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

18 Aug '19

Hi All, I'm pleased to announce that we have a total of 11 talks and 6 workshops confirmed for Open Source Hardware Camp 2019! As in previous years, there will be a social event on the Saturday evening and OSHCamp is once again being hosted to coincide with the Wuthering Bytes technology festival. http://wutheringbytes.com/ Cheers, Andrew // Open Source Hardware Camp 2019 On the 31st August 2019, 09:00 Saturday morning - 16:00 on the Sunday afternoon at Hebden Bridge Town Hall, St. George's Street, Hebden Bridge, HX7 7BY, UK. Registration: http://oshug.org/event/oshcamp2019 Open Source Hardware Camp 2019 will take place place in the Pennine town of Hebden Bridge, where it will return to be hosted for the sixth year as part of the Wuthering Bytes technology festival. Hebden Bridge is approximately 1 hour by rail from Leeds and Manchester. Budget accommodation is available at the Hebden Bridge Hostel which adjoins the venue, with private rooms available and discounts for group bookings. Details of other local accommodation can be found at www.hebdenbridge.co.uk. There will be a social event on the Saturday evening from 8PM.. *** Saturday :: Talks *** — Customising a RISC-V Core This talk walks through the RISC-V ISA and the microarchitecture of an open-source RISC-V core, to provide an understanding of how new instructions can be added to the hardware. RISC-V is an open Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) that can be implemented freely. The ISA is modular, providing a base set of integer instructions alongside standard extensions for multiplication, floating point, atomic operations, and many other categories. In addition to standard extensions, the ISA reserves space for user-defined extensions, providing the flexibility to add custom instructions that fulfil any purpose. There are many open-source implementations of RISC-V cores - in this talk we will look at a small core written in SystemVerilog that is simple enough to be understood by those relatively new digital logic design. We will walk through the different components of the core and how they fit together to build a picture of how instructions are decoded and executed, and go through an example of the changes to each component needed to support a custom instruction. * Dr Graham Markall is a software toolchain engineer at Embecosm, which provides open source toolchain services. Most of his work focuses on GNU toolchains (GCC, Binutils, GDB, etc.) and the use of cycle-accurate simulation for pre-silicon toolchain development and testing. His current projects focus on the development of customised toolchains for various RISC-V systems, ranging from small, deeply-embedded applications up to high-performance multicore systems. — Building A Network on a Chip for a Raspberry Pi Zero Cluster A Raspberry Pi cluster is a popular platform for experimentation and learning about parallel computing. The tiny Raspberry Pi Zero has no built-in ethernet capability, so a Pi Zero cluster needs an alternative way to connect the CPUs. By implementing a specialised local network on an FPGA chip, linked to a serial or SPI port on each CPU, we can avoid the need for bulky ethernet cables and switches, and build a very compact cluster with low cost and low power consumption. * As a member of Oxford University's Programming Research Group in the 1980s, Richard Miller wrote software for parallel computing systems from the transputer to the Cray T3D. More recently as a freelance software engineer, he ported the Plan 9 operating system to the Raspberry Pi. His current focus is on FPGA circuit design. — From humble beginnings to manufacturing the HILTOP open source test and measurement platform and the problems along the way! The story of how three entrepreneurs with a vision and willingness to succeed have carved out an open source test and measurement business and the details behind the hardware and software problems they had with early prototypes and product integration. * Tim Telford is a hardware engineer with diverse skill set and highly motivated self starter. Passionate about design detail and experienced in high reliability solutions for the Aerospace, Defence, Telecoms and Nuclear industries. Development of test equipment and measurement systems for Rolls-Royce Aerospace. Systems and Electronic engineering experience within the nuclear industry. Design of commercial test equipment and high integrity, high value projects. Analogue and Digital board level design, Schematics, PCB, FPGA development, DFM, DFT, Simulation, systems design and integration/testing. Requirements management, FMEA, WCA & PSA analysis techniques. * Joe Burmeister spent nearly 12 years in the console and PC game industry. He worked in a number of areas from graphics and animation engine to art and animation tools, finally file systems and databases. Joe comes from a multiple platform background, partly as consoles used to not be PCs, but also having grown up on RISC OS (Acorn’s desktop ARM OS), before moving to Windows for work then Linux for fun and finally work. For the past five years Joe has done work on GNU/Linux, often on ARM. Having started out bedroom programming, Joe is a strong believer that everyone should have the option of source code and learning how things work. — Linux on Open Source Hardware and Libre Silicon This talk will explore Open Source Hardware projects relevant to Linux, including boards like BeagleBone, Olimex OLinuXino, Giant board and more. Looking at the benefits and challenges of designing Open Source Hardware for a Linux system, along with BeagleBoard.org's experience of working with community, manufacturers, and distributors to create an Open Source Hardware platform. In closing also looking at the future, Libre Silicon like RISC-V designs, and where this might take Linux. * Drew Fustini is an Open Source Hardware designer at OSH Park, board member of the BeagleBoard Foundation, maintainer of the Adafruit BeagleBone Python library, and Open Source Hardware Association vice president. — Exploring the Gigatron TTL Computer The Gigatron TTL computer is an open source computer constructed almost entirely from TTL logic - without the need for a microprocessor. The unique design combines 36 standard 74HCTxx TTL devices with ROM and RAM chips to make a platform capable of colour VGA video and sound. The machine can host 1980's style games and can be programmed in interactive Tiny BASIC. In the last year, Ken has explored the architecture of this machine and achieves some performance gains by overclocking the cpu by over 200%. This has yielded a platform that is rated at about 2 to 3 times the performance of the classic 1980's machines, such as the C64, Spectrum etc. Working with an unfamiliar architecture has meant creating some programming tools and also simulating the machine behaviour on an ARM processor. Ken discusses the progress to date - and poses the question, "What would computers be like had the microprocessor not appeared when it did?" * Ken Boak began programming computers in 1979 at school, and has * continued to do so - somewhat infrequently over the last 40 years. The Gigatron rekindles old memories of TTL logic and working with resource limited computing. It illustrates just how much can be done with such a minimal machine. — Gearing up for Volume Manufacturing: Tales from China The journey of a design from engineering sign-off all the way to customer shipment takes many months of hard work and the smallest of hiccups could translate to severe delays. With many actors involved, how does it all work? What is involved in designing and shipping a consumer product with high volume manufacturing in mind? This talk will give the audience a behind the scenes look at what it takes to ship electronics products at scale, particularly focusing on the approach, dialogue and the processes required to run a successful manufacturing project. * Omer Kilic is an embedded systems engineer who works at the various intersections of hardware and software engineering practices, product development and manufacturing. — Saving Your Electronic Conference Badge From A Life On The Shelf As the creator of an electronic conference badge, you want to create something memorable, a badge with Wow! factor which will be remembered fondly and remain in use for years afterwards. Unfortunately so many badges end up sitting in drawers gathering dust, never to see the light of day again. Firmware,hardware, or documentation haven't been kind to the conference attendees, and though you've given them an amazing piece of hardware they just haven't been able to get a handle on it and use it in their own projects. This talk gives a few ideas about how that might be avoided, how an awesome badge can avoid being an ignominious piece of e-waste and become a valued piece of hardware used in projects for years afterwards. * Jenny List is an electronic engineer and technical writer who spent a long career in electronic publishing from CD-ROMs to dictionaries before breaking out and forming her own hardware business, and writing about hardware as a contributing editor for Hackaday.com. — What's So Good About The Z80 CPU Anyway? This talk will briefly cover the history of the Zilog Z80 CPU including early development, some predictable places where it turned up, as well as some more less expected uses. It will include a look at the architecture of the Z80 itself and then an overview of how to build a simple Z80 based computer and program it in BASIC. This will lead on to a description of the kit in your goodie bag and a plug for the workshop on the Sunday. * Spencer Owen like many kids in the 80s, loved his ZX Spectrum and other 8 bit computers. This set him up for a career in IT, and he worked as a server engineer and network engineer for many years. In 2013, in a bid to see if he really understood how computers worked at the lowest level, Spencer went back to his roots built a simple Z80 based machine on a breadboard. This was to mature in to the RC2014, which Spencer started selling in his spare time in 2015. Within a few months it was clear that the RC2014 was taking up more time than he had spare, so he quit network job and started a retro computer kit company. Spencer is now the largest supplier of Z80 computers worldwide. — Next Generation Open Source FPGAs After the success of Icestorm and the growth of the open source FPGA ecosystem, work started on the next generation of open source FPGA toolchains in 2018. This includes the next-generation place-and-route tool nextpnr, designed to support a wide range of FPGA architectures as well as producing higher quality results with less runtime. Combined with Project Trellis which provides bitstream documentation for the Lattice ECP5 FPGAs, a wide range of advanced projects such as Linux-capable RISC-V SoCs with fast memory, Ethernet and video interfaces are possible with an end-to-end open source flow. This talk will introduce these new tools and their capabilities, as well as discussing what lies ahead for open source FPGA tools, and how you can get involved in this exciting new open world! * David Shah is a engineer at Symbiotic EDA and a Electronic and Information Engineering student at Imperial College London. He entered the world of open source FPGAs by extending Project Icestorm, the iCE40 bitstream documentation project, to include the newer iCE40 UltraPlus FPGAs. As well developing Project Trellis, he has been involved in the development of a new open source FPGA place-and-route tool, nextpnr. — Heterogeneous design for embedded development Developing embedded solutions for today's challenging applications be them IoT, consumer, automation or robotics requires a heterogeneous technology approach involving hardware, FPGA, µC Firmware, and software combined at multiple levels. Concepts such as Machine Vision/Learning, Artificial Intelligence coupled with traditional embedded hardware and software stacks require hybrid approaches to design and implementation. I take a look at typical hardware being used and platform sweet spots I have been identified. I also take a look at some emerging tools and approaches for tackling these heterogeneous projects. * Alan Wood has been working with parallel distributed programming for several decades. His recent work includes smart grids, 3D printers, robotics, automation and biotec diagnostics. His current research is focused on machine learning for embedded automation using FPGA and µC. He is a long term advocate of open source communities, a moderator (aka Folknology) for xCORE, the co-founder of myStorm open hardware FPGA community, as well as a co-founder of Surrey and Hampshire Makerspace. — EMC Design for Open Source Hardware Many Open Source electronics designs start off as cool development tools and end up being integrated into commercial products due to their low barrier to entry and ease of development. Now your hardware becomes subject to various Regulatory requirements, Electro-Magnetic Compatibility (EMC) amongst them. Whilst it might not be viable for an Open Source project to undergo full compliance testing, there are things that can be done to improve the EMC performance of your system. In this talk, James gives an overview of common problems encountered during EMC testing of Open Source hardware and the fixes required to resolve them. We'll also look at some key electromagnetic concepts (don't worry, no scary maths) that will help you look at your designs in a new light. * James Pawson runs Unit 3 Compliance, a West Yorkshire EMC test lab and consultancy that offers practical advice and EMC problem solving for a wide range of electronics products. *** Sunday :: Workshops *** — Customising a RISC-V Core - workshop Starting from an Open-source RISC-V core, add a new instruction to it that you design! This workshop will walk through the process of getting started with simulating an open-source RISC-V core and making the necessary modifications to decode and execute a new instruction. A processor that supports a new instruction is not much good if you can't write any code for it, so the second part of the workshop will focus on adding support into the assembler for your new instruction, so that you can write a program using the instruction and see that it executes correctly (or does not, and helps you to work out the bugs in your implementation). The tutorial materials will provide enough of the implementation and sufficient guidance to be able to work through with a little experience of Verilog and C++. For those new to Verilog, the materials from last year's talk and workshop ("Introduction to cycle-accurate Verilog simulation" and "Open Source RISC-V core quickstart") will be available to provide a more accessible starting point. Participants should bring: - A laptop. * Run by: Graham Markall — A Crash Course in KiCAD A KiCAD basics workshop that will be a crash course covering the main aspects of schematic capture, PCB layout and generating the manufacturing outputs and 3D models etc. Participants should bring: - A laptop with KiCAD version 5 installed ready to go. * Run by: Tim Telford — Gigatron TTL Computer demo and hands-on There will be a demo of the machine and an opportunity to do some retro-programming. * Run by: Ken Boak — SMD Soldering In this workshop we will introduce common SMD soldering techniques, including stencils and solder paste usage in a hobbyist home-lab capacity. The format is a series of demonstrations followed by exercises. Participants will be provided with a kit of parts and will assemble their circuits taking turns on the equipment provided. There will be a mixture of hand soldering and hot plate/air reflow techniques covered and a variety of SMD packages including some fine pitch components will be used. Participant requirements: - Some familiarity with soldering and electronics in general would be beneficial. * Run by: Omer Kilic — Assembling Your RC2014 Z80 Based Computer This workshop will take participants through all the stages of assembling and getting started with the RC2014 kit. Some basic soldering experience is assumed and soldering irons and tools will be available for groups of up to 6 people at a time. There will be a nominal charge of £5 per person. Participants should bring: - A laptop. - An FTDI cable if they have one. — Heterogeneous embedded hardware example walk through A walk through a practical heterogeneous application and its development, based around the combination of a microcontroller and an FPGA along with mixed tooling. * Run by: Alan Wood NOTE: - There are separate tickets for Saturday and Sunday. - A light lunch and refreshments will be provided each day. - Delegates will receive an RC2014 Micro upon registration on the - Saturday! - Please aim to arrive between 09:00 and 09:15 on the Saturday as the event will start at 09:20 prompt. // -- Andrew Back http://abopen.com

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

16 Jul '19

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

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

16 Jul '19

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Hi all, We've been holding meetings on RISC-V since 2014. Next Monday, 22 July, we're holding another meeting, but this time it will be as part of the RISC-V Foundation global meetup series. Because the BCS London office is in the middle of moving, this event will be at the IET, 2 Savoy Place. We'll start half an hour earlier than usual with tea/coffee/biscuits at 5:30 and talks from 6:00. This will allow plenty of time for networking afterwards. We have three speakers: - - Alex Bradbury on the LowRISC project - - Rick O'Connor on the OpenHW Group - - Ben Marshall on the XCrypt instruction set extension Full details and registration here: https://ossg.bcs.org/blog/event/inaugural-london-risc-v-meetup/ I look forward to seeing you there. Best wishes, Jeremy - -- Tel: +44 (1590) 610184 Cell: +44 (7970) 676050 SkypeID: jeremybennett Twitter: @jeremypbennett Email: jeremy.bennett(a)embecosm.com Web: www.embecosm.com PGP key: 1024D/BEF58172FB4754E1 2009-03-20 -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- iEYEARECAAYFAl0tsD0ACgkQvvWBcvtHVOGbZwCgke8qynu/4fNntohuI+xg/cmB WtIAn3llTkpYVQx8bl1Y+TW3//hMDi9M =/vxx -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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

08 Jul '19

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

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BCS Open Source SG/OSHUG meeting, 20 June 2019: Makerspaces
by Jeremy Bennett 17 Jun '19

17 Jun '19

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 As many of your already know, our next meetings looks at makerspaces. We last looked at Makerspaces four years ago. Since this time the maker movement has evolved, often, but not always, for the better. We have two 45 minute talks with a total of five speakers. Full details of the event and how to book are online: https://ossg.bcs.org/blog/event/makerspaces/ We'll also be live streaming and recording the talk. Details will be added to the webpage and tweeted on @bcsossg shortly before the talk. Dr Jenny Molloy, Tony Naggs and Anne-Pia Marty of Biomakespace Cambridge will talk on setting up and running a maker space for interdisciplinary work covering both technology and natural science Dr Laura James, co-founder of Cambridge Makerspace and Adrian McEwen, founder of DoES Liverpool will provide a critical review of maker spaces and their role in wider society. We look forward to seeing you there. Best wishes, Jeremy Bennett Open Source Specialist Group chair - -- 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----- iEYEARECAAYFAl0HvFUACgkQvvWBcvtHVOE+FQCfQK2SSA5CXi84S57NtsX8jVot YHcAniJEtrm+EtLbpq8vCiv+av77G92E =ny+d -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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BCS OSSG/OSHUG meeting Thu 16 May
by Jeremy Bennett 14 May '19

14 May '19

Hi all, Apologies for the very late notice - it took a while to get the booking link up and running. We have our meeting on Thursday on "Women in Open Source". https://ossg.bcs.org/blog/event/women-in-open-source/ The meeting will be held at BCS London, starting at 6:30pm, with tea and coffee from 6:00pm. We also hope to have a livestream, which we'll advertise on Twitter (@bcsossg). We have three speakers: Rain Ashford ------------ An old friend of OSHUG, we are delighted to welcome back Rain Ashford, who will talk about prototyping wearables with open source. Pietra Madio ------------ Pietra is a sixth form student at Brockenhurst College. She has been working with neural networks using Keras and TensorFlow and will speak about her experience starting out in open source. Prof Cornelia Boldyreff ----------------------- Cornelia is my predecessor as Chair of OSSG and will talk about some recent research by Ann Barcombe on episodic volunteering in open source. We look forward to seeing you there. Best wishes, Jeremy -- Tel: +44 (1590) 610184 Cell: +44 (7970) 676050 SkypeID: jeremybennett Twitter: @jeremypbennett Email: jeremy.bennett(a)embecosm.com Web: www.embecosm.com PGP key: 1024D/BEF58172FB4754E1 2009-03-20

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Re: [oshug] OSHCamp 2019 (31st Aug & 1st Sept), call for Talks & Workshops.
by Andrew Back 28 Mar '19

28 Mar '19

Hi All, Just to note that the call deadline has been extended to Monday 29th April at 17:00. However, if you are thinking of giving a talk or hosting a workshop, it would be appreciated if you could submit details or get in touch sooner, where possible. Also appears as though my previous message to oshug@ didn't make it into the archives, so I'm not sure if it was received? Although the post to oshug-announce@ did. Will look into this. Cheers, Andrew On 06/02/2019 12:49, Andrew Back wrote: > Hello, > > This year we will be returning to Hebden Bridge Town Hall for OSHCamp , > over the weekend of Saturday 31st August & Sunday 1st September. Details > of the call for talks and workshops can be found below. > > // > > -+- Open Source Hardware Camp 2019 -+- > > This year Open Source Hardware Camp will take place over the weekend > of Saturday 31st August & Sunday 1st September, at Hebden Bridge Town > Hall, St George's St, Hebden Bridge, West Yorkshire, HX7 7BY. > > Proposals for talks and workshops for OSHCamp 2019 are invited! > > There is no theme and topics may include, for example: > > * Open source hardware projects > * Open development practices and principles > * Novel/interesting/fun projects built using open source hardware > * Tools (hardware and software) > * Skills and techniques, e.g. PCB fab, DIY SMT assembly > * Relevant technologies, e.g. SPI/I2C bus programming > * ...something else relevant to the community > > If you would like to give a talk on the Saturday and/or run a workshop > on the Sunday, please submit details via the form at: > > > https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1Bd2FHzkjehF-7zD386xbJ1ujrVcWWPoe_As1WOYnrQ… > > Any questions can either be directed to the list, sent to andrew at > abopen.com, or discussed in person with myself, Sevan Janiyan or Andy > Bennett at an OSHUG/OSSG meeting. > > **** Note that the deadline for submitting titles and abstracts is > Monday 6th April at 17:00. If you would like to discuss ideas etc. > please get in touch sooner, rather than later. **** > > A social is planned for the Saturday evening and details of > accommodation nearby to the venue will be provided in due course. > > // > -- Andrew Back http://abopen.com

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OSHUG #72 — Open Source FPGA Hardware and Tooling Past, Present and Future, Thurs 21st March.
by Andrew Back 12 Mar '19

12 Mar '19

Hi All, Registration is now open for the 72nd meeting, which is being held in partnership with the BCS OSSG. Details below. Also a reminder that the OSHCamp 2019 call closes in a little under a month, on Monday 8th April! Still plenty of opportunity to submit talk and workshop proposals and there is an online form at: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1Bd2FHzkjehF-7zD386xbJ1ujrVcWWPoe_As1WOYnrQ… Any questions don't hesitate to get in touch. Cheers, Andrew // Event #72 — Open Source FPGA Hardware and Tooling Past, Present and Future. On 21 March 2019, 18:30 - 20:30 at BCS London, 1st Floor, The Davidson Building, 5 Southampton Street, London, WC2E 7HA. Registration: http://oshug.org/event/72 Once upon a time we could only use proprietary tools and development boards supplied by FPGA vendors. This all changed in 2016 with the advent of the IceStorm open source toolchain, combined with open hardware like the myStorm board. With the 2nd generation of tools and hardware, sophisticated FPGA features are opening exciting avenues for 'open source all the way down'. We hope to provide an update and crystal ball on where some of this could be leading to. — Tools: past to present David Shah looks at where we have come from with the IceStorm toochain, and looks at how this has developed recently and expanded Lattice iCE40 support to include new lower power, lower cost, reduced pin count FPGAs to include their Ultra & Ultra Plus range. — Hardware: past to present Alan Wood talks about the journey through the early history of open source FPGA open hardware from IcoBoard through myStorm too recent UltraPlus offerings recently made available. — Tools: present to future IceStorm was aimed at a narrow family of iCE40 FPGAS, the new SymbiFlow family of tools expands the open source tooling exponentially. David Shah takes a look at NextPNR, which lies at the heart of the toolset and deals with specific FPGA family functionality, in particular he concentrates on the Lattice ECP5 family support he has developed with Project Trellis as part of NextPNR and the recent 1.0 version supporting this new family and high end FPGA features. — Hardware: present to future What comes next for open source FPGA hardware, after the success of tinyFPGA and myStorm we are beginning to see ECP5 open source hardware emerging, first with Radiona's ULX3S and being followed up by offerings from both tinyFPGA and myStorm dev board stables. With new hardware comes new features building on NextPNRs tooling, like DSP, SerDES I/O gearing and DDR memory etc. Alan plots the course for these new powerful opesource development boards. — Demos Time permitting we can show some of what's possible with the new tools in a brave new 'open source all the way down' world. * David Shah is a engineer at Symbiotic EDA and a Electronic and Information Engineering student at Imperial College London. He entered the world of open source FPGAs by extending Project Icestorm, the iCE40 bitstream documentation project, to include the newer iCE40 UltraPlus FPGAs. As well developing Project Trellis, he has been involved in the development of a new open source FPGA place-and-route tool, nextpnr. * Alan Wood has been working with parallel distributed programming for several decades. His recent work includes smart grids, 3D printers, robotics, automation, biotec diagnostics and designing FPGA dev boards. His current research is focused on machine learning for embedded automation using FPGAs. 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. 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 Infrastructure Conference
by Danny Abukalam 13 Feb '19

13 Feb '19

Hello, I've recently discovered OSHUG after I was pointed at it by a colleague. I am aware of the Hardware Camps at Wuthering Bytes, but didn't realise this was their home! I hope it's OK to post such a message to this list... I thought I'd send a message to let you guys know about a non-profit community-driven event that we're running in Central London on April 1 & 2 2019. The focus is all things open source infrastructure, and is an evolution of OpenStack Days, opening out to a lot more topics and tracks including open hardware. The Open Compute Project is a backing foundation of the event, and we're going to have a track on Open Hardware in the datacentre. You can find more information on the conference and workshops here - https://openinfradays.co.uk/. We're accepting talk proposals up until Feb 28th, so if you'd like to submit something it would be more than welcome! Thanks, Danny

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OSHUG #71 — Machines and systems of past, present, future, Thurs 17th January.
by Andrew Back 16 Jan '19

16 Jan '19

Hi All, Registration is now open for the 71st meeting, held in partnership with the BCS OSSG. Details below. Cheers, Andrew // Event #71 — Machines and systems of past, present, future On the 17 January 2019, 18:30 - 20:30 at BCS London, 1st Floor, The Davidson Building, 5 Southampton Street, London, WC2E 7HA. http://oshug.org/event/71 To start off the year, we have a series of talks around the theme of Acorn computers, RISC OS, RISC-V toolchain. This is a joint meeting with the British Computer Society Open Source Specialist Group. — Brief history of Unix-like operating systems on Acorn hardware Stephen Borrill first encountered Unix while working for a PhD in Psychoacoustics and as a long-term Acorn user, his Acorn RiscPC was his hardware of choice to run it on. While finishing his PhD, Stephen started a part-time job at Acorn Computers working in technical support. This led to full-time employment at Acorn and Xemplar (an Acorn and Apple joint venture focussed on UK education) during which he developed products based on BSD Unix on Acorn hardware which were sold nationally. In 1999 Stephen founded Precedence Technologies who took over support and development of the products he worked on at Acorn and Xemplar. He continues to with the products 20 years later. — 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 Brown 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. — 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, 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. — 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. 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. 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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