- oshug - lists.oshug.org

New kindle book on open source hardware
by girish m 28 Mar '15

28 Mar '15

Hi All, Please check out the new kindle book on open source hardware and provide your feedback. http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00T6JXDCS Thanks,Girish

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Events
by Mark.itto 23 Mar '15

23 Mar '15

Hi, i went to the event 39 Id like to know where can i find the presentations? are they put online? id be very interested on seeing this again. kind regards. M

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OSHUG #40 — Hackerspace/makerspace/fablab panel discussion, Thursday 16th April.
by Andrew Back 21 Mar '15

21 Mar '15

Hello, Registration is now open for the April meeting, details of which can be found below. Cheers, Andrew // Event #40 — Hackerspace/makerspace/fablab panel discussion 16 April 2015, 17:30 - 20:00 at BCS London, 1st Floor, The Davidson Building, 5 Southampton Street, London,WC2E 7HA. Registration: http://oshug.org/event/40 For the fourtieth meeting we will be hosting a panel discussion which will explore the organisation, operation, challenges and benefits of creative spaces known as hackerspaces, makerspaces and fablabs. There will be representatives from Makespace Cambridge, South London Makerspace, So Make It (Southampton), Fab Lab London, London Hackspace and the UK's innovation agency, Innovate UK. — Makespace Cambridge Dr Laura James is co-founder and Director of Makespace Cambridge, a non-profit community inventing shed and hackspace. She is currently consulting on a variety of technology and innovation activities. Laura has worked in technology and leadership roles in a wide variety of organisations. After R&D work at AT&T Labs in both Menlo Park and Cambridge, Laura developed high speed optical networks with Intel Research for her PhD. She was the first employee and VP Engineering at AlertMe.com, developing an easy to use innovative connected home platform and security system. At True Knowledge, Laura was part of the senior management team leading the company through a pivot, to apply their unique semantic technology to next generation search, creating Evi, a revolutionary conversational search app. Laura has also worked as Chief Operating Officer at CARET, a dynamic innovation department of the University of Cambridge, developing open source systems to support teaching and research. Most recently, Laura was CEO of Open Knowledge, a civil society organisation dedicated to opening up knowledge to empower people. Laura is an advisor to Open Knowledge, Product Health, Good Night Lamp, and the ContentMine. Laura holds Masters and PhD degrees in Engineering from the University of Cambridge, received the Royal Academy of Engineering Leadership Award and a NESTA Crucible Fellowship, and is a Chartered Engineer. — South London Makerspace Tom Lynch is a Designer/Maker based in London, after completing his MA at the Royal College of Art he went on to start Elephant & Castle Mini Maker Faire at the London College of Communication where he now works as a Physical Computing Specialist Technician. Living in South London, Tom is a founder and trustee of South London Makerspace, a social, community workshop in Herne Hill. — So Make It Jem Gillam is an iOS programmer turned stay at home mum, and a trustee at So Make It. She has always had an interest in programming and hardware hacking, her first projects involving circuit bending and wearable electronics. Her current project is working with a large team to build a life size remote control Dalek, which meant finally learning to use the power tools at the makerspace! — Fab Lab London Tony Fish is co-founder of Fab Lab London, investor, entrepreneur and an author with a background in electronics, computing and design. — London Hackspace Jonty Wareing is co-founder and trustee of London Hackspace, and co-founder of Electromagnetic Field. He is currently hacking on IRC Cloud after three years at Lumi, and five years at Last.fm. — Innovate UK Nikos Pronios is Lead Technologist for Information & Communication Technologies (ICT) at Innovate UK which he joined in early 2014. He has a diverse background in the ICT sector with experience in US and Europe, both in the industry and academia. After obtaining his PhD from the University of Southern California, he worked for Bell Communication Research in New Jersey, before moving to INTRACOM in Greece. Nikos has worked in various industry positions covering before moving to INTRACOM in Greece. Nikos has worked in various industry positions covering civilian and defence sectors, and he is currently using his diverse experience of more than 20 years to help organisations innovate and compete. — Chaired by: Dr Jeremy Bennett is Founder and CEO of Embecosm, an open source compiler and silicon chip modeling consultancy, that are a strong supporter of the makerspace movement as sponsor of So Make It, Chip Hack and regular workshops that serve to introduce people to embedded computing. Note: Please aim to arrive by 18:15 as the event will start at 18:30 prompt. //

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Open Source Hardware projects in Google Summer of Code
by Alex Bradbury 17 Mar '15

17 Mar '15

Hi all, Student applications are now open for Google Summer of Code <http://google-opensource.blogspot.co.uk/2015/03/gsoc-2015-student-applicati…>. This gives the opportunity for selected students to get paid a $5500 stipend to work on open source projects over the summer. The lowRISC project to produce a fully open-source System-on-Chip was fortunate enough to be accepted as a mentoring organisation, working in collaboration with a number of our friends in the wider open source software and hardware community. We have project ideas covering pretty much every part of the hardware/software stack <http://www.lowrisc.org/docs/gsoc-2015-ideas/> with a wide range of implementation languages (there's more opportunity to write JavaScript than you might expect for a hardware-focused project!). Projects include extending Cocotb (showcased at a a previous OSHUG), implementing place and route for the reverse engineered iCE40 FPGA to produce a fully open source compilation flow, using tagged memory in LLVM, and much more. You may remember I gave a talk about lowRISC at a previous OSHUG meeting. I'd really appreciate any help in spreading the word to students who might be interested. More information about GSoC is available at <https://www.google-melange.com/gsoc/homepage/google/gsoc2015>. Other participating mentoring organisations that may be of interest to oshuggers are: * BeagleBoard http://www.google-melange.com/gsoc/org2/google/gsoc2015/beagleboard * MinnowBoard http://www.google-melange.com/gsoc/org2/google/gsoc2015/minnowboard * Openwall (has a few FPGA-based projects) http://www.google-melange.com/gsoc/org2/google/gsoc2015/openwall Best, Alex

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BBC Micro Bit
by Andy Bennett 12 Mar '15

12 Mar '15

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-31834927 Regards, @ndy -- andyjpb(a)ashurst.eu.org http://www.ashurst.eu.org/ 0290 DA75 E982 7D99 A51F E46A 387A 7695 7EBA 75FF

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3rd wireless related talk for next week.
by Andrew Back 11 Mar '15

11 Mar '15

Hello, Unfortunately, Will and Miles from Wireless Things are now unable to present at next week's meeting, which means we have a spare slot. Anyone have a wireless related talk they would like to give? Needn't be long — even just a 5 min talk would be fine. Cheers, Andrew

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Energy Efficient Computing Workshop, 11 March 2015, Manchester
by Jeremy Bennett 04 Mar '15

04 Mar '15

Hi all, The InnovateUK Energy Efficient Computing Group is running a two day conference and workshop at the Manchester Museum of Science & Industry. Both the conference (10 March) and workshop (11 March) are free to attend. https://connect.innovateuk.org/web/eec/events OSHUG members may be particularly interested in the workshop Embecosm is running using the open source Crazyflie 2.0 quadcopter. We'll be trying to improve the efficiency of flying this design, using the MAGEEC energy measurement board (an open hardware design). 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/FB4754E1 2009-03-20

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South London Makerspace.
by Andrew Back 03 Mar '15

03 Mar '15

Hello, Anyone on the list involved with, or have a contact at, South London Makerspace? I seem to recall speaking with someone about this, but forget who! Cheers, Andrew

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Re: [oshug] New kindle book on open source hardware available for pre-order
by girish m 24 Feb '15

24 Feb '15

Check out the below link for a new kindle book on open source hardware Amazon.com: Product Development Process for Open Source Hardware: A reference guide for OSH developers eBook: Girish Maiya: Kindle Store | | | | | | | | | Amazon.com: Product Development Process for Open Source Hardware: A reference guide for OSH ...Product Development Process for Open Source Hardware: A reference guide for OSH developers - Kindle edition by Girish Maiya. Download it once and read it on your Kindle device, PC, phones or tablets. Use features like bookmarks, note taking and highlighting while reading Produ... | | | | View on www.amazon.com | Preview by Yahoo | | | | |

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OSHUG #39 — Radio Pt. 3, Thursday 19th March.
by Andrew Back 22 Feb '15

22 Feb '15

Hello, Registration is now open for the March meeting, details of which can be found below. Cheers, Andrew // Event #39 — Radio Pt. 3 (OpenBeacon, HPSDR, Building Things) 19 March 2015, 17:30 - 20:00 at BCS London, 1st Floor, The Davidson Building, 5 Southampton Street, London, WC2E 7HA. Registration: http://oshug.org/event/39 The thirty-ninth meeting will feature an update on the HPSDR project, which we first heard about back in October 2010 at OSHUG #5. There will also be talks on Bluetooth Low Energy programming and OpenBeacon, and Building Things. — Low Power to the People - take back Bluetooth Low Energy control! ** Programming BLE the hard way: bare metal programming of nRF51 BLE tokens for fun and profit. The talk will start with a brief overview of the Bluetooth Low Energy advertisement protocol and how to implement bare-metal BLE on top of the ARM-based nRF51 chip — without using the manufacturer provided Bluetooth stack. The general development flow will be explored along with some useful examples, closing with some mischief that can be caused using this knowledge :-) The latest version of the OpenBeacon tag design is supposed to be the ultimate hacking, fuzzing and pen testing tool for Bluetooth Low Energy. The hardware schematics and the PCB layout were released under the CC attribution license. We strongly believe that the future of the Internet of Things can be privacy enabled and can work distributed, without selling your soul to large cloud services. Milosch Meriac has over 20 years experience in the information security business and hardware design. He is currently living in Cambridge where he works for ARM on securing the Internet of Things. In his private time he loves making and grokking things. He is currently playing with RGB strips to create light paintings. Milosch is the co-founder of active and passive RFID open source projects like Sputnik/OpenBeacon, OpenPCD and OpenPICC, and is committed to RFID related security research. He broke the iCLASS RFID security system and was involved in breaking Mifare Classic security. As a member of the Blinkenlights Stereoscope Core Team Milosch designed the 2.4GHz OpenBeacon-based dimmmer/Ethernet dardware that was used in the Toronto City Hall Installation. As one of the three maintainers of the former Xbox-Linux Project he helped to break Xbox security and to port the first Linux system to the Xbox. His focus is on hardware development, embedded systems, RF designs, active and passive RFID hardware development, custom-tailoring of embedded Linux hardware platforms, real time systems, IT-security and reverse engineering. — OpenHPSDR Update A review of hardware and software progress of the High Performance Software Define Radio, an open source hardware and software project being developed by an international group of ham radio enthusiasts. John Melton has held a ham radio license since 1984 and has developed several open source Linux applications, including ground station software for working digital satellites and software defined radios. He is a retired software engineer after 48 years developing software for several computer manufacturers including Burroughs Corporation, ICL, Sun Microsystems and Oracle Corporation. — Building Things Creative communities are having an ever increasing influence on the way in which global companies like Microsoft, Samsung and Google go about developing new products. Access to open source technology creates new ways for inventors, makers and coders to turn ideas into things others want to use or buy. Embarking on the journey of turning an idea into a product comes with numerous hurdles, including: access to expensive machinery, technology, or skills which just aren’t readily available to many. Miles and Will from Wireless Things (formerly Ciseco) will describe how ‘Building Things’, their latest open source hardware, will help people build their own cool wireless devices. Current CEO of Wireless Things, Miles Hodkinson previously made a living selling and supporting scalable IT infrastructure. Whilst Head of Software Security for Egg PLC he always harboured a passion for tinkering. Miles has transformed his passion from a hobby in his garden shed, to one of the ‘go-to’ companies for people building IoT solutions, all manufactured in his home town of Nottingham. Head of Channel Strategy for Wireless Things, Will Stone has spent the last decade between running an outsourced sales company and in engineering recruitment. Will teamed up with Miles at the beginning of 2014 and is responsible for commercial aspects of the business, including the management of their rapidly expanding chain of partners and distributors. Now with 40 recognized distributors across 21 countries, Wireless Things has a growing presence and reputation in the Internet of Things. Note: Please aim to arrive by 18:15 as the first talk will start at 18:30 prompt. //

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OSHUG #38 — Energy, Thursday 19th February.
by Andrew Back 27 Jan '15

27 Jan '15

Hello, Registration is now open for the February meeting. Details below. Cheers, Andrew // Event #38 — Energy (Exploring "open" in energy, Electricity from Woodchips, OpenTRV) 19 February 2015, 17:30 - 20:00 at BCS London, 1st Floor, The Davidson Building, 5 Southampton Street, London, WC2E 7HA. Registration: http://oshug.org/event/38 The thirty-eighth meeting will take a look open source technologies in support of the generation and efficient use of energy. — Exploring "Open" in Energy Arcola Energy builds energy systems using fuel cells powered by hydrogen. Fuel cells are one of those great ideas that has yet to gain much traction in real markets. They put men on the moon, but since then commercial progress has been slow. One way of opening up uses of fuel cells is to involve a much wider developer community. To explore this Arcola has developed a fuel cell developer kit and started on the road to working with open source groups. This talk will look at our journey, the success to far and the challenges ahead. Richard Kemp-Harper is a former research scientist who spent several years managing web development, including open source systems at Oxfam. He then moved into technology and innovation, working at Innovate UK running innovation programmes in intelligent mobility, rail and energy. He specialises in not being a specialist. — Electricity from Woodchips — An Edwardian Idea — Tamed with 21st Century Microelectronics First studied in the 1820s, gasification is the process of converting a hydrocarbon solid fuel, such as coal or wood, into a low calorific value gas suitable for running an internal combustion engine. Used for vehicle transportation during World War 2 — gasification has enjoyed a renaissance at the start of the 21st Century. Low cost, open source microelectronics are used to tame this technology, from a labour intensive manual process, to a fully automated turnkey system. In January 2012, Ken Boak quit his UK electronic design job and travelled to Berkeley, California, to work on a new biomass energy project — an open source, microcontroller based control system for a wood chip fired CHP system. The company — an East Bay area start-up — "All Power Labs", had a compact, self-contained biomass gasification system, close to commercialisation. In the 6 month contract, Ken productionised the open source, control and automation system, using standard, globally available components and rationalised the wiring loom so that low cost, modular assembly was practical. Ken started his career at BBC Research Department in 1986 working on digital signal processing systems for HDTV - and subsequently over 30 years, a mix of 10 other technology companies, both UK and US based, in the fields of instrumentation, automation, telemetry and telecomms. Ken tries to live a low impact lifestyle in a modest Edwardian house in Surrey, with a little help from modern electronics. — Scratching the itch: saving the planet When BigCo and .gov are not sorting your problem then open everything makes it easier for you to scratch your own itch, especially with the very positive innovation support around right now, possibly the best for 30 years. And when you can save the planet, be your own boss, and meet and work with lots of fabulous interesting people, what’s holding you back? Damon Hart-Davis is lead on the OpenTRV open source project created following his 2012 presentation to DECC's smart heating workshop. He has freelanced in technology for over 30 years, delivering mission-critical products from design to BAU in the City for more than 20 of those, and has founded and been involved in several start-ups over that time with his creations seen on TV, the Web, and his pioneering Internet Service Provider helping crack open that market more than 20 years ago. A previous virtual/on-line credit-card company start-up that he co-founded as CTO, Ixaris, turns over ~£10m. Mark Hill spent 15 years in the City after a solid grounding in IT at the chip level at the microprocessor manufacturer Inmos, designing and delivering highly complex systems. Project management, direction and governance are all part of his toolkit. He now speaks regularly about innovation, collaboration and IoT. Recently he founded a mobile phone software start-up and is now OpenTRV Ltd's co-founder. Note: Please aim to arrive by 18:15 as the first talk will start at 18:30 prompt. //

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Live stream of this evening's meeting.
by Andrew Back 22 Jan '15

22 Jan '15

Hello, For those who are unable to make it along to Sheffield this evening, there are plans to stream it live via YouTube. The URL won't be known until nearer the time, but for details you can follow either of the hashtags: #oshug #bcsossg And also @UKOSHUG, of course. Hoping to take questions via Twitter also. Cheers, Andrew

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Feb meeting and energy scavenging.
by Andrew Back 18 Jan '15

18 Jan '15

Hello, The theme for the 19th Feb meeting will be "energy" and I wondered if anyone had any experience with energy scavenging projects and fancied giving a talk? Or for that matter, any other interesting energy related applications :o) Cheers, Andrew

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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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Call for Makers - Makers Area 2014 at Sandown Park
by marc barto 29 Sep '14

29 Sep '14

Hi all I thought this might interest some of you in the OSHUG community as we had lots of electronics exhibits last year, from Arduino/Rpis based projects to custom boards. Happy to discuss details if interested, all info below. cheers Marc @marc_in_london <https://twitter.com/marc_in_london> ------ *Call for Makers - Makers Area 2014 at Sandown Park* The Makers Area is back at the Model Engineer Exhibition. Our first edition was a a great success with over 2,000 people attending the 3 day long event to discover amazing DIY creations by the 30 makers taking part. If you want to see what happened last year, have a peek at our photo gallery! <https://www.flickr.com/groups/2401543@N25/> *About me* I run various Makers and open hardware groups in London (London Arduino, Not Just Arduino) and also co-organise the Mini Maker Faire in London. *Makers Area at MEX* This event involves hundreds of stands with the whole community of modellers, tinkerers, hobbyists (there is a locomotive coming from Australia...) and some of the best engineers in the UK. We will have a large dedicated area for 3D Scanning/Printing/Craft/Coding/Electronics (and more). *When / where?* This will take place on *12-**14 December in Esher, Surrey (25min outside London) *here is the link: http://www.modelengineershow.co.uk/makersshow If you want to see what happened last year, have a peek at our photo gallery! <https://www.flickr.com/groups/2401543@N25/> Any question get in touch!

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Milkymyst
by Sevan / Venture37 29 Sep '14

29 Sep '14

Hi, Some of you may remember Yann presenting the milkymyst project a couple of years back at OSHUG, Yann has just been awarded a NetBSD commit bit for the work he has done on porting NetBSD to that architecture :) Sevan

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