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OSHUG #19 — Kits (Homesense, Quick2Wire), Thursday 31st May 2012.
by Andrew Back 16 May '12

16 May '12

Hello, Registration for OSHUG #19 is now open, details below. Best, 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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MusicTechFest 17-19 May in London
by Nils Hitze 08 May '12

08 May '12

Hi there, i am new to this group (and based in Munich, Germany not London) but nevertheless a friend of mine is organizing an event in London that you might find interesting: http://www.musictechfest.org/#register A three day, free Music Hack Day/TechFest. Be fast, there might still be some tickets left Kind Regards Nils -- Nils Hitze Email: nhitze(a)gmail.com Mobil: +49 179 9429701 Blog: silberkind.de <http://www.silberkind.de> G+: silberkind.de/+ Twitter: @kojote <http://twitter.com/kojote>

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Wikipedia entry for OSHUG
by Jeremy Bennett 04 May '12

04 May '12

I have created a stub Wikipedia entry for OSHUG http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OSHUG Perhaps others would like to expand this. More information on the origins, and a list of meetings would be useful. Best wishes, Jeremy -- Tel: +44 (1590) 610184 Cell: +44 (7970) 676050 SkypeID: jeremybennett Email: jeremy.bennett(a)embecosm.com Web: www.embecosm.com

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Microsoft infiltrating the Cabinet Office Open Source consultation
by Jeremy Bennett 27 Apr '12

27 Apr '12

It seems big business will try anything to stop government's supporting open source. This government announcement is of interest - not least because of them doing the right thing about it! http://digital.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/2012/04/26/open-standards-consultation-… Although we are an open source hardware group, many members overlap into the open source software world. You may like to respond to the consultation and your MP. Best wishes, Jeremy -- Tel: +44 (1590) 610184 Cell: +44 (7970) 676050 SkypeID: jeremybennett Email: jeremy.bennett(a)embecosm.com Web: www.embecosm.com

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Modular OpenChronos firmware
by Sevan / Venture37 22 Apr '12

22 Apr '12

Hiya, The OpenChronos devs have announced a modular firmware for the Ti EZ430 watches, details on whats new & how to obtain the code are covered here: http://groups.google.com/group/openchronos/browse_thread/thread/5ba4b073ea5… Sevan

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London Raspberry Pi Meetup, Thursday 26th April.
by Andrew Back 19 Apr '12

19 Apr '12

Hello, Those attending OSHUG #18 next Thursday evening may be interested in coming along to an informal Raspberry Pi meetup that is being hosted by C4CC earlier the same day. Details pasted below. Cheers, Andrew // London Raspberry Pi Meetup #01 On the 26th April 2012, 15:00 - 17:30 at Centre for Creative Collaboration, 16 Acton Street, London, WC1X 9NG (51.529049, -0.116436) * Do you have a Raspberry Pi? * Perhaps you have a Raspberry Pi-based project in mind. * Or you would just like to find out more... The people behind OSHUG, and DesignSpark and the Centre for Creative Collaboration invite you to the first London Raspberry Pi meetup. Come along and meet other RasPi users and enthusiasts, share experiences and demo projects. Should we organise regular meetings or workshops? Here is an opportunity to get involved with shaping future events! Note: this will be an informal meetup with no particular structure or presentations, and so please set your expectations accordingly. - Registration: http://londonraspi01.eventbrite.co.uk/ //

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OSHUG #18 — Energy-efficient Computing, Thursday 26th April.
by Andrew Back 05 Apr '12

05 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 event preparation
by Julius Baxter 27 Mar '12

27 Mar '12

Hi all For those intending on coming along to OSHUG 17 on Thursday, can I recommend you visit the following page on OpenCores for some details on what you'll need to install to participate in some of the practical parts of the evening: http://opencores.org/or1k/OSHUG We don't have a nice, neat distribution of the OpenRISC cross-compiler readily available yet, so part of the process is to build the tool chain. Otherwise, the rest is just obtaining a copy of the OpenRISC repository so we can simulate things on the evening. Coming with these preparations will save a lot of time and hopefully allow those who want to play along to do so. If you have any questions, let us know here, or on the OpenRISC mailing list at http://lists.openrisc.net Thanks Julius

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Next Thursday and help at C4CC.
by Andrew Back 23 Mar '12

23 Mar '12

Hello, Just a reminder that next Thursday evening it will be OSHUG #17: http://oshug.org/event/17 And we'd be interested in hearing from anyone who might be bringing their own FPGA development board along to try out an ORSoC/OpenRISC build. Also, our generous hosts at the Centre for Creative Collaboration are in need of a favour. They've just picked up a couple of network switches in advance of a Pachube workshop that is taking place during the day next Weds & Thurs, and could do with a hand setting these up. I've not checked, but it might even be possible to attend the aforementioned workshop too. In any case, if you may be able to help out please contact Brian Condon (CC'ed) direct as he's not subscribed to this list. Cheers, Andrew

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OSHUG #17 — Practical System-on-Chip, Thursday 29th March.
by Andrew Back 01 Mar '12

01 Mar '12

Hello, Registration is now open for the March OSHUG meeting. Cheers, 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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