oshug

oshug@oshug.org

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438 discussions

Open Source Hardware Camp sponsorship!
by Andrew Back 03 Aug '16

03 Aug '16

Hi All, I'm looking for sponsors for this year's open source hardware camp. In return for their support sponsors get their logo on: * oshug.org * printed materials at OSHCamp itself * post-event HD video which goes up on YouTube Should they wish, they can also have flyers or pens etc. put in the packs that delegates receive upon registration. It's a pretty good deal, if I say so myself, and helps to make the event possible, of course. Any offers or suggestions gratefully received and please drop me a line! Cheers, Andrew

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Making laser light synths talk at OSHCamp.
by Andrew Back 28 Jul '16

28 Jul '16

Hi All, Just occurred to me that I'd failed to forward details of a 12th talk which has been added to the programme for OSHCamp, which will be from Seb Lee-Delisle and on making laser light synths, no less! "Making the Laser Light Synths The Laser Light Synths are LED emblazoned musical instruments that anyone can play. Along with high power lasers, they form part of a large outdoor installation that switch the traditional roles of audience and performer. As an artist, Seb Lee-Delisle likes to make interesting things from code that encourage interaction and playfulness from the public. Notable projects include Lunar Trails, featuring a 3m wide drawing machine, and PixelPyros, the Arts Council funded digital fireworks display that toured nationwide." Looking forward to this one :o) Cheers, Andrew

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Open Source Inverter + Energy Monitor
by Marcin Jakubowski 19 Jul '16

19 Jul '16

Friends, Marcin from Open Source Ecology <http://opensourceecology.org/> here. Just heard about OSHCamp 2016 via OSHWA mailing list - and that led me to Open Inverter and Open Energy Monitor. Does anyone know the status of the open source inverter project? Does it work? Is Trystan Lea on this list, regarding Open Energy Monitor? I am asking with respect a project we launched recently, Open Building Institute <http://openbuildinginstitute.org/>. We will build a 700 square foot Seed Home <http://openbuildinginstitute.org/how-it-works/#utilities> this November (Missouri, USA), filled with ecological features. We would like to add open source energy monitoring and open source inverters to its off-grid systems - so that these open source technologies will be a part of the standard Seed Home features. Thus, we would like to add Ken Boak and Trystan Lea to our team of advisors <http://openbuildinginstitute.org/about-who-we-are/> - to bring a complete and crazy open source home to the world. Are you on this list? Please email me if you can help us on the Seed Home. I would like to make it to OSHCamp, as I'll be in Germany on Sep. 5-6. Thanks, Marcin -- *Full Disclosure Agreement:* OSE works openly. All conversations in this email are intended to be transparent and subject to sharing, with due respect. OSE does not sign NDAs in order to promote collaboration. All of our work is libre or open source. If you are discussing potential development collaboration, your work must also be open source pursuant to the Open Source Hardware Association definition <http://www.oshwa.org/definition/>. See Global Village Construction Set TED Talk <http://www.ted.com/talks/marcin_jakubowski>. Sign up for our Design Sprints <http://opensourceecology.org/wiki/OSE_Design_Sprint>. Subscribe as a True Fan <http://opensourceecology.org/community/#truefans>. See Tsu <https://www.tsu.co/OpenSourceEcology> or Facebook <https://www.facebook.com/OpenSourceEcology> for updates. Subscribe to monthly update OSEmail <http://opensourceecology.org/wiki/OSEmail>. Donate to our 501(c)3 <http://opensourceecology.org/wiki/Other_donation_options>. Marcin Jakubowski, Ph.D. Executive Director Open Source Ecology http://opensourceecology.org

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Wuthering Bytes, Fri 2nd-Sun 11th September.
by Andrew Back 05 Jul '16

05 Jul '16

Hello, Just wanted to share details of this year's Wuthering Bytes technology festival, which will once again be taking place in Hebden Bridge (W. Yorks) and this year runs over the course of 10 days. With proceedings getting off to a start on Friday 2nd September with the “Festival Day”, featuring 10 talks from a fantastic speaker line-up and covering a diverse range of topics: * Hacking Robot Dinosaurs, Dr Lucy Rogers (engineer, author and judge on the new series of Robot Wars) * Project Nimbus: The Projection of Moving Images onto Clouds from an Aircraft, Dave Lynch (artist, director and inventor) * Prototyping for Public Good, Rachel Coldicutt (Director of Products & Service at Doteveryone) * The Magic Lantern at the Turn of the 19th Century, Phillip Roberts (researcher working with the National Media Museum and University of York) * Northern Powerhouse: A Text Adventure Game, Hwa Young Jung (multidisciplinary artist working in the arts, cultural and sciences) * What does mass spectrometry have to do with me? Giles Edwards (analytical chemist, engineer and musician) * Digital futures: art & design in a hyper-connected world, Irini Papadimitriou (Digital Programmes Manager at the V&A) * The secret life of your mobile, Geoff White (Channel 4 News) * Glowsticks, Lasers and Making Art with Code, Seb Lee-Delisle (digital artist and speaker who uses computers to engage with people and inspire them) * Catching up with Domesday, Andy Finney (radio and TV producer who helped to found the BBC Domesday Project) Tickets are priced at £10 and this includes lunch. Festival Day will be followed by Open Source Hardware Camp taking place over the weekend of 3rd & 4th September, featuring 12 talks on the Saturday and 4 workshops on the Sunday. This will then be followed on Monday 5th by the Open for Business Conference, hosted by the BCS Open Source Specialist Group and Open Source Consortium. On Tuesday 6th ODI Leeds will then be taking a look at “open smart cities”, with a full day of exploration, show & tell and collaborative work. Thursday 8th Wuthering Bytes will be playing host to the first ever LLVM Cauldron, a one-day conference with a single talks track and a space for breakout sessions, birds of a feather, and potentially tutorials. The meeting is free to attend and open to anyone whether a hobbyist, from academia, or from industry, and regardless of previous experience with LLVM. The conference keynote will be delivered by Andy Wingo, maintainer of the Guile Scheme implementation and committer to V8 and SpiderMonkey. Finally, we will have the annual GCC, GDB and friends developer conference, GNU Tools Cauldron, joining us from Friday 9th until Sunday 11th September. For further details and to register please visit: http://wutheringbytes.com Cheers, Andrew

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Video from OSHUG #40 — hackerspace/fablab/makerspace panel discussion.
by Andrew Back 27 Jun '16

27 Jun '16

Hello, The video from OSHUG #40 is now finally up on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7So6zIE_Lu8 Cheers, Andrew

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ORCONF 2016
by Julius Baxter 11 Jun '16

11 Jun '16

Hi all, I'd like to announce ORCONF 2016, the annual open source digital design conference. This year we're very pleased to be hosted by Davide Rossi and his group at the University of Bologna in Bologna, Italy over October 7th, 8th and 9th. As in previous years, we're looking forward to bringing together those involved and interested in any facet of open source embedded systems engineering. We'd like to have a strong showing from the various open source communities and their projects that are out there, academia and their interesting research ideas that either directly or indirectly contribute to the open source hardware ecosystem, and commercial developers who either contribute or perhaps just have success stories to share about their use of, or collaboration with, open source hardware projects. As usual, the http://orconf.org site is the place to go for all of the information as it becomes available. Registration and presentation submission forms are now live. Please do register if you plan to attend: http://goo.gl/forms/u6V54ay8P4i3wtXG2 If you'd like to present at ORCONF this year, then please fill out this form as well, and we'll be in touch: http://goo.gl/forms/Nah5LH7cJWK1uQ6L2 The conference is being organised by the Free and Open Source Silicon Foundation (FOSSi) with help, of course, by our hosts at the University of Bologna. ORCONF will be free to attend, and we'd like to provide food and drinks during the day for attendees, amongst other things, and so are seeking sponsors for the event. Please get in touch if you'd like to sponsor us this year. We look forward to another great conference this year, and hope to see as many of you there as possible. The ORCONF team

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Open Source Hardware Camp 2016 — Sat 3rd & Sun 4th September, Hebden Bridge.
by Andrew Back 10 Jun '16

10 Jun '16

Hello, I'm pleased to announce that we have 11 talks and 4 workshops confirmed for Open Source Hardware Camp 2016, covering a great selection of topics and with some excellent speakers. For the full programme and to register please visit: http://oshug.org/event/oshcamp2016 Details can also be found below and there is a possibility of the odd additional talk and workshop being added to the programme. 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. You're encouraged to check the website for details of other participating events, as some are likely to be of interest. Although please note that more details are yet to be added for the Festival Day. http://wutheringbytes.com/ Cheers, Andrew // Open Source Hardware Camp 2016 On the 3rd September 2016, 09:00 Saturday morning - 16:00 on the Sunday afternoon at The Birchcliffe Centre, Birchcliffe Road, Hebden Bridge, West Yorkshire, HX7 8DG, UK. Registration: http://oshug.org/event/oshcamp2016 Open Source Hardware Camp 2016 will take place place in the Pennine town of Hebden Bridge. For the third year running it is being hosted 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 *** — LabRTC — progress at the Open University on instant real-time control of lab hardware that's half a world away Now that web infrastructure is finally delivering on the promises made in the 90s, instant real-time interactions with live hardware on the other side of the world are a reality. For example, we have recently been testing a rotating pendulum that can be controlled from a mobile phone, tablet or PC, from anywhere in the world, with no noticeable lag in the video feed. This approach is at the core of the new openSTEM lab being created at the Open University, as part of a £2.7M HEFCE project. The Open University are world leaders in connecting knowledge with distance students, and are now tackling the challenge of linking distance students in their homes with state of the art hardware on our campus, yet achieving the same response times as if they were in the same room with it. This talk will present core aspects of the technology behind our new openSTEMlab for electronics, as well as give you a teaser of the open-source version of our software that we are developing for eventual release to our students (and you) for use with open-source hardware in your own projects. Attendees will also be given the opportunity to remotely access activities in the openSTEMlab itself over coming months, as it enters alpha and beta phases ahead of the first electronics courses going live in October 2017. * Dr Tim Drysdale is a Senior Lecturer in electronics at The Open University, leading the development of the openSTEMlab and the creation of two new electronics courses. His research area involves antenna design and numerical software development. — Openly Educating the Next Generation of Engineers In this talk we take a look at technical education past and present and discusses how it can benefit from open hardware. * Ken Boak got his first soldering iron on his 6th birthday, and was introduced to electronics by his father, by constructing crystal sets together. Ken studied Electronic Engineering at the University of North Wales, Bangor, and then went on to work for BBC Research Department on the then, fledgling HDTV systems. Since leaving the BBC in 1994, Ken has held 10 permanent positions, plus several contract jobs across a wide range of hardware disciplines. Ken still enjoys tinkering with the latest hardware and has interests in FPGAs, soft core processors and educational hardware. — Indie Manufacturing Is there a scale of production between craft and mass-manufacture? Does it work for consumer products? Can local suppliers - particularly across the UK Maker Belt in the North - help us bridge the gap and scale up? Adrian McEwen will share what he's learnt exploring the issues and building a new IoT product as part of the RCA Future Makespaces & Redistributed Manufacturing project. * Adrian McEwen is a technologist and entrepreneur based in Liverpool. He has been connecting devices to the Internet since 1995 — first cash registers, then mobile phones, and now anything from bubble machines to wave energy prototypes. He founded MCQN Ltd., an Internet of Things product studio and is co-founder of DoES Liverpool, a hybrid co-working/makerspace that is the home for tech startups in Liverpool. He co-wrote the book Designing the Internet of Things and runs the monthly #IoTLiverpool meetups. Adrian concentrates on how the Internet of Things intersects with people’s lives and how heterogeneous networks of devices should work together, and lectures and speaks on these issues internationally. — Keeping your project on track This talk will look at a project from inception through to the "end product". It will look at the various stages: research, design, hardware development and software development, debugging and fault finding. It will consider the possible choices you have at each stage. It will look at the tools that are available to help your development, such as IDEs, debuggers, and so on. The example that will be used is a controller for model trains using "Digital Cab Control" ("DCC"). * Melanie Rhianna Lewis started a life long love of electronics as a child when her Dad helped her make a "crystal" radio with an ear piece, a coil of wire, a diode and a radiator! Melanie currently works for an embedded device consultancy near Bradford where she works developing Linux based devices using ARM and MIPS. In her spare time she can be found on roller skates hitting people. — Open Source and Feature Film Production Having researched and examined how open source has reached out into many areas of current working environments, Daniel Mulligan was struck by how little open source seems to be used within the film production community. It appearing that little has been developed for an entire production workflow and backbone, from the sensor and how it is used and manipulated, the colour science and workflow. Examples do exist, such as ACES (Academy Color Encoding System), providing a free, open source colour and look management architecture. This has been taken forward through the educational department of the Oscars and by established Industry practitioners, but being such a new subject has as yet to completely encompass the entire workflow. Thus seeking to further the understanding and appreciation of production processes we can create a diverse array of programs and hardware for filmmakers (and institutions) to provide unique opportunities for engagement with the principles of open source relating to film production, and by approaching the subject now and introducing hardware research with an ethical ethos and approach, the belief is that we can further educate those who would like to see open source become a stronger and more realistic proposition as it continues to thrive and develop. Learning, teaching and research are all encompassed in the entire pipeline for a production. Open content, open practice, open data, open access are all elements that can be attributed to open source for film and education. On this basis contact was established with Apertusº for their open source 4K camera hardware. This has allowed us to tackle the subject fully by developing not only sensor technology but also the processing involved. We have currently had delivered the very first shipped Open Source 4K hardware camera and testing fully its capabilities. The aim is to create free and open technology and hardware, and make all the generated knowledge freely available to everyone, encouraging participation along the way. By developing this approach we can create a production pathway that includes subjects such as open data, open collaboration and open hardware and software. Open source film production is an emerging environment effecting production tremendously, and is a perfect example of collaboration and education developing in multiple areas for the future, and can all be developed with an extremely strong emphasis on hardware development with software support. * Daniel Mulligan started in cameras (assisting and focus pulling), before then graduating up the ranks to Camara Operating for F1, BBC Dramas then 2nd Unit Cinematography for Feature Theatrical Productions. Daniel also started and privately ran a rental house supplying digital cameras, plus an onset/location company providing location post and digital camera workflows. This culminated just recently with a 2-3 year stint at Technicolor as their locations digital dailies supervisor, looking after projects such as Jupiter Ascending, Mortdecai and The Man from UNCLE. During this time Daniel has seen a few changes and re-iterations of the current digital workflows and it has struck him over time how much we do rely on proprietary systems for most delivery. And perhaps quite rightly so, as the delivery requirements for VFX to DI, to onset LUTs and more need that service. — The Things Network, a crowd sourced data network for the Internet of Things In November 2015 a group of geeks in Reading were inspired to create an Internet for the IoT, a community project that has grown legs and is up and walking. The great thing about this project is how is has built connections with many abstract groups in the area. Mike will talk about the project to date, the plans for the future and how you can get involved, and Mark will outline the progress and gotchas when rolling out The Things Network on a grand scale. * Mike (The Bee) Beardmore is a maker based in Berkshire. He tinkers with software and hardware, micros and 3D printing. He is an enthusiastic supporter of open source and is working with projects connecting things, including horticulture, energy systems and art installations. * Mark Hill is the co-founder of OpenTRV, a company on a mission to cut carbon emissions. With smart thermostatic radiator valves (TRVs), OpenTRV aims to knock 10% off the entire UK's carbon emissions. Whether hardware, software or making a noise about guerilla IoT networks, Mark concentrates on making things happen, and in the right way. — Kitnic.it - A registry for open hardware electronics projects Kitnic.it is a site to share electronics projects in a way that makes sense: give me the Gerbers and let me buy all the parts with a few clicks. In this talk the creator of the open source site outlines it's functionality, the standards it's trying to promote, some of the technical challenges encountered in making it and what's on the roadmap for the future. * Kaspar Emanuel is a freelance electronic design engineer and software developer working on projects ranging from musical instruments, to robots, to Braille displays. His primary professional interest is in making technology more accessible, less scary and more fun. — Computer Controlled Heating System — cool use for a hot Pi This talk will take a look at the shortcomings with currently available heating controllers (even the posh ones) and Andrew Gladwell came up with a system that solves all of the identified problems. * Andrew Gladwell is a computer technician operating his own repair workshop in Ashton Under Lyne. He has been interested in Linux and open source for many years and no longer has any Windows or Mac equipment in regular use.. Andrew has become convinced in recent months that he has undiagnosed and hopefully mild Aspergers Syndrome but is not sure quite what, if anything, to do about that. When not down the rabbit hole of the terminal shell Andrew enjoys walking, cycling, motorbikes, DIY, rock climbing. — Scaling IoT with Open Data In this talk, Yodit will make the case that Open Data is the best practical way to make IoT in work within the 'Smart Cities' context. She will talk about examples of community sensing projects from all over the world from air quality to water quality. The digitisation of public spaces means that sensors are deployed in a number of contexts from environmental to traffic, practically this data is useful to lots of people and reuse is vital. * Yodit Stanton is a data nerd and machine learning developer who runs OpenSensors.io. OpenSensors provides data infrastructure for the Internet of Things enabling anyone to publish real time open data from sensor networks. OpenSensors came out of my her own frustration at not being able to find real time information about the world and we are fixing that... As the physical world becomes digitised making sure people and not just businesses understand the data within their own context is especially important for IoT to succeed. — Building a Smarter Island The island of Martha’s Vineyard, 7 miles off the coast of Massachusetts, is a popular holiday destination for tourists, US Presidents and celebrities, but it also has an engaged year round community. HereLab is building a LoRaWAN network to cover island towns, land and waterways. This talk will cover how Thing Innovations and HereLab have collaborated to develop a long range sensor platform designed for air, land, water and town applications. It will provide some use-cases which will demonstrate how the sensor platform is being used to monitor greenhouses, aqua farms, buildings, trash and traffic. It will also outline how data is being used to help islanders measure the local environment and, as a result, to better manage and engage their local natural, social and built-space resources. * Andrew Lindsay is a freelance developer with an active interest in embedded hardware and the "Internet of Things”, developing sensor devices through his IoT consultancy Thing Innovations. Andrew has been tinkering with electronics and computers for over 35 years. His first computer was a Sinclair ZX80. He has worked as a software developer for over 25 years working in industries as diverse as Cable TV, Water instrumentation & control systems, Network hardware, ISP, Telecoms, Finance and Retail systems. Outside of work, Andrew enjoys real ale, good food, gadgets, heavy metal, motorcycles and of course his family. Andrews projects include designing and building river level sensors for the Oxford Flood network system, building a community LoRaWAN network and developing a range of sensors to use the network. — Going Beyond the von Neumann Architecture with FPGAs The late 20th century was 0wned by John von Neumann's architecture and Alan Wood predicts that the 21st century will become Alan Turing's algorithmic playground. The current pinnacle of computation at the beginning of the 21st century is represented by peak Von Neumann Architectures (VNA), as more and more has been squeezed out of this arrangement, it has been clocked and optimised to it's very limits, and now it's shrinking cores are being, multiplied and integrated to their logical extreme. However, the next era of computation requires an exponential jump in performance per watt in order to tackle 21st century needs; regression, prediction, machine learning, complex real-time transforms, convolution kernels, neural networks and general artificial intelligence. In order to get anywhere near the efficiencies we see in nature with the human brain, for example, we need neuron computation operating at picojoule energies, which is not suited to VNA. Therefore we need a new primitive vocabulary of Turing Complete Engines which we can use to matrix, network and orchestrate real-time, real-world embedded helpers, bots, devices and robots. In this talk Alan will explore first history leading to this millennial transition and indicate what to expect as one of this centuries most important developments (A.I.) unfolds, I will provide a peek into the emerging Turing playgrounds of hybrids, ASICs and focus on DIY/Opensource FPGAs approaches to influencing and playing a part in this exciting transition. * 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 applications using Motes on FPGA and emerging Asics. He is a long term advocate and moderator (aka Folknology) for xCORE and other opensource communities, as well as a founder of Surrey and Hampshire Makerspace. — Compered by: Dr Jeremy Bennett is founder and Chief Executive of Embecosm, a consultancy specializing in the development of open source compiler tool chains. *** Sunday :: Workshops *** — Getting started with FPGAs and Verilog using project IceStorm In this workshop we will build some basic Verilog blocks and modules targeting low power, low cost FPGAs from the Lattice Ice40 series. The workshop will operate using a complete open source Verilog toolchain based around Clifford Wolf's Yosys and Arachne-PNR, which can be run on Linux and OS X. We will cover basic sequential and combinational logic blocks, before moving on to ALU's and simple Turing Machines or even a Forth processor. This workshop will give participants a real taste of FPGA development in an open source environment. It will hopefully whet their appetite with emerging hardware applications and perhaps allow them to delve deeper into FPGAs. * Run by: Alan Wood & Ken Boak — Develop your own long range sensor using Arduino and the Thing Innovations LoRaWAN Sensor development shield. Develop your own long range sensor using Arduino and the Thing Innovations LoRaWAN Sensor development shield, to connect to The Things Network and access your sensor data. In this workshop participants will learn how to use the LoRaWAN development shield based on the Microchip RN2483 LoRaWAN module. This comes with a number of basic sensors, while the shield also includes additional Arduino headers so you can add your own sensor shields and devices. The aim of the workshop is for participants to create their own Arduino-based sensor devices using The Things Network. * Run by: Andrew Lindsay — Axiom 4K Open Source Camera demonstration This workshop will demonstrate an entire RAW 4K workflow from the sensor and develop an image in 4K. Capturing and processing from a 4K sensor and showing what can be done through open source access to the hardware. Demonstrating the Axiom hardware, its capabilities and explaining why open source is applicable to this type of application. * Run by: Daniel Mulligan — Assembling the OSHCamp kit Get help with assembling this year's 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 recently enrolled as a STEM Ambassador. 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.

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OSHUG #50 — Drones Pt. 2 (Captain Buzz, Whirly Blades of Death, Bounder), Thursday 16th June.
by Andrew Back 21 May '16

21 May '16

Hello, Registration is now open for the June meeting, details of which can be found below. Note that there are no meetings in July or August, and we return after summer with OSHCamp over the weekend of 3rd & 4th September. Cheers, Andrew // Event #50 — Drones Pt. 2 (Captain Buzz, Whirly Blades of Death, Bounder) On the 16 June 2016, 18:00 - 20:00 at BCS London, 1st Floor, The Davidson Building, 5 Southampton Street, London, WC2E 7HA. Registration: http://oshug.org/event/50 For the fiftieth OSHUG meeting we return to the theme of twentieth meeting back in June 2012, "drones", with a talk on Captain Buzz, a smartphone app that flies drones, another on what goes into making a quadrotor stay in the air, and a third talk on managing drone airspace. — Captain Buzz: Your smartphone’s real ‘airplane mode' In ten years time drones will be delivering Amazon packages to your door minutes after ordering them. Current drones are built using purpose-designed hardware and software with limited computational power. Moreover, adding features typically requires purchasing and connecting additional hardware modules. In this talk I present Captain Buzz: a smartphone app that flies a drone, eliminating the need for such dedicated hardware. I show that by mounting your smartphone on a drone, Captain Buzz can use the inbuilt sensors to calculate the drone's position and orientation. Captain Buzz then uses the headphone socket, connected to the drone's servos, to manoeuvre the drone in the air. By building drones using smartphones, we can leverage existing smartphone functionality: Internet connectivity, maps, cameras for novel uses of drones. With Captain Buzz your next smartphone might be delivered to you by your previous one! * Oliver Chick recently finished a PhD in Computer Science at the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory. His research concerns techniques for measuring the performance of software stacks executing in a virtual machine. Highlights of this work include a best paper at ApSys 2015 and publication in SIGOPS Operating Systems Review (OSR). Alongside this research, Oliver worked with colleagues on a “20%” project to build Captain Buzz, the subject of tonight’s talk. Since completing his PhD, Oliver has started working as a Teaching Associate at Queens’ College Cambridge, and Focal Point Positioning, a startup that is revolutionising positioning in difficult environments. — Whirly blades of death Since the availability of cheap MEMS sensor technology and powerful brushless motors, radio controlled flight has changed enormously. Quadrotors have been viable for several years now and have enjoyed an enormous rush of popularity due largely to their mechanical simplicity. That mechanical simplicity comes at the cost of considerable complexity in the control system. We will take a look at what goes into making a lump of metal with four whirly blades of death stay in the air. * Gavan Fantom is a professional embedded software engineer with a penchant for wielding screwdrivers and soldering irons. He has a keen interest in things that fly, things that make sound and things that make and receive light (ranging from the visible spectrum down to a few MHz). Some people are terrified of his oversized metal quadrotor, noting the fact that it looks menacing as well as expressing fear that he wrote the control software that keeps it flying. For some reason they seem to think it might decide that their face needs the spiral cucumber treatment, never realising that he feeds it pizza before letting it out in public to prevent this from happening. — Managing drone airspace Drones flying into controlled airspace have gotten attention in the media including the recent incident of drone in Heathrow. Ensuring that drones fly within an allowed zone and looking at the possiblity of managing the airspace with a platform to do this, is an interesting challenge. A quick survery of the area with a focus more the software stack of one of them, which was prototype build behind Bounder. High level overview of the choices and tradeoffs and hardware choices associated are discussed. * Anish Mohammed has been an electronics enthusiast and software hacker since his early teens. He endured medical school, before working in security and cryptography. He has spent half his career researching cryptographic algorithms and protocols at three different research groups, including Microsoft Research. He is also a self-confessed UAV addict who owns more than a dozen AHRS/Autopilots. His interests are mostly focused on navigation algorithms for unmanned vehicles. His research interests include AI and Ethics of AI, and he is one of the folks behind Bounder and Dexethics .These days he works for Lloyds, where he is involved with, among other things, internal innovation and Blockchain initiatives. Note: Please aim to arrive by 18:15 as the event will start at 18:30 prompt.

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OSHCamp tickets now available.
by Andrew Back 20 May '16

20 May '16

A few people have already booked their accommodation and were now keen to book tickets for Open Source Hardware Camp in September, so I've set early bird tickets up on Eventbrite: http://oshcamp2016.eventbrite.co.uk/ Details of the sessions will of course be added to the website in due course. A number of which have now been confirmed, with a few more exciting proposals where the details are being worked out. Still a few more slots left, so please do drop me a line if you'd like to give a talk and/or host a workshop! Cheers, Andrew

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OSHUG #49 — Open Source Chips Pt. 3 (AAP, FOSSi Foundation, Getting into FPGAs), Thursday 19th May.
by Andrew Back 20 May '16

20 May '16

Hello, Registration is now open for the May meeting, details of which can be found below. A reminder also that in addition to the monthly meeting, we're hosting a one day conference in partnership with NMI and BCS in just over one week, on 10th May: http://oshug.org/event/nmiopen Cheers, Andrew // Event #49 — Open Source Chips Pt. 3 On the 19 May 2016, 18:00 - 20:00 at BCS London, 1st Floor, The Davidson Building, 5 Southampton Street, London, WC2E 7HA. Registration: http://oshug.org/event/49 At the forty-ninth meeting we will return to the topic of open source chip design, with talks on AAP — an open hardware processor architecture — and its simulation, the Free and Open Source Silicon Foundation (FOSSi), and getting into FPGAs. — AAP: An Altruistic Processor An Altruistic Processor (AAP) is an open hardware 16-bit architecture for deeply embedded applications running on small FPGA devices. It is somewhat configurable, with a minimum of 4 16-bit general registers, at least one word-addressed code space of up to 16Mword and at least one byte addressed data space of up to 64kbyte. The primary role of AAP is as a test bench for compiler backends. It encapsulates features found in a wide range of popular embedded processors which traditionally cause difficulties for compiler writers. In this talk we will discuss the motivation behind this project, our experience implementing and testing LLVM for this architecture, the architectural features unique to our processor and how these interact with LLVM. In AAP integers are less than 32-bits, pointers may be word addressed, and too large to fit in a registers (of which there may be very few), and have multiple function and code spaces that may be switched between at run time, each with their own addressing requirements. Edward Jones Edward Jones supports Embecosm's work on runtime libraries, LLVM toolchains and testing. Currently his work involves developing LLVM compiler support for embedded systems, as well as work on the TSERO project to develop tools which intelligently optimise compiled code. Other research topics include superoptimization, the art of finding the provably optimal instruction sequence for a given task. — AAPSim: Simulating Hardware in LLVM An Altruistic Processor (AAP) is an open hardware 16-bit architecture for deeply embedded applications running on small FPGA devices. It is somewhat configurable, with a minimum of 4 16-bit general registers, at least one word-addressed code space of up to 16Mword and at least one byte addressed data space of up to 64kbyte. A key part of any implementation of an embedded toolchain is a simulator of the architecture, both such that user written code can be run and so the compiler's implementation itself can be verified. As part of AAP, we have implemented a simulator based on LLVM MC that both runs standalone and as part of a gdb/lldbserver. This talk explores the design and experiences of using LLVM as the host for a simulator. Simon Cook has a background in low-power processors, with a particular focus on the energy constraints of code running in embedded environments. Since 2012, he has been working on LLVM for deeply embedded architectures, primarily focusing on optimization, but also on providing compiler support for unique hardware features. Most recently, he has been working on LLVM for AAP, a reference Harvard architecture with the aim of improving upstream support for more eccentric architectural features. — Open Source Silicon Design Ecosystem The talk will begin by surveying the current state of the open source chip design space and present some of the most exciting and interesting projects and communities which are contributing to the field. Next, the Free and Open Source Silicon Foundation (FOSSi) will be introduced as a group to help further the cause through LibreCores, amongst other initiatives. Julius Baxter has been involved in the OpenRISC project since 2008. Now working as a digital design engineer in Cambridge, he helps run the annual OpenRISC conference, ORCONF, which has since become a general open source digital design conference, and is one of the founders of FOSSi. — Getting into FPGAs; Why, what, how & where might this lead Why? Probably the biggest question I get with programmable logic and gate arrays is: why would I need to use an FPGA, when I can do so much with commonly available micro-controllers? In other words when doesn't a low cost Von Neumann chip do the job efficiently. What? A lightning tour of low cost FPGAs and their capabilities, classic applications and use cases that don't involve spending $millions on fabricating silicon chips. How? The field of FPGAs and chip design can appear big and scary at first. It can present a challenging environment to any newcomer and requires acquisition of multiple new disciplines and commercial tools. As a result many are put of by the steep learning curve and investment of proprietary tools and hardware. Icestorm is Clifford Wolf's an opensource project which combines tools like Yosys to provide a simple and open tool set supporting multiple vendors of FPGAs. Although it is at an early stage and only a small range of products are supported its a great tool to get started with on small projects and enables you to get close to the mechanicals. In addition to it's Verilog support, it also exposes some nice low level features that will result in more innovative and diverse open tools flourishing around it further down the road. Where? A glimpse at the part FPGAs might play in the emerging embedded intelligence market: Matrixed Open Turing Engines (Motes) enabling low powered smart controllers for robotics, devices and IoT. This illustrates at least one fascinating trajectory for FPGAS & ASICs in the opensource hardware community. 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 applications using Motes on FPGA and emerging Asics. He is a long term advocate and moderator (aka Folknology) for xCORE and other opensource communities, as well as a founder of Surrey and Hampshire Makerspace. Note: Please aim to arrive by 18:15 as the event will start at 18:30 prompt.

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