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Hardware Freedom Day 2015 in Manchester
by Michael Dorrington 13 Jan '15

13 Jan '15

Manchester Free Software and ManLUG are holding a Hardware Freedom Day event as part of ManLUG's meeting this Saturday. It'll be from about 14:00 to about 15:00 but there is time available if people want do hardware freedom lightning talks and/or demos. http://wiki.hfday.org/2015/UK/Manchester Cheers, Mike. -- FSF member #9429 http://www.fsf.org/register_form?referrer=9429 http://www.fsf.org/about "The Free Software Foundation (FSF) is a nonprofit with a worldwide mission to promote computer user freedom and to defend the rights of all free software users."

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OSHUG #37 — Open Source in Business, Thursday 22nd January.
by Andrew Back 05 Jan '15

05 Jan '15

Hello, Registration is now open for the first meeting of 2015, which will be hosted at Sheffield Hallam University and in conjunction with the BCS OSSG. In February we will return to hosting meetings at the BCS offices in Covent Garden. However, should anyone have any suggestions for hosting a special meeting elsewhere in the country, please get in touch! Cheers, Andrew // Event #37 — Open Source in Business 22nd January 2015, 17:30 - 20:30 at Owen Lecture Theatre, 1028 Owen Building, Sheffield Hallam University, Howard Street, Sheffield, S1 1WB. Registration: http://oshug.org/event/37 An evening of talks exploring different commercial aspects of open source — hardware and software — including crowdfunding an open hardware microenterprise, navigating licensing issues, trade associations, and building a business on free software. Hosted in conjunction with the BCS Open Source Specialist Group. — Open Source Consortium - an introduction OSC is a trade association which represents companies and individuals delivering solutions and advice based on Open Standards and Free & Open Source Software. As a trade association, OSC gives its members greater influence than they could achieve alone by providing a collective voice, and by supporting initiatives such as the implementation of open standards in public sector IT, the inclusion of open standards in school curricula and levelling the gender balance in the industry. At the core of its vision, OSC campaigns for the use of Open Standards in all aspects of public and commercial life, promoting the unique advantages of Free & Open Source Software and the independent expertise offered by members. Irenie White has been Chair of the Open Source Consortium since 2013 after working with the organisation for 3 years. This year she was appointed as MD of credativ, a free software consulting and services company, after running operations there for 6 years. As a STEMNET Ambassador and through her work with Advancing Women in IT, Irenie is committed to supporting bottom-up growth in the wider technology industry. Outside of work her family comes first, music a close second. — Notes from the first three months of an Open Source Microenterprise * How I learned to stop worrying and love the Kickstarter Starting an Open Source Hardware business is lot of work, even if you've spent 11 years running a different one. There are all sorts of things you've forgotten about and there are a whole host of new challenges as you try to do things the right way from the start. None of it is easy, but all of it beats having a 9-5. Benjamin Gray is a proponent of Open Hardware, founder of MeArm, an open source robot arm manufacturer and phenoptix a recently retired maker business. Ben graduated from the University of Exeter with a chemistry degree and a fledgling phenoptix before moving to Nottingham to complete a PhD in theoretical physical chemistry. With 11 years of Maker business experience under his belt he's set out on a new adventure manufacturing the MeArm, a pocket sized robot arm. — But I didn't mean *that* Accidents and incidents exploring relationships between corporations and the licenses they use to share, from Creative Commons to GPL. Paul Beech used his graphic and web design skills to co-found Pimoroni, a maker company that does Raspberry Pi and Arduino stuff. Code: open source. Hardware: less so. — Giving it away: Free Software as a business strategy Bytemark Hosting has been involved in building, fixing and publishing Free Software since its foundation in 2002. Back then, free Software was seen as an unquestionable part of a winning business strategy for big firms, but within years firms that bet too much on it were brought down to earth. Matthew Bloch, Bytemark's MD, narrates his own company's successes, profitability and changes in strategy around this important social movement. Matthew Bloch is MD and co-founder of Bytemark Hosting, one of the UK's oldest and best-respected hosting and cloud providers, with its own data centre in York and staff of 23. Previous to Bytemark Matthew worked as a programmer on several Java virtual machines, and the PC emulator for Acorn computers. Compered by: Gareth Halfacree is a freelance technology journalist and the co-author of the Raspberry Pi User Guide, alongside project co-founder Eben Upton. He also writes the maker-centric Hobby Tech column for Custom PC Magazine, as well as numerous features in magazines including PC Pro, Linux User & Developer, Micro Mart, Computeractive and others. Formerly a system administrator working in the education sector, Gareth's passion for open source projects has followed him from one career to another and he can often be seen reviewing, documenting or even contributing to projects including GNU/Linux, LibreOffice, Fritzing and Arduino. He is also the creator of the Sleepduino and Burnduino open hardware projects and numerous small software tools, all released under permissive licences. Note: Please aim to arrive by 17:45 as the first talk will start at 18:00 prompt. //

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Meeting in Sheffield on Thursday 22nd January.
by Andrew Back 18 Dec '14

18 Dec '14

Hello, This is just a heads up that there will be a joint OSHUG and BCS OSSG meeting on the evening of January 22nd at Sheffield Hallam University. The theme will be open source in business and further details will follow in due course. There's a good chance that there will also be a UK Maker Belt Association meeting held in Sheffield around lunchtime on the same day. For the February meeting we will then return to the BCS offices in London. Cheers, Andrew

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More info released on lowRISC (presented at OSHUG Oct meeting)
by Alex Bradbury 18 Dec '14

18 Dec '14

A number of you may remember I presented our plans for the open source lowRISC SoC at OSHUG 36 in October http://oshug.org/event/36 You may be interested that we've released a document that describes in more detail two of the ideas I presented at the meeting - tagged memory and 'minion' cores (for software-defined I/O peripherals and other uses). Comments, feedback, queries etc are all very welcome. http://www.lowrisc.org/docs/memo-2014-001-tagged-memory-and-minion-cores/ Alex

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Video from October meeting.
by Andrew Back 08 Dec '14

08 Dec '14

Hello, The video from the October meeting is now up on YouTube: 1. Silicon Chip Design for Teenagers https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a2EGX_z2j9g 2. Cocotb, an Open Source Verification Framework https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M2rAOF4EvVI 3. lowRISC, Alex Bradbury https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rcfgoRILvBg Cheers, Andrew

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Superoptimization and supercomputing talks, Wed 26th November at The RSA.
by Andrew Back 11 Nov '14

11 Nov '14

Hello, There are no hardware talks this month, but the BCS OSSG is hosting two talks on open source software with a "super" theme — supercomputing and superoptimization. Details and a link to registration are below. Also note that this month the venue is the Royal Society of Arts on The Strand, and not the BCS! Cheers, Andrew //// Location: The Prince Philip room Royal Society of Arts 8 John Adam Street London WC2N 6EZ Date: Wednesday 26 November Time: 6:00pm for 6:30pm start Price: Free for BCS members and non-members Booking link: https://events.bcs.org/book/1320/ (Please remember to book your place.) N.B. Note the change of venue, due to a double booking at the BCS. The RSA is just the other side of the strand from the BCS. map: RSA, 8+John+Adam+St,+London+WC2N, This month we have two talks on a "super" theme. Talk 1: Superoptimization: How fast can your code go. Speaker: James Pallister, University of Bristol Modern compiler optimization can take almost any code and produce a reasonably efficient binary at the end. However compiler "optimization" doesn't make your code "optimal", just better. In contrast, superoptimization can produce perfect code - the fastest, the smallest or the most energy efficient code. The technique, first introduced in the late 80s found in some cases it could do 25% better than the best assembly programmer, and 40% better than the best compiler at the time. Free software has always played a central role in superoptimization research, with the GNU Superoptimizer being one of the very first tools constructed. However there is a downside. Superoptimization today is incredibly demanding of compute time, so currently it is limited to short instruction sequences. At present it is most valuable in optimizing code hotspots and key library routines, and can also be a valuable aid to the compiler writer for peephole optimization. Recent research has developed new techniques that can make superoptimization more applicable to general code. In this talk I will introduce superoptimization and give some examples of the weird and wonderfully short sequences of code it produces. I will introduce the GNU superoptimizer and show how it is used, including some of the recent improvements I have contributed. The final part of my talk will look at the latest research including machine learning and constraint solving, and show how in future superoptimizers may be able to optimize much larger programs. Talk 2: Open-source Software in UK Scientific HPC Speakers: Neil Morgan and Phil Ridley, Hartree Centre, STFC Daresbury There are hundreds of scientific applications, libraries and tools that are used within the UK's academic HPC community and a large number of these are open-source. To demonstrate this usage and the benefits of open-source to this community, a short review of some of these will be given. Applications will be included which are used for performing atomistic and molecular simulations, computational fluid dynamics, and statistics for bioinformatics. All of these are able to utilise the capabilities of high end computing architectures with thousands of cores to facilitate new science. Furthermore, since efficient object code is of greatest importance in HPC, the use of open-source in compilers, tools and libraries will also be described. N.B. Note the change of venue to the RSA. Booking link: https://events.bcs.org/book/1320/ (Please remember to book your place.)

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Real vs fake FTDI FT232RL chip
by Sevan / Venture37 23 Oct '14

23 Oct '14

http://zeptobars.ru/en/read/FTDI-FT232RL-real-vs-fake-supereal The rest of the blog is worth a look, lots of die shots e.g. Soviet Z80 http://zeptobars.ru/en/read/t34vm1-z80-angstrem-mme Sevan

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NON-profit
by Mark.itto 16 Oct '14

16 Oct '14

Hi, I Studied technical High school in Granada Nicaragua, the digital divide is still today with all the internet very big because of the purchasing power hence access to technology even cheap stuff we could consider cheap and accessible like Arduino and RPi. I want to donate some Arduino to my old school I looking for help on things like boards, accessories (sensors, motors...), and internet access(monthly cost). Does anyone have any experience running things like this? I'd like some advise on how to approach and find potential helpers. Im thinking 50 boards 1000£ in accessories Some way of sorting the internet maybe ask ISP for help? I'm also considering crowd funding and things like that. I live in London, so at the moment I'm looking for interested and trust-able people in the country itself. Looking for some expertise. xD Kind regards. MarcoP.

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PCBmodE version 3.0 released!
by Saar Drimer 06 Oct '14

06 Oct '14

Hello OSHUG friends. I've just released a major version of PCBmodE (open source PCB design software): https://boldport.squarespace.com/blog/2014/10/3/pcbmode-version-30-released This time it has documentation! (Well, a start) http://pcbmode.readthedocs.org/en/latest/index.html and a apex domain http://pcbmode.com Any feedback would be much appreciated! I'd also like to take this opportunity to update you on Boldport. We're now based on London and looking for business, so please get in touch if you've got any ideas ;) I'll be at the next OSHUG event, so I'm looking forward to seeing many of you in person again. Have a great productive week! cheers, saar.

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OSHUG #36 — Chips Pt. 2, Thursday 23rd October.
by Andrew Back 05 Oct '14

05 Oct '14

Hello, Registration is now open for the meeting October meeting. Details below. Regards, Andrew // Event #36 — Chips Pt.2 (Chip Design for Teenagers, Cocotb, lowRISC) 23rd October 2014, 18:00 - 20:00 at BCS London, 1st Floor, The Davidson Building, 5 Southampton Street, London, WC2E 7HA. Registration: http://oshug.org/event/36 Back in April 2011 we had our first meeting on the theme of open source chip design, and then around one year later we took a closer look at the OpenRISC Reference Platform System-on-Chip. The thirty-sixth meeting will feature talks on chip design for teenagers, an open source verification framework, and a fully open source system-on-chip that will be manufactured in volume. — Silicon Chip Design for Teenagers These days we expect school students to learn to write code, and teachers are turning to tools like Scratch (for primary education) and Python (for secondary education). But why stick to software languages. Why not teach coding in Verilog and get children to design silicon chips. Earlier this year Dan Gorringe attended Chip Hack II in Cambridge. Inspired by this he spent two weeks work experience at Embecosm in August 2014 modifying the Chip Hack materials for use by Year 9-11 students. His resulting application note, "Silicon Chip Design for Teenagers", is to be published very shortly by Embecosm. In this talk, Dan will share his experience of learning silicon chip design, using Verilog for his first serious attempt at coding and encountering Mentor Graphics EDA tools for the first time. Dan Gorringe has just started year 11 and faces the horrors of GCSE exams in 8 months time, so silicon chip design is just light relief. He has aspirations to a career in computing. — Cocotb, an Open Source Verification Framework Verifying hardware designs has always been a significant challenge but very few open-source tools have emerged to support this effort. The recent advances in verification to facilitate complex designs often depend on specialist knowledge and expensive software tools. In this talk we will look at Cocotb, an open-source verification framework, and explore whether Python is a viable language for verification. Chris Higgs has over a decade of experience working with FPGAs in various industries. His software background has shaped his approach to RTL design and verification and he now spends his time trying to bridge the divide between hardware and software development. — lowRISC — a Fully Open Source RISC-V System-on-Chip The lowRISC project has been formed to produce a System-on-Chip which will be open source right down to the HDL, implementing the open RISC-V instruction set architecture. Volume manufacture of silicon manufacture is planned, along with creating and distributing low-cost development boards. This talk will describe the aims of the lowRISC project, summarise its current status, describe some of the features that are being implemented, and give details on how you can get involved. Alex Bradbury is a researcher at the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory where he works on compilation techniques for a novel many-core architecture. He writes LLVM Weekly, is co-author of Learning Python with Raspberry Pi, and has been a contributor to the Raspberry Pi project since the first alpha hardware was available. Note: Please aim to arrive by 18:15 as the first talk will start at 18:30 prompt. //

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