Open Source Hardware Camp will once again take place in the Pennine town of Hebden Bridge. However, this year it is being hosted as part of a larger technology festival called Wuthering Bytes. Details of the OSHUG talks and workshops can be found below and for the full programme please see the Wuthering Bytes website.
Hebden Bridge is approximately 1 hour by rail from Leeds and Manchester. Budget accommodation is available at the Hebden Bridge Hostel, 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 and those interested in pre-event drinks on the Friday should join the discussion list.
Saturday Talks
The Importance of Mini Makers
14 year old Amy Mather discusses why the maker culture is so important to the younger generation and introduces us to her idea of a Mini Mini Maker Faire, where only under 18's would be able to exhibit their creations.
Amy Mather, a.k.a. MiniGirlGeek, has been making and coding for 18 months with the guidance and support of the community that she found at Manchester's MadLab and hackspace. Amy was the closing keynote speaker at the world's first Raspberry Jamboree event, speaking alongside Professor Steve Furber and Pete Lomas of the Raspberry Pi foundation. Amy also presented at the inaugural event RSA FutureMaker event at London's Somerset House, where she also ran a workshop introducing attendees to the world of sewable electronics.
Building a Maker Business: Sharing, Education, Open Source and Conscience.
How open are you prepared to be when starting a business? Explore the wonderful shades of grey in the moral and legal landscape, as well as the risks and benefits to your survival in those early days, with war stories from Pimoroni's first year of existence.
Paul Beech is a co-founder of Pimoroni, makers of the Pibow, Picade and other things Raspberry Pi. He also designed the Raspberry Pi Logo, and was somewhat responsible for the short-lived Interactive DVD phenomenon. He lives in Sheffield, in the Pimoroni workshop, because that's where all the good toys are. He prefers small-scale subtractive manufacturing processes.
The @ShrimpingIt Manifesto
Electronics engineers find it trivial to build an Arduino-compatible circuit on a breadboard using components which are just one tenth the cost of an official Arduino board. The @ShrimpingIt project curates open resources and projects so that everyone can progress their prototyping with simple components and materials, just like the experts. The approach delivers a whole host of benefits for those learning to prototype - not just saving money.
We'll be introducing the project, sharing the choicest cuts from our year's experience running it, and featuring lots of the great spin-off projects people have built on our work. The @ShrimpingIt manifesto combines insights from open design and community engagement, arriving at a challenging standpoint of how beginner microcontroller projects should be designed, presented and taught for a better tomorrow.
Cefn Hoile sculpts open source hardware and software, and supports others doing the same. Drawing on ten years of experience in R&D for a multinational technology company, he works as a public domain inventor, and an innovation catalyst and architect of bespoke digital installations and prototypes, working most recently with Tinker.it, BT, the BBC, EDF, Nokia.
Cefn is a founder-member of the Curiosity Collective digital arts group, and a regular contributor to open source projects and not-for-profits. He is currently completing a PhD in Digital Innovation at Highwire, University of Lancaster.
White Space — Connect all the Things!
White space spectrum may hold the key for wide-area sensor networks. Find out how we can all enable the Internet of Things with this new technology.
Ben Ward is founder of Love Hz, promoting the use of white space spectrum for open innovation in the Internet of Things. A survivor of the dotcom bubble, subsea bandwidth glut and the UK broadband wars, he's still surprisingly optimistic about the future.
Introduction to Robot Operating System
Robot Operating System (ROS) is an open source modular robot middleware. It is used in many many Universities and research projects around the world, and is starting to move into industry as well.
This talk will provide an introduction to ROS, explaining what it is, how it works and some of the things it can do. There will also be a practical demonstration of a robot running ROS.
Nick Weldin initiated the first public Arduino course in the UK in 2005, because he didn't want to program PIC chips on the accounts computer at work after everyone else had gone home any more, and he couldn't get his boss to send him to the Arduino course that was running in Spain. When Tinker London started up he joined them and ran courses teaching Arduino wherever anyone was interested. He is co-author of the Arduino Cookbook and now works for Middlesex University.
Risking a Compuserve of Things
More and more companies are staking a claim to be the platform for the Internet of Things. Should we be aiming for a more open Internet of Things? Is the platform for the Internet of Things not just the Internet? Adrian McEwen will be exploring some of the challenges in implementing the Internet of Things and suggesting ways to improve collaboration and interoperability.
Adrian McEwen has been connecting odd things to the Internet since the mid-90s. Starting with cash registers, and then as part of the team who were first to put a web browser onto a mobile phone. For the past five years he's been working with the Internet of Things.
Adrian founded MCQN Ltd, an IoT consultancy and product company, which is based in DoES Liverpool - a hybrid makerspace and office, which he set up with some friends. He's putting the finishing touches to a book — Designing the Internet of Things — and also working as CTO of start-up Good Night Lamp.
Measuring Energy Consumption in Embedded Systems
How energy-efficient are your programs and how long will your devices last on battery power?
Particularly when writing bare-metal applications, we have a great deal of control over how much energy the processor and hardware connected to it consumes. In this talk I discuss how we can accurately measure the energy consumption of our devices, and techniques that we can use to extend battery life.
James Pallister is a graduate of the University of Bristol, where he achieved joint First Class Honours in Computer Science and Electronics. During the summer of 2012, he led Embecosm's research program into the impact of compilers on energy consumption in embedded systems, which was a development of James' work at the University of Bristol with the XMOS multi-core processor.
James returned to Bristol in October 2012, where he is studying for a PhD in low-power multi-core system design. He remains a Technical Advisor to Embecosm.
Polling is for Wimps — Asynchronous Communications for the Internet of Things
They say that, if the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a screw. Don't get me wrong, I love REST. It's great for posting data and one-off access. However, REST is not a good way for IoT actuators to get their instructions from a controlling system. aul will discuss his experiences with Sockets, XMPP and MQTT. One of which will usually be a good solution for most implementations.
In each case arguments for and against will be presented, in the context of systems that must operate in near real time with low power budgets. Relevant open source technologies will be referenced. For a case example we’ll use the MQTT system that Paul and Adrian Godwin have been building for an experimental, thermally-efficient new build home.
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.
A Basic Introduction to Interfacing for the Hardware Curious
So you've got a Raspberry Pi or Beaglebone and now you want to connect some hardware to it. You know basically what you want to do but you're are feeling a little bit lost in the jargon. What is a GPIO pin? What is an SPI or I2C bus? What is a shift register? How do I get more outputs than I have pins? How do chose the resistor for an LED? How do I read the value of a push switch? What does 3.3V tolerant mean?
This talk will look at the basics of hardware interfacing. It will describe the basics of the interfaces typical of embedded systems and how to approach programming them. It will discuss some very basic electronics theory that will be useful to the beginner hardware hacker. Finally it will give pointers as to where to look for further information.
Melanie Rhianna Lewis started a life long love of electronics as a child when her Dad helped her make a "crystal" radio with an ear piece, a coil of wire, a diode and a radiator! At the same time the home computer revolution started and she would lust after the "build your own computers" advertised in the electronics magazines of the time. She never got one but did end up the proud owner of a BBC Micro. Melanie learnt everything she could about the machine and including assembler, operating systems, drivers, interrupt, and, thanks to the circuit diagram in the Advanced User Guide, digital electronics. After the BBC Micro came the Acorn Archimedes and so started a long relationship with ARM processors. In the 90s Melanie became interested in Linux and then developed one of the first ARM Linux distributions running on an Acorn RISC PC. The hobby became a job and Melanie currently works for an embedded device consultancy near Bradford where a lot of her work is still with ARM processors.
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.
Sunday Workshops
Please feel free to bring along equipment and components provided that you are able to take full responsibility for your own personal safety and that of others. Common sense should be exercised!
M2M with MQTT
Following on from the talk on asynchronous communications this session will provide the opportunity for people to get their hands dirty with MQTT.
We will have an installation of the Mosquitto micro-broker and a rules engine running on a Raspberry Pi. Dale Lane's MQTT client for Arduino is available, as are other implementations for low-power platforms.
Run by: Paul Tanner.
Hardware Interfacing Clinic
Get expert advice for projects that involve interfacing peripherals, chips, sensors and other inputs, displays and other outputs. Bring your laptop. Bring along your interfacing woes and project ideas!
Run by: MelanieRhiannaLewis.
Persistence-of-vision and Face Tracking with ShrimpingIt
Novice participants will create a persistence-of-vision project based around the Arduino-compatible, Shrimp. The perfect workshop for the hardware curious and crossover coders!
Those with more hardware experience under their belt will have the opportunity to construct a face tracking system, using a webcam with a Linux host running an OpenCV application, which uses a Shrimp-based circuit as an interface to driving the servos which steer the webcam.
Dr Jeremy Bennett is the founder of Embecosm, and an expert on hardware modelling and embedded software development. Prior to founding Embecosm, Dr Bennett was Vice President of ARC International PLC and previously Vice President of Marconi PLC.
Simon Cook has a background in low-power processors, with a particular focus on the energy constraints of code running in embedded environments. He works for embedded systems consultancy, Embecosm, where he provides support for their work on low level binutils for both GNU and LLVM toolchains.
Profiling Energy Consumption in Embedded Applications
Following the previous day's talk James will be demonstrating the energy consumption measurement kit, with several instrumented platforms: Arduino, Raspberry Pi and a BeagleBone.
Participants will be able to instrument their code and run it on the available platforms, showing where the energy hot-spots are. Bring along your code to be profiled on one of the platforms, and if you bring your own hardware along we can also try to hook it up.
Run by: JamesPallister.
Soldering is Easy: Assembling the OSHCamp Kit
Build the OSHCamp kit, a special version of the LittleWire board, that has been designed by Boldport just for Wuthering Bytes. This is an incredibly handy USB multi-tool that can be used to program microcontrollers, read sensors, control outputs and much more.
Great for beginners, there will be expert support on hand to help you assemble your kit.
Run by: Anish Mohammed, Alan Wood and Steve Crozier.
Receiving FUNcube Satellite Telemetry
The FUNcube-1 satellite is ready for launch. Are you ready to receive?
This workshop will show how to set up a receiver to decode telemetry from the satellite and to submit it to the data warehouse which relies upon crowd-reception. Bring along your own FUNcube dongle receiver or a suitable USB DVB dongle and check that it's working.
Participants will be able to connect up sensors and actuators that they bring with them and make use of a rules engine to create ad-hoc applications.
Run by: Jason Flynn
Note:
- This year there are separate tickets for the Saturday and Sunday.
- Tickets will permit entry to all Wuthering Bytes sessions and not just OSHUG ones.
- A light lunch and refreshments will be provided on both days. Please ensure that you make any dietary requirements clear when registering.
- Please aim to arrive between 09:30 and 09:45 on the Saturday as the event will start at 10:00 prompt.