Hello,
Those attending OSHUG #18 next Thursday evening may be interested in
coming along to an informal Raspberry Pi meetup that is being hosted
by C4CC earlier the same day. Details pasted below.
Cheers,
Andrew
//
London Raspberry Pi Meetup #01
On the 26th April 2012, 15:00 - 17:30 at Centre for Creative
Collaboration, 16 Acton Street, London, WC1X 9NG (51.529049,
-0.116436)
* Do you have a Raspberry Pi?
* Perhaps you have a Raspberry Pi-based project in mind.
* Or you would just like to find out more...
The people behind OSHUG, and DesignSpark and the Centre for Creative
Collaboration invite you to the first London Raspberry Pi meetup. Come
along and meet other RasPi users and enthusiasts, share experiences
and demo projects.
Should we organise regular meetings or workshops? Here is an
opportunity to get involved with shaping future events!
Note: this will be an informal meetup with no particular structure or
presentations, and so please set your expectations accordingly.
- Registration: http://londonraspi01.eventbrite.co.uk/
//
Hello,
Just to let folks know that registration is now open for this month's
meeting, which will also be our second anniversary! And with thanks to
SK Pang for kindly sponsoring OSHUG this month.
Cheers,
Andrew
--
OSHUG #18 — Energy-efficient Computing (Open Compute, BeagleBoard,
Event-driven XCore)
On the 26th April 2012, 18:00 - 20:00 at Centre for Creative
Collaboration, 16 Acton Street, London, WC1X 9NG (51.529049,
-0.116436)
// Sponsored by SK Pang Electronics: http://www.skpang.co.uk //
- Registration: http://oshug.org/event/18
At the eighteenth OSHUG meeting we will hear how open source
collaboration is being used to transform data centre design, and how
open source hardware and software have been used to enable low cost
ARM development. It will also be the OSHUG 2nd anniversary, and two
years on we are delighted to welcome back XMOS, who will be giving us
an introduction to event-driven programming with XCore.
— The Open Compute Project
Facebook uses a lot of servers, and those servers use a lot of energy.
To minimise the costs associated with those servers and data center
facilities, Facebook engineers came up with a fresh design. To build a
community around that design it has been open sourced via the Open
Compute Project (OCP). OCP is now involved in taking the requirements
of many large data center users, and turning them into designs for
servers, the racks that hold them, the facilities that power and cool
them, and the management interfaces that control them. This
presentation will give an overview of what Facebook have built, and
how OCP plans to transform data centers elsewhere.
Chris Swan has been an electronics hobbyist and software hacker since
primary school. These days he's an IT guy at a large bank, focussed on
security and innovation - including mobile, consumerisation and cloud
computing. Alongside his day job Chris chairs the infrastructure
working group at the Open Data Center Alliance (ODCA), which is
partnered with the Open Compute Project (OCP).
— BeagleBoard.org Community - Open Hardware, Open Software, Open Platforms
BeagleBoard.org has created a number of products since its conception
a few years ago, from the initial 'BeagleBoard' single board computer,
through to the enhanced 'BeagleBoard-xM' with more performance and
connectivity, and its most recent and expandable platform, the
'BeagleBone'. All of these have set out to achieve a goal of bringing
high performance ARM-based processing technology to a wide 'community'
of developers and users, in low-cost 'open' platforms, giving access
to as much of the system-on-chip features as possible. The recent
launch of the 'BeagleBone' was a great testament to this vibrant
'community', key to Beagleboard.org, which enabled a wealth of
advanced platform and application software to be immediately
available, and a large amount of hardware expertise providing feedback
and ready to start building add-ons and clones. This was exactly what
was hoped for when the project was initially conceived by a couple of
engineers discussing at the coffee machine about how their technology
could be made more widely accessible. The community continues to grow
each day, with more and more exciting and innovative uses for these
low-cost, open platforms revealed on the various mailing lists and
chat rooms - from 'football playing robots' to 'media servers', the
list, expertise and imagination seems endless!
This presentation hopes to give an overview of the BeagleBoard.org
community project and how the products have been created and
supported. There have been many exciting moments, many challenges and
many lessons learned throughout this project - some of which will
hopefully be covered during this presentation and discussion.
Roger Monk is a System Applications Engineer for Texas Instruments,
and has spent the last 10+ years working closely with customers to
build hi-tech electronic products based around Texas Instruments
Embedded Processing technology across a range of application areas.
Roger is passionate about open-source technology and the ability for
it to help deliver higher quality, more innovative products to market
quickly. He has been closely involved with the BeagleBoard.org
community project since its conception.
— Event-driven Programming with XCore
XMOS designs concurrent, event-driven processor cores. Because of the
deterministic nature of the architecture both real-time algorithms and
hardware interfaces can be developed as software. The event-driven
nature of the processor means that all programs pause until they need
to perform a task, making them inherently efficient.
In this talk we will discuss events, concurrency, and how hardware
interfaces can be programmed in software. We will then show the design
of the slice-kit development system, which enables XCores to be easily
attached to peripheral PCB's containing, for example, an Ethernet PHY.
Henk Muller is currently the Principal Technologist at XMOS Ltd. In
that role he has been involved in the design and implementation of
hardware and software for real time systems. Prior to that, Henk
worked in Academia for 20 years in computer architecture, compilers,
and ubiquitous computing. He holds a doctorate from the University of
Amsterdam.
Note: Please aim to arrive for 18:00 - 18:20 as the event will start
at 18:30 prompt.
- Registration: http://oshug.org/event/18
Hi all
For those intending on coming along to OSHUG 17 on Thursday, can I
recommend you visit the following page on OpenCores for some details
on what you'll need to install to participate in some of the practical
parts of the evening: http://opencores.org/or1k/OSHUG
We don't have a nice, neat distribution of the OpenRISC cross-compiler
readily available yet, so part of the process is to build the tool
chain. Otherwise, the rest is just obtaining a copy of the OpenRISC
repository so we can simulate things on the evening.
Coming with these preparations will save a lot of time and hopefully
allow those who want to play along to do so.
If you have any questions, let us know here, or on the OpenRISC
mailing list at http://lists.openrisc.net
Thanks
Julius
Hello,
Just a reminder that next Thursday evening it will be OSHUG #17:
http://oshug.org/event/17
And we'd be interested in hearing from anyone who might be bringing
their own FPGA development board along to try out an ORSoC/OpenRISC
build.
Also, our generous hosts at the Centre for Creative Collaboration are
in need of a favour. They've just picked up a couple of network
switches in advance of a Pachube workshop that is taking place during
the day next Weds & Thurs, and could do with a hand setting these up.
I've not checked, but it might even be possible to attend the
aforementioned workshop too. In any case, if you may be able to help
out please contact Brian Condon (CC'ed) direct as he's not subscribed
to this list.
Cheers,
Andrew
Hello,
Registration is now open for the March OSHUG meeting.
Cheers,
Andrew
--
OSHUG #17 — Practical System-on-Chip (Program your own open source FPGA SoC)
29th March 2012, 18:00 - 20:00 at Centre for Creative Collaboration,
16 Acton Street, London, WC1X 9NG (51.529049, -0.116436)
// Sponsored by DesignSpark: http://www.designspark.com //
- Registration: http://oshug.org/event/17
At the ninth OSHUG meeting we were given an introduction to FPGA
development, and to the OpenCores community and the OpenRISC 1000 open
source processor family. At the seventeenth OSHUG meeting we will be
given a comprehensive introduction to the practicalities of
programming your own open source FPGA system-on-chip.
— How to Program Your Own Open Source FPGA System-on-Chip
It is possible to buy a FPGA prototyping board like the Terasic
DE0-nano, capable of running a complete 32-bit System-on-Chip for
around £50. Even larger boards with the memory capacity to bring up a
full Linux system on the design cost a few hundred pounds.
In this talk Julius Baxter and Jeremy Bennett will present the
OpenRISC architecture and OpenRISC Reference Platform SoC (ORPSoC),
and show how to take this open source design and get it running on an
FPGA board.
This is a practical evening, aimed at users who have never done any
chip design. Using a Xilinx ML501 prototyping board, Julius Baxter
will demonstrate all the steps from obtaining the initial hardware
design through to bringing up the board and booting a full Linux
system.
The following topics will be covered:
* an overview of OpenCores and the OpenRISC project
* an introduction to the Verilog Hardware Design Language
* how to synthesize the design into a FPGA bitstream
* what needs modifying to run on different boards
* how to get software running
* porting a simple (newlib) library to the board
* demonstration of Linux booting
// Note that this will be an interactive session, and participants are
encouraged to bring their along own FPGA dev boards and laptops and to
join in, should they wish. If you have a board that is not listed as
having a preconfigured ORPSoC build, or you have any other questions
concerning the practicalities of this, you should direct your question
to the OSHUG discussion list. //
Julius Baxter has been involved with the OpenRISC project for 4 years,
and during that time he's worked on everything from processor Verilog
RTL to the Linux kernel port. After finishing undergraduate studies in
his native Australia, he then studied a System-on-Chip design Master's
at KTH in Stockholm, Sweden, while working at ORSoC AB - the owners
and operators of OpenCores.org. Now living and working Cambridge,
Julius maintains a role as an active developer and maintainer on the
OpenRISC project, largely dealing with RTL, toolchain and architecture
work.
Dr Jeremy Bennett is Chief Executive of Embecosm which provides open
source services, tools and models to facilitate embedded software
development with complex systems-on-chip. He has been involved with
OpenCores for the past decade, and is responsible for much of the
software tool chain. Contact him at jeremy.bennett(a)embecosm.com.
Note: Please aim to arrive for 18:00 - 18:20 as the event will start
at 18:30 prompt.
- Registration: http://oshug.org/event/17
This list may well be interested in this free presentation by Yara Senger
at Skills Matter in London in a couple of weeks.
http://skillsmatter.com/podcast/java-jee/jhome
EVENT DETAILS
What:London Java Community:jHome: Using JavaEE and open-source hardware to
automatize your houseWhere:The Skills Matter eXchange,
London<http://skillsmatter.com/location-details/java-jee/1268/96>
When:21 Feb 2012 Starts at 18:30
jHome: Using JavaEE and open-source hardware to automatize your house
During this presentation we will be showing how you can use Java EE and
open-source hardware, like Arduino, to automatize your house. Using jHome,
a complete Java EE 6 API for home automation, you can control lamps, wall
sockets, electric gates and doors using Web App and Twitter.
We will not present a product! It's a complete solution that you can do it
yourself with open-source hardware and software and you will have a lot of
fun with Java EE 6 with this different usage context!
This talk will cover:
- Introduction to Home Automation and open-source hardware
- Project jHome
Cool demos:
- Servlets controlling lamps
- Controllling RGB with jQuery
- Scheduling coffee-machine with EJB's
- Using sounds and FFT(fast fourier transforming) to control your house
This is a basic talk and useful for any developer professional level.
I'm not sure about "automatizing" anything, and no doubt this will all be
very basic for some here, but of interest I hope.
Hello,
Registration is now open for the February meeting and details are
below. Also, there is room for a third speaker if anyone would like to
propose a manufacturing related talk. Wouldn't need to be too long,
and could be on any topic, experiences or challenges etc to do with
the manufacturing of open source hardware. If interested drop me a
line asap.
Regards,
Andrew
--
OSHUG #16 — Manufacturing (Breadboard to Finished Product, Arduino Shield)
On the 23rd February 2012, 18:00 - 20:00 at Centre for Creative
Collaboration, 16 Acton Street, London, WC1X 9NG (51.529049,
-0.116436)
Registration: http://oshug.org/event/16
At the sixteenth OSHUG meeting we will be hearing about first-hand
experiences of taking an open source hardware design from being a
project to a product. With insights into prototyping, some of the
manufacturing options available and the challenges that may be
encountered.
— From Breadboard to Finished Product
You have a cool project, people are sending you emails asking where
they could get their hands on one and you find yourself googling
"electronics manufacturing"... Should you get yourself a toaster oven
and start a miniature production line in your living room or should
you just outsource it? What challenges await you if you decide to go
down the contract manufacturing route? This talk aims to give the
audience an overview of the electronics manufacturing process, using a
project recently completed by the speaker as a case study.
Omer Kilic is theoretically still a research student at the University
of Kent, although he intends to submit his thesis (which is about a
reconfigurable heterogeneous computing framework) pretty soon. He
likes tiny computers, things that 'just work' and beer. He currently
works for Erlang Solutions in London, exploring the use of Erlang
programming language in the Embedded Systems domain and develops tools
and support material to help the adoption of this technology.
— Arduino Shield: From Design to Manufacturing
The Arduino CAN-Bus shield gives the Arduino CAN-Bus capability. In
this presentation we will learn about the design process from PCB
layout and prototyping, to testing with a simulator and eventually
testing with a real car. And about the perils of using a simulator,
small scale production and outsourcing.
Sukkin Pang is a design engineer and a director at SK Pang Electronics
Ltd. He graduated from the University of Hertfordshire and has over 20
years of industrial experience. He is passionate about open source
hardware and has four Arduino shields published. He used to tinker in
assembler on the Z80, 6502, PIC and AVR, but nowadays he mainly uses C
and C++.
Note: Please aim to arrive for 18:00 - 18:20 as the talks will start
at 18:30 prompt.
Registration: http://oshug.org/event/16
Hi guys,
Thought you might be interested in an event we are organising.
Barcamp Canterbury[0] is an un-conference all about technology.
Barcamps[1] are run all around the country for and buy technology enthusiasts,
and what's better they are totally free!
The event is going to run on weekend of the 28th and 29th of April.
thank
Martin
[0]http://www.barcampcanterbury.com/
[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BarCamp
Hello,
Registration is now open for January's meeting.
Regards,
Andrew
--
Event #15 — Wireless (Hacking Commodity Wireless, Practical Wireless,
Contiki OS, CWIG)
On the 26th January 2012, 18:00 - 20:00 at Centre for Creative
Collaboration, 16 Acton Street, London, WC1X 9NG, (51.529049,
-0.116436)
** Registration: http://oshug.org/event/15 **
At the fifteenth OSHUG meeting we'll be taking a look at wireless
technologies. We will hear how you can repurpose low cost commodity
equipment, we will be given an introduction to RF basics, we will
learn about the Contiki operating system, and we will be introduced to
Ciseco's new Wireless Internet Gateway.
- Hacking Commodity Wireless
Many people build their hacks from the ground up, but those short of
time sometimes prefer to repurpose cheap off-the-shelf components that
can be made to fit the bill. A good example being a wireless
thermometer for external use, where an off-the-shelf device provides
an inexpensive option complete with the requisite weatherproof
packaging. However, such devices typically use proprietary protocols
and good documentation is rarely available. This talk will look at how
to interface such devices where a degree of reverse-engineering is
frequently required.
Paul Tanner is a consultant, developer and maker in wood, metal,
plastic, electronics and software. His day job is IT-based business
improvement for SMEs. By night he turns energy nut, creating tools to
optimise energy use. Paul graduated in electronics and was responsible
for hardware and software product development and customer services in
several product and service start-ups, switching to consulting in
2000.
- Practical Wireless
Adding wireless connectivity to your latest open hardware project is
not difficult, provided that you take the time to understand some of
the principles of RF communication. In this talk we will learn about
the basics of wireless propagation, and take a look at some of the low
cost modules which now make adding wireless even easier.
Ken Boak joined BBC Research Department after graduating and worked on
digital picture processing of HDTV images, and coding algorithms for
video distribution around studios. Since then, Ken has worked in
laboratory instrumentation, telecommunications, low power wireless and
consumer electronics produced in the Far East. With an interest in
renewables, Ken now develops laboratory instruments to teach
undergraduates the principles of photovoltaic and wind power. Outside
of work, Ken is interested in smart wireless sensors, open source
hardware and low cost solutions for the Internet of Things.
- An Introduction to the Contiki O/S
This talk is aimed to introduce the Contiki OS and some of the
development hardware. We will learn about the process of bootstrapping
the development environment and there will be a hands-on tutorial.
Ilya Dmitrichenko was born in Soviet Latvia in 1985, grew up and
attended a secondary school there, and moved to UK as soon as Latvia
joined the EU. He attended the biggest university in London and was
rather disappointed with the education, but nevertheless carried on
and had fun working on a final year engineering project which served
as an introduction to the topic of this talk. Ilya is interested in
various aspects of hardware and software, spanning from WSN to DSP and
several other random fields.
- CWIG — The Ciseco Wireless Internet Gateway
The CWIG is a new open hardware device that is designed to be the "one
and only" platform you'd need for a wireless gateway. It employs the
same ATmega328 microcontroller that is familiar to Arduino users and
supports Ciseco's TI CC1110-based XRF module, XBee, Bluetooth, RFM12B,
X10/HomeEasy, FRAM, SD, Ethernet and over-the-air programming with
AVRDude. It's sized to be housed in a low cost, compact enclosure and
to be cheap to build using through-hole components. In this talk we
will be given an introduction to the CWIG and also to the XRF wireless
UART and programmable RF module.
Miles Hodkinson's twenty-odd year relationship with IT ended around
six years ago when he decided that it was time to do something
completely different. He had looked around without success for
something to log and control his wind turbine, solar panels and Lister
single cylinder engine, and found that nothing was flexible enough for
the money he wanted to pay (tens of pounds per device), so he decided
he would try and build it himself. After a number of years working on
a human-focused method of networking originally built using XBee
modules and now termed LLAP, his company developed the TI CC1110-based
XRF module.
Note: Please aim to arrive for 18:00 - 18:20 as the talks will start
at 18:30 prompt.
** Registration: http://oshug.org/event/15 **