2019