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Cancelled: OSHUG / OSSG January Meeting: Machines and systems of past, present, future. @ Thursday, 17 January 2019
by Ivan Iacono 16 Jan '19

16 Jan '19

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What happened to RepRap?; TFMS looking to buy Huxley Duos
by J. R. Haigh 13 Jan '19

13 Jan '19

Hi, We at the Telford Makerspace (https://TelfordMaker.space ) are looking to get 2 or 3 RepRaps (https://RepRap.org ) with which to run workshops. We decided on getting a couple of RepRap Huxley Duos (https://web.Archive.org/web/20160620213955/http://RepRapPro.com/documentati… ), and materials and parts to build at least another Huxley Duo. Features of the Huxley Duo which appeal to us are: > • OSH and well-documented; > • Cartesian-style filament printer; > • dual-filament; > • small and portable with a very sturdy frame; > • cheap – 750£ will buy at least 3 of them; > • repairable; interchangeable; modifyable; upgradable. However, Andy D'Arcy Jewell and I could not find finer details such as nozzle diameter or print resolution, and when we were looking to buy one, we found that all of the links that we tried are dead or discontinued, i.e. we could not find /any/ live link to a current retailer of the Huxley Duo. The RepRap Project somewhat feels like a ghost town. We'd like to know: • Why did RepRap Ltd. close? • What happened to the RepRap Project and its community? • Where we can get RepRap Huxley Duos and their parts from? I notice that there's a fairly recent email to the list, the one announcing the 68th OSHUG meeting, that suggests that RepRap is still current without any hint of demise: At 2018-07-10Tue21:58:59+01, Andrew Back sent: > […] > Yet engineering hasn't worked with the power of self replication much, if at all, until now. This talk will be about the RepRap Project - an open-source project that has created humanity's first general-purpose self-replicating manufacturing machine. It will examine the likely social and economic impacts of self-replicating technology, and draw parallels with a twelve-thousand-year-old industry that uses natural self-replicating machines, the industry without which we would all starve: farming. > > * Adrian Bowyer holds a first degree and a PhD in engineering from Imperial College. He was an academic engineer and mathematician at the University of Bath for 35 years, from where he retired in 2012 to become a director of RepRap Ltd., a company that sells RepRap machines and components, and that undertakes research and consultancy in RepRap-related projects. RepRap Ltd is an entirely open-source company, and all its designs, software and documentation are freely available to everyone. […] The present tense implies that RepRap is still current. I sincerely hope so. Best regards, James R. Haigh. -- Wealth doesn't bring happiness, but poverty brings sadness. https://wiki.FSFE.org/Fellows/JRHaigh Sent from NixOS with Claws Mail, using email subaddressing as an alternative to error-prone heuristical spam filtering.

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Invitation: OSHUG / OSSG January Meeting: Machines and system... @ Thu Jan 17, 2019 6:30pm - 9pm (GMT) (oshug@oshug.org)
by Ivan Iacono 13 Jan '19

13 Jan '19

You have been invited to the following event. Title: [oshug] OSHUG / OSSG January Meeting: Machines and systems of past, present, future. When: Thu Jan 17, 2019 6:30pm – 9pm United Kingdom Time Calendar: oshug(a)oshug.org Who: * Ivan Iacono - organizer * Open Source Hardware User Group Discussion List Event details: https://www.google.com/calendar/event?action=VIEW&eid=XzYwcTMwYzFnNjBvMzBlM… Invitation from Google Calendar: https://www.google.com/calendar/ You are receiving this courtesy email at the account oshug(a)oshug.org because you are an attendee of this event. To stop receiving future updates for this event, decline this event. Alternatively you can sign up for a Google account at https://www.google.com/calendar/ and control your notification settings for your entire calendar. Forwarding this invitation could allow any recipient to modify your RSVP response. Learn more at https://support.google.com/calendar/answer/37135#forwarding

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OSHUG / OSSG January Meeting: Machines and systems of past, present, future.
by Sevan Janiyan 07 Jan '19

07 Jan '19

Happy new year folks, To start off the year, we have a series of talks around the theme of Acorn computers, RISC OS, RISC-V toolchain (preview of talks upcoming at FOSDEM [1] [2]). Meeting is on the 17th of January (18:30 to 21:00) at BCS London, 1st Floor, The Davidson Building, 5 Southampton Street, London, WC2E 7HA. Registration link: https://ossg170119.eventbrite.co.uk/ 1) History of Acorn Archimedes/NetPC/Rics PC computers A look at the line of ARM CPU based computers and thin clients by Acorn Computer Ltd Speaker Bio TBA 2) RISC OS : What's Next As of 2018, RISC OS is an open source operating system. This talk will cover the heritage of RISC OS, direction it would like to go, the response since it was open sourced as well as a demo of the latest computers that run RISC OS. Richard is a co-founder and director of RISC OS Developments Ltd. Since its inception in April 2017, Richard has been a driving force in making RISC OS truly open source; this was achieved with significant funding and community support in November 2018. Richard is also the sole director of GeneSys Developments Ltd, an IT company, which additionally incorporates Orpheus Internet, an ISP company. Despite not having a 'techie' background, Richard would end up assisting or implementing IT solutions for the companies he worked for. Taking the opportunity to further his technical knowledge and experience, Richard went on to work in the IT industry and set up his own business in 1995. In the early 80's, Richard spent some time in Canada. Here, he worked in the camera industry where he acquired advanced skills in photography, a love of which had been instilled in Richard as a young person by his father and continues to be a key skill in his career to date. 3) Embedded FreeBSD on a five-core RISC-V processor using LLVM We were tasked with bringing up and testing embedded FreeBSD on a custom five-core 32/64-bit RISC-V processor using LLVM. Given FreeBSD has already been ported to RISC-V and LLVM is the standard BSD C/C++ compiler surely this should be easy. But it wasn't. LLVM for RISC-V is still relatively immature, particularly for 64-bit. FreeBSD runs on symmetric multi-core 64-bit QEMU RISC-V, but not on embedded systems and not on heterogeneous multicore systems. In this talk we'll go through the steps needed to bring up a functioning embedded FreeBSD system on multi-core heterogeneous RISC-V system. Our target hardware was not available at the start of the project, so we used the generally available HiFive Freedom Unleashed board. The result is a reference embedded FreeBSD implementation for RISC-V, freely available to the community. This is not a talk about the deep internals of FreeBSD, but about the practical engineering steps needed to bring up an embedded operating system where many of the key components are not yet fully mature. Jeremy Bennett is Chief Executive of Embecosm (www.embecosm.com), a company developing open source compiler tool chains and porting embedded operating systems for new architectures. He is author of the standard text book "Introduction to Compiling Techniques" (McGraw-Hill 1990, 1995, 2003) and is an active member of the RISC-V Compliance Task Group. 4) Buildroot for RISC-V (Using Buildroot to create embedded Linux systems for 64-bit RISC-V) Buildroot is an embedded Linux build system that generates complete system images from source for a wide range of boards and processors. I have recently added support for 64-bit RISC-V to the official Buildroot distribution which make it a viable alternative to other build systems for RISC-V such as Yocto. During this presentation I will give a brief overview of Buildroot and how it compares to Yocto for those in the audience who are unfamiliar with these systems. In the main part of the talk I will look at the issues relating to the implementation of RISC-V support, based on my experiences. This will include a look at the status of the RISC-V software ecosystem with regard to the selection of a suitable toolchain, C library, kernel and bootloader. I will then run through how to configure and build a minimal system for booting under QEMU. Finally I will consider any further work required to improve Buildroot for RISC-V including the status of 32-bit support. Mark Corbin is Embedded Operating Systems Lead at Embecosm (www.embecosm.com). He has an extensive background in embedded systems development and has worked with Linux since 1996. He specialises in building embedded Linux distributions and is currently the RISC-V maintainer for the Buildroot project. [1] https://fosdem.org/2019/schedule/event/testing_freebsd_risc_v5/ [2] https://fosdem.org/2019/schedule/event/riscvbuildroot/ Regards, Sevan Janiyan

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OSHUG #70 — Mentoring & Advocacy in Open Source, Thurs 25th October.
by Andrew Back 15 Oct '18

15 Oct '18

Hi All, Registration is now open for the 70th meeting, held in partnership with the BCS OSSG and also coinciding with their AGM. Details below. Cheers, Andrew // Event #70 — Mentoring & Advocacy in Open Source + OSSG AGM 25 October 2018, 18:30 - 20:00 at BCS London, 1st Floor, The Davidson Building, 5 Southampton Street, London, WC2E 7HA. http://oshug.org/event/70 Whilst open source is now more widely accepted, there are still large parts of the engineering community who have yet to "see the light". Advocacy remains a key role for all who care about open source, while mentoring helps user make best use of open source technology. — Software Freedom Conservancy Software Freedom Conservancy helps promote, improve, develop, and defend Free, Libre, and Open Source Software (FLOSS) projects. * Karen M. Sandler is the executive director of Conservancy. Karen is known as a cyborg lawyer for her advocacy for free software, particularly in relation to the software on medical devices. Prior to joining Conservancy, she was executive director of the GNOME Foundation. Before that, she was general counsel of the Software Freedom Law Center. Karen co-organizes Outreachy, the award-winning outreach program to support women globally and for people of color who are underrepresented in US tech. She is also pro bono counsel to the FSF and GNOME. Karen is a recipient of the Free Software Foundation's Award for the Advancement of Free Software and the O'Reilly Open Source Award. Karen received her law degree from Columbia Law School in 2000, where she was a James Kent Scholar and co-founder of the Columbia Science and Technology Law Review. Karen received her bachelor's degree in engineering from The Cooper Union. — Cooking with a touch of science and a dash of engineering. Free Software Foundation Europe is a charity that empowers users to control technology. Software is deeply involved in all aspects of our lives; and it is important that this technology empowers rather than restricts us. Free Software gives everybody the rights to use, understand, adapt and share software. These rights help support other fundamental freedoms like freedom of speech, press and privacy. * Paul Adams is a co-founder of BCS Open Source SG and its second Chair. He served as a FSFE Fellow in 2009 and regularly gives presentations on behalf of the FSFE. — Advocacy for Women in Open Source * Cornelia Boldyreff is a Visiting Professor at the University of Greenwich. She gained her PhD in Software Engineering from the University of Durham. In 2004 she became the first Professor of Software Engineering at the University of Lincoln, where she co-founded and directed the Centre for Research in Open Source Software. Cornelia was most recently Associate Dean (Research and Enterprise) at the University of East London She is a founding committee member of the BCSWomen Specialist Group, a committee member of the BCS e-Learning Specialist Group, and from 2013-2017 chaired the BCS Open Source Specialist Group. She has been actively campaigning for more women in STEM throughout her career. Together with Miriam Joy Morris and Dr Yasmine Arafa, she founded the start-up, ebartex Ltd, and together they are developing a new digital bartering currency, ebarts. 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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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 #68 — 3D Printing and Making, Thurs 19th July.
by Andrew Back 10 Jul '18

10 Jul '18

Hello, Registration is now open for the 68th meeting, held in partnership with the BCS OSSG, and featuring talks on 3D Printing and Making. Details below. Cheers, Andrew // Event #68 — 3D Printing and Making 19 July 2018, 18:30 - 20:00 at BCS London, 1st Floor, The Davidson Building, 5 Southampton Street, London, WC2E 7HA, (51.510812, -0.121733) http://oshug.org/event/68 At this evening meeting in London, we return to the popular themes of open source 3D printing and making. We’re delighted to welcome three leading authorities in the field to speak to us. This is a joint meeting with the UK Open Source Hardware Users Group. — Fashion Technology, Stem Cell Research & Mental Health Rachel will be talking about her personal projects in Fashion Technology and her work in stem cell research and how open source and social media communications has helped her achieve her goals. She will also touch on the importance of having a varied interest in relation to mental health. * Rachel "Konichiwakitty" Wong is a wearable tech innovator and a stem cell scientist. During the day, her PhD involves using stem cells to grow optic vesicles to study and find a cure for genetic childhood blindness. When she isn't working, she creates wearable fashion technology. She combines her skills in sewing an jewellery-making together with programming and electronics. She exhibits and gives talks on her fashion tech projects around the world to encourage young girls into STEM education and careers. She was recently awarded a Electronics Weekly BrightSparks engineering award for her work in tissue engineering and fashion technology. — Delta Printers Are Really Cool A short talk on the the ups and the many downs of delta machines, when & why you should use one, what the challenges are and a few different ways to conquer those challenges. * Bracken Dawson is a developer at IBM working on the Cloud. He was one of the five founding trustees of So Make It, the Southampton makerspace. He has been building 3D printers since the 3D printing boom in 2012. — In the future, everyone will work for 15 minutes There is much said about the coming impact on work of the robot and AI revolutions, some of it quite well-informed. But the powers of automation and intelligence are dwarfed by the power of something else: self-replication. After the fundamental forces of physics, self-replication is the most significant phenomenon that there is. Using the Sun’s energy over the last four billion years, self-replication and Darwin’s Law have created a world-surface that is knee-deep in reproducing nano-machines. Indeed, your very knees are made out of them. Yet engineering hasn't worked with the power of self replication much, if at all, until now. This talk will be about the RepRap Project - an open-source project that has created humanity's first general-purpose self-replicating manufacturing machine. It will examine the likely social and economic impacts of self-replicating technology, and draw parallels with a twelve-thousand-year-old industry that uses natural self-replicating machines, the industry without which we would all starve: farming. * Adrian Bowyer holds a first degree and a PhD in engineering from Imperial College. He was an academic engineer and mathematician at the University of Bath for 35 years, from where he retired in 2012 to become a director of RepRap Ltd., a company that sells RepRap machines and components, and that undertakes research and consultancy in RepRap-related projects. RepRap Ltd is an entirely open-source company, and all its designs, software and documentation are freely available to everyone. His areas of research are geometric modelling and geometric computing in general (he is one of the creators of the Bowyer-Watson algorithm for Voronoi diagrams), the application of computers to manufacturing, and biomimetics. He is the author of about one hundred papers and books on many different aspects of engineering, computing, mathematics and biology. 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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Open Source Hardware Camp 2018 — Sat 30/06 & Sun 01/07, Lincoln.
by Andrew Back 29 Jun '18

29 Jun '18

Hi All, I'm pleased to announce that we have 10 talks and 7 workshops confirmed for Open Source Hardware Camp 2018, with the possibility of one or two more. Registration is now open! For the first time ever we will be hosting OSHCamp in Lincoln and a huge thanks to Sarah Markall for helping to make this happen. As in previous years, there will be a social event on the Saturday evening and we have a room booked at the Wig and Mitre. Food will be available. There will likely be a few of us meeting up for pre-conference drinks on the Friday evening also. Details of the programme can be found below and, as ever, we have an excellent mix of topics being covered. Cheers, Andrew // Open Source Hardware Camp 2018 On the 30th June 2018, 09:00 Saturday morning - 16:00 on the Sunday afternoon at The Blue Room, The Lawn, Union Rd, Lincoln, LN1 3BU. Registration: http://oshug.org/event/oshcamp2018 Open Source Hardware Camp 2018 will be hosted in the historic county town of Lincoln — home to, amongst others, noted engine builders Ruston & Hornsby (now Siemens, via GEC and English Electric). Lincoln is well served by rail, reachable from Leeds and London within 2-2.5 hours, and 4-5 hours from Edinburgh and Southampton. There will be a social at the Wig and Mitre on the Saturday evening. For travel and accommodation information information please see the event page on oshug.org. *** Saturday :: Talks *** — Introduction to cycle-accurate Verilog simulation Developing hardware designs in Verilog is tricky, for both FPGA platforms and ASIC hardware targets. Understanding the behaviour of a design, testing it, and debugging are made much easier by simulating in software. There are a variety of simulation approaches with different trade-offs in what properties of the design are accurately modelled and how quickly they run. This talk starts by giving a brief overview of the approaches, then focusing in more detail on cycle-accurate modelling, which is a relatively fast approach that is robustly implemented in an open-source tool called Verilator. The main focus will be on working with CPU designs, but the software and techniques are generally applicable to other areas. A brief overview of how to use Verilator to simulate a design, to develop testbenches, and to visualise simulation output using GTKWave will be given. The software and techniques discussed in this talk will be put into practice in the "Open-source RISC-V core quickstart" workshop on Sunday. * Dr Graham Markall has a background in languages and compilers for scientific computing, and is well known for his work on the Numba project. He is part of Embecosm’s GNU tool chain team, where his current projects include the implementation of security enhancements to the GCC and LLVM compilers for RISC-V and ARM, and the development a GCC-based toolchain for a customised RISC-V processor. — LoRaWAN at 100,000 feet & 10mW with High Altitude Ballooning High-altitude balloons are manned or unmanned balloons, usually filled with helium, that are released into the stratosphere and generally attaining between 18,000 to 37,000 metres (59,000 to 121,000 ft; 11 to 23 mi). In 2002, a balloon named BU60-1 attained 53.0 km (32.9 mi; 173,900 ft). The advent of cheap open source electronics & suitable GPS chips has allowed hobbyists worldwide to build fly & (usually) recover these balloons since the mid 2000’s with modest budgets compared to professional weather balloons. Indeed, the Raspberry Pi Foundation ran a few Skycademy events aimed at helping school teachers. There is a wealth of information available from the United Kingdom High Altitude Society (UKHAS), their website HabHUB.org and Dave Ackerman’s website. Ofcom limit the power of any airborne transmitter to 10mW, which whilst tiny isn’t a practical problem since the line of sight is usually superb. The community stated using RTTY initially but latterly has begun to use LoRaWAN to transmit the telemetry and some of the pictures taken during a typical 2 to 3 hour flight. The Civil Aviation Authority will grant permission for such flight via their system, NOTAMs. It’s normal to be asked to contact air traffic control before launch to make sure commercial aviation traffic isn’t hindered. * Tony Brookes is a member of the Derby Makers who is leading a project to launch such a balloon (or more if funding permits) over the summer. Derby Makers are now resident in the Radio Communications Museum of Great Britain in Derby following their tenure in the Derby Silk Mill museum which is now undergoing HLF funded refurbishment. — Machine Vision Machine Vision is one of the fastest growing disciplines in robotics and automation. In the past, discrete vision processing tasks have been both complex and brittle requiring a great deal of specialisation and practice. Now however machine learning (ML) inference is becoming practical at the edge, Machine Vision is one of the emerging 'edge applications' of ML inference technology. Machine Vision is much less brittle than earlier approaches and promises much wider and simpler applications. This talk (and hands on workshop) will explore the landscape of Machine Vision and its applications for robotics and automation. * 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, CSP and Neural Turing Machines. 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. — Making Electronic Tesla Coils - Keeping in the Magic Smoke This talk will give an overview of designing and building an electronic Tesla coil from off the shelf or easily modified components. It will cover the safety, construction methods and some of the theory of operation. It will also present details of the controls and methods needed to prevent the Tesla coil from destroying itself when power is applied. * Derek Woodroffe has been building Tesla coils as a hobby for over 20 years. He has constructed over 30 different Tesla coils, from 30mm to over 1M tall and of many different types. He runs both the Nottingham Gaussfest and Cambridge Tesla coiler meet-ups and has worked a number of times on TV to assist with Tesla coil and high voltage demonstrations to programs such as the Royal Institute Christmas Lectures and Dara O Briain's Science club. Derek also has a keen interest in all other uses and generators of high voltage and has built working examples of many. His projects are detailed on www.extremeelectronics.co.uk. Amazingly, he is still alive. — Turning your hobby project in to a business for fun and profit Designing hardware is the easy part. Turning it in to a business is where it gets interesting. This talk will cover some of the things needed to take it to market, including stock, marketing, shipping, support, cash flow. * 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. — MakerNet Alliance A brief presentation of ideas the MakerNet Alliance is working on with E-nable.org for a Design Ecology Interface, to visualize the evolution of open source designs for prosthetics (and ultimately any hardware designs) and help users find the design version with the features they need. The presentation will be followed by discussion session with the audience to get feedback on the ideas and input on requirements. * Anna Sera Lowe has always been fascinated by how things are made and how they get to the people who need them. As a manufacturing manager and later a supply chain consultant, she made a career of finding great excuses to visit manufacturing facilities around the globe; from multi-million dollar automated factories to informal waste-processing operations on dumps (sometimes next to each other) - and everything in between. She has consulted for clients as diverse as Johnson & Johnson, the state electricity monopoly of South Africa, and the Global Fund to Fight Aids, Tuberculosis, and Malaria. Over the last few years her interest has been caught by ideas around grassroots innovation and distributed manufacturing networks. She co-founded Kumasi Hive, a makerspace in Ghana, and is leading work on MakerNet, an initiative to explore business models and digital tools for local manufacturing of useful goods for development. — EMC for IoT Often the last thing on your mind when working on an exciting new project are the regulatory hurdles that come with getting a product ready for sale in the European market. These afterthoughts suddenly become pressing priorities as you approach your launch date. Electro-Magnetic Compatibility (EMC) is the study of how all electronic devices and phenomena interact and, in our increasingly electro-dense society, these requirements become all the more important. Without EMC and radio regulations we would suffer interference to the wireless infrastructure we so depend on. This talk will give a tour through the EMC and radio regulations for a typical IoT type product (equally applicable to any electronics product), why they are required and look at some of the risks and pitfalls involved in the process. If you've got a product that you want to start selling, have limited experience or are merely EMC-curious then this talk will be extremely useful. Questions often asked include: Why do I need to do EMC testing? What about if I have a radio module in my product? What sort of certificate should I have? Do I even need to do anything? You'll find some of the answers here. * James Pawson, Unit 3 Compliance. Having a broad background of electronics experience (and also a beard), James found himself drawn to the field of EMC partly because of the interesting variety of work and partly because no one else wanted to do it. Twelve years later, now with his own test laboratory and consultancy business, he has found his vocation in helping solve people's EMC problems. He's also found more grey hairs in his beard and worries that the two are related. — Non-Standard Computation — From Bits to Pulses to Spikes Taken together the rise of parallel distributed processing and the end of Moore's law has brought a renaissance in alternative views of computation. This talk is a journey through the rapidly changing area of non-standard computation: from GPU's, tensor and neuromorphic processors to stochastic, temporal and quantum computation. The main aim of the talk is to describe the tremendous opportunities that currently exist for radical change in computational paradigms, and crucially for the open source community, in the delivery of these architectures. * Jonny Edwards is the CEO/CTO of Temporal Computing - the first business in the UK to focus on temporal computation methods. The work on temporal computing started in the Non-Standard Computation Group at York University, via several Unconventional Computing Conferences, and has since attracted VC and IUK funding to support long-term commercial exploitation. — It’s the people, stupid! (But the people aren’t stupid) — Hardware as an enabler to Heating as as Service Why are clocks slowing down over western Europe like halving your heating bills at home? Remember when at the start of the year a row in one corner of what used to be Yugoslavia caused clocks across Europe to slow down and eventually lose six minutes? Nothing technical was broken, and it’s a reminder that people issues can’t just be ‘fixed’ blindly with tech. When a purely technical fix for energy efficiency is installed, for example a better boiler, savings tend to persist for many years, maybe for a decade if the tech lasts that long. Solutions that may make as big a difference but rely on the people around it continuing to do something to assist, tend to have much shorter persistence. Maybe between one and four years. We already have a smart radiator valve called “Radbot” that can knock 20–50% off your heating bills and pay for itself in a year. It requires very little input if any to do its job. But it won’t work if people open all their windows in winter and expect magic to happen. Yes, some people do. We just finished an Innovate UK project "Heating as a Service - Lite”. We are more convinced than ever that while the technical and financial elements are probably easy to find solutions to, the social part, making things that work with real people for a long time, is intriguing! * Damon Hart-Davis created the OpenTRV project following his 2012 presentation to DECC's smart heating workshop. He has freelanced in technology for over 30 years, delivering mission-critical products from design to production in the City for more than 20 of those, and has founded and been involved in several start-ups over that time with his creations seen on TV, the Web, and his pioneering Internet Service Provider helping crack open that market more than 25 years ago. A previous virtual/on-line credit-card company start-up that he co-founded as CTO, Ixaris, turns over ~GBP13m. — Bela, an embedded platform for ultra-low latency audio and sensor processing Bela started off as a research project at Centre For Digital Music (Queen Mary University of London) and is now a commercial product, mainly aimed at makers, programmers and researchers that work with audio. The platform is based on a BeagleBone Black with a custom expansion cape and a dedicated software environment. The board runs Debian Linux with Xenomai as a real-time co-kernel. The combined use of Xenomai and the BeagleBone Black's on-board PRU microcontroller allows to achieve sub-millisecond latency for audio and sensor processing, while node.js is used to provide a user-friendly web-based IDE. The project is entirely open source, hardware and software. * Giulio Moro is a PhD student in the Centre for Digital Music at Queen Mary University of London. A sound engineer by training, he is now researching in the field of performer-instrument interaction. He is one of the inventors and core developers of Bela. -Note that this talk was originally given at OSHUG #63 in London and is being repeated at OSHCamp as a refresher and to serve as an introduction for the workshop on the Sunday.- *** Sunday :: Workshops *** — Open-source RISC-V core quickstart An introductory workshop for getting starting with simulating RISC-V cores using Verilator, which is an open-source tool for generating cycle-accurate models of hardware designs written in Verilog. Although this workshop focuses on simulation, the cores can in general be instantiated on FPGAs for use in real applications (and higher performance!) The workshop will use two or three different RISC-V implementations (including Clifford Wolf's PicoRV32 and Ariane from the PuLP platform). Loading and executing programs onto these bare metal systems through a testbench and also through a debugger (GDB) will be covered, along with some examples of interacting with the cores, and inspecting their state. Gathering accurate performance measurements is also possible, because the simulations are cycle-accurate. The tutorial materials will provide enough implementation that it is possible to follow this workshop without having had prior experience of hardware design or Verilog specifically - however, some understanding of programming and the organisation of computer hardware will be required. The workshop should be of interest to people with a background in software who would like to tinker with open-source processor core development, and people with a background in hardware who would like to tinker with software toolchains. — An introductory workshop to NetBSD on embedded platforms An introductory workshop to NetBSD in the context of developing embedded platforms. NetBSD is a fully featured operating system with great agility that has been around for many many years. This workshop is intended to introduce some of the features which are available in the operating system as standard. We'll explore how to go from obtaining the source code to building the operating system, cover features which simplify working with the system, how accessible it is without resorting to installing third party software or writing any C. Topics we will cover: - Cross compilation support with build.sh - File tamper detection / execution prevention with Veriexec - High-level access to subsystems e.g exploring GPIO via Lua - Rapid development with Rumpkernel * Sevan Janiyan is founder of Venture 37, which provides system administration & consultancy services. As a fan of operating systems and computers with different CPU architectures, in his spare time he maintains builds of open source software on a variety of systems featuring PowerPC, SPARC and armv7l CPUs. He hopes to own a NeXTcube & OMRON LUNA-88K2 one day. — High Altitude Ballooning An in-depth look at the help and advice available online, likely costs and technical issues for those wanting to build, fly and recover a HAB. If our project has some spares available, I’ll try and bring them along so people can see what’s being discussed. If we’re lucky there may be a balloon launch somewhere in the world that we can follow during the session! * Run by: Tony Brookes — Machine Vision A hands-on machine vision workshop - further details TBC. * Run by: Alan Wood Soldering Workshop A soldering workshop where novices get to assemble and program the Cuttlefish, Arduino-compatible, kit. * Chelsea Back is a trainee engineer and is working towards a degree in Electronic Engineering. She enjoys building microcontroller projects and teaching people how to solder, is a student member of the IET and a STEM Ambassador. — Build a Z80 based retro computer A step-by-step build of a RC2014 Mini Z80 Retro Computer. Approx 2 hours should be enough time to assemble a computer running BASIC. Participants will need to purchase a (heavily discounted) RC2014 Mini. Some soldering experience is assumed. * Run by: Spencer Owen — Bela: an embedded platform for ultra-low latency audio and sensor processing This hands-on workshop introduces Bela, an embedded platform for ultra-low latency audio and sensor processing. Bela is useful for creating digital musical instruments and other interactive projects, which can be developed in C/C++, Pure Data (Pd) or Supercollider. The platform features an on-board browser-based IDE for getting started quickly. In this workshop we will guide participants through connecting sensors and accessing them from C++ or PureData and use them to control the generated sound. On Bela, sensor inputs are sampled at audio frequency and with high resolution (16bit), in order to allow for detailed, nuanced interactions. The hardware and software architecture allows sub-millisecond latency, allowing for expressive musical performances, as well as feedback control of physical systems. * Run by: Giulio Moro NOTE: * There are separate tickets for Saturday and Sunday. * A light lunch and refreshments will be provided each day. * Please aim to arrive between 09:00 and 09:15 on the Saturday as the event will start at 09:20 prompt. -- Andrew Back http://abopen.com

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Re: [oshug] oshug Digest, Vol 95, Issue 3
by Simon Mylius 24 Jun '18

24 Jun '18

Please unsubscribe me from this list. Thanks. On Sat, 23 Jun 2018, 13:03 , <oshug-request(a)oshug.org> wrote: > Send oshug mailing list submissions to > oshug(a)oshug.org > > To subscribe or unsubscribe via the World Wide Web, visit > http://oshug.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/oshug > or, via email, send a message with subject or body 'help' to > oshug-request(a)oshug.org > > You can reach the person managing the list at > oshug-owner(a)oshug.org > > When replying, please edit your Subject line so it is more specific > than "Re: Contents of oshug digest..." > > > Today's Topics: > > 1. Open event in Lincoln (Harold Bourne) > > > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > > Message: 1 > Date: Sat, 23 Jun 2018 07:59:34 +0000 > From: Harold Bourne <haroldbourne(a)hotmail.com> > To: "oshug(a)oshug.org" <oshug(a)oshug.org> > Subject: [oshug] Open event in Lincoln > Message-ID: > < > MMXP12301MB14873ED59C8127709D6A11A3D2740(a)MMXP12301MB1487.GBRP123.PROD.OUTLOOK.COM > > > > Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8" > > Does anyone have details of the order of the events for the Sat and Sun, > in particular the talks on the sat? > > Kind regards > > Harold >

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