Monthly archives: July 2013


“The Ownership of the Means of Production by the Proletariat” – A talk by Adran Bowyer on the RepRap 3D printer

http://reprap.org/mediawiki/reprap_logo.png

“The Ownership of the Means of Production by the Proletariat”

A talk by by Adrian Bowyer

Plus (new)

“Experiences from the Thames Valley RepRap User Group”

A talk by by Alan Wood

Wednesday – October 2nd 2013

BCS , First Floor, The Davidson Building, 5 Southampton Street, London , WC2E 7HA – 17:30pm – 21:00PM

BCS Open Source SG joint event with the Open Source Hardware Users Group.

Price: Free to attend for both BCS Members and Non-members.
 
Tea and coffee will be available from 17:30 to 18:30. Dr Bowyer will speak from 18:30 to 19:30 followed by Q and A, then sandwiches and juice and water aiming to finish by 20:30/21:00.

“The Ownership of the Means of Production by the Proletariat”

Subject

Look at your computer setup. Imagine you hooked up a 3D printer. Instead of printing on bits of paper this 3D printer makes real, robust, mechanical parts. To give you an idea of how robust, think Lego bricks and you’re in the right area. You could make lots of useful stuff, but interestingly you could also make lots of the parts to make another 3D printer. That would be a machine that could copy itself.

This talk will be about RepRap – the Replicating Rapid-prototyper.  This 3D printer builds the component up in layers of plastic.  This technology already existed before RepRap, but the cheapest proprietary machine then would have set you back £15,000. And it wasn’t even designed so that it could make itself.  So what the RepRap team have done is to develop and to give away the designs for a much cheaper machine with the novel capability of being able to self-copy (material costs are about £300).  That way it’s accessible to small communities in the developing world as well as individuals in the developed world.  The RepRap machine is being distributed entirely free to everyone using open-source – so, if you have one, you can make another and give it to a friend…

Biography:

Adrian Bowyer holds a first degree and a PhD in engineering from Imperial College.  He was an academic at the University of Bath for 35 years.  He retired in 2012 to help to run the company RepRap Professional Ltd.

His areas of research are geometric modelling and geometric computing in general (he is one of the authors of the Bowyer-Watson algorithm for Voronoi diagrams), the application of computers to manufacturing, and biomimetics.  In 2004 he created RepRap – humanity’s first self-replicating general-purpose manufacturing machine.

 

“Experiences from the Thames Valley RepRap User Group”

Subject

Thames Valley RepRap User Group (TVRRUG) was set up to provide support
to those who wanted to build their own RepRap 3D printer, and to
exchange information and ideas between those who had already
successfully completed builds.

TVRRUG has now organised three group build rounds, sourcing and
printing parts, and resulting in many working printers. Along the way
the group has produced extensive documentation, and designed its own
electronics and a variant of the Prusa Mendel design.

Biography:

Alan Wood originally trained in systems engineering, and got lost in
software engineering and F/OSS for a decade, before returning back to
his hardware roots via the open source hardware and makers movement
that has gathered momentum in recent years.

Please book using the following link: https://events.bcs.org/book/740/

Closing date for bookings is Monday 30 September 2013 at 11:59pm.


Internet of things Mash-up Day 23rd of July, University of Oxford


BOOK YOUR PLACE: http://iotmashup.eventbrite.com/
Workshop Day for IOT Device Vendors
Develop interoperable drivers for your IOT/M2M devices

Practical Interoperability of Devices – Port your Device onto the Open Source Framework – Getting Your Device Working with a wide Ecosystem with Expert help – Facilitating Programmatic Access and Control for Your Devices – Securely Sharing Data Between Different Devices. Creating Data Mash-Ups between Different Devices and People.

A FREE one-day event run by the webinos consortium where you can be briefed on state-of-the-art Internet of Things and Machine to Machine technologies. The day will be split into two halves

  • Morning: A series of brief talks given by industry experts. Rapidly get up to speed with some of the most significant developments in the IOT/M2M/sensor industry
  • Afternoon: webinos developers will give one-on-one consultation on deep technical issues, and for those bringing devices to the event, hands-on assistance working with and integrating the code

Who is it relevant for: Application developers
Any application developers that has an interest in working with a broad spectrum of devices and taking live data feeds from connected sensors. For example, driver and vehicle diagnostics, usage-based insurance, home automation controllers, health monitoring services, and eco-consultancies.

This event is free. You will get free implementation consultancy, meet with like minded people and be part of the expert briefing sessions. The value of the technology is ‘ecosystem benefit’. You will make your device connect with others and experience interoperability with the Apps and Services which run across the open source webinos platform.

 
More information on the event can be found on the website http://www.webinos.org/blog/2013/06/26/internet-of-things-mash-up-day-23rd-of-july-university-of-oxford/