Yearly archives: 2015

Open for Business – Hebden Bridge 28/09/2015

 in OSSG  tagged open source business / OSSG conference / Wuthering Bytes by (updated 3141 days ago)

Wuthering Bytes

This one day conference aims to help anyone with or working at an open source business, along with those who may be thinking of starting an open source business.

The event will be held on  Monday 28th September 2015 at Hebden Bridge Town Hall, Saint George’s Street, Hebden Bridge, HX7 7BY, from 8:30am to 5:30pm.

There will be presentations that provide insights into first-hand experiences at companies ranging from micro to global in scale, together with talks that look at the economics and legal considerations, exploring open source business models and contracts.

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Supplementing teaching in schools by employing free to low-cost, and open educational resources – London 30/07/2015 1

 in Education / OSSG Events  tagged mashups / open educational resources by (updated 3207 days ago)

Open Educational ResourceThe BCS e-Learning SG and the BCS OSSG are hosting a talk on low-cost and open educational resources.

The event will be held on Thursday 30th July at BCS HQ – 5 Southampton Street, London, WC2E 7HA from 5:00pm (registration) to 7:30pm. The talks will start at 5:30pm.

This event is free to attend for both BCS Members and non-members but booking is required.

Synopsis

Schools’ potential for large-scale resource investment and  employing dedicated technical staff to support technology enhanced learning is being increasingly constrained under current economic conditions.

The speaker will discuss past experiences as an IT professional, in combining free, low cost and Open Source platforms as technology “mashups”.

About Speaker

Tara McBride has worked as an IT professional for over 15 years, in the private sector for companies as diverse as IBM and CarGiant car-supermarket, and in both the primary and tertiary education sectors.  Tara is currently lecturing within the Digital Technology and Computing Department at GSM London.

Areas of interest surrounds the interface between business and computing, in particular how to enact ethical computing, and how to remove fear barriers to technology adoption.  She is currently trying to make her Raspberry Pi make her Raspberry Pie.

Chips Pt.3 (BERI, Do we need separate Hardware Construction languages? OpenTransputer) – London 18/06/2015

 in Hardware / OSSG Events  tagged beri / Bluespec / Chisel / FPGA / HML / Internet of Things / IoT / LLVM / OpenTransputer / oshug / risk by

The BCS OSSG and the OSHUG are hosting 3 talks on Open Source Chip Designs.

The event will be held on Thursday 18th June at BCS HQ – 5 Southampton Street, London, WC2E 7HA from 6:00pm to 8:00pm.

This event is free to attend for both BCS Members and non-members but booking is required.

Note: Please aim to arrive by 6:15 as the event will start at 6:30 prompt.

BERI: An open RISC softcore for research and experimentation

OpentransputerBERI (the Bluespec Extensible RISC Implementation) is a softcore processor jointly developed by SRI International and The University of Cambridge. It implements a superset of the MIPS III ISA in Bluespec, a high-level HDL and supports a fully Open Source, permissively licensed, software stack comprising the FreeBSD operating system and the LLVM compiler suite. This talk will describe the design of the BERI processor and its use.

BERI was created to facilitate experimentation at the boundaries between CPU architecture, operating systems, and programming languages. It runs in Altera and Xilinx FPGAs, including the NetFPGA 10G board. At 100MHz, it is fast enough to use as a real computer (albeit a fairly slow one).

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Making your program faster and greener

 in Knowledge / OSSG / OSSG Article / OSSG Press  tagged article / beebs / compilers / Experimental Design theory / mageec / superoptimization by (updated 1737 days ago)

Jeremy Bennett, Embecosm

Abstract

Compilers take computer programs and translate them to the binary machine code processors actually run. Two of the most widely used compilers are completely free and open source: GCC and LLVM. In this article we look at two recent industrial research projects supported by Innovate UK, the government’s innovation agency, which advance the state of the art with these compilers.

The MAGEEC project, a joint project between Embecosm and Bristol University, is an open source machine learning framework for any compiler, which allows the compiler to be trained to generate more energy efficient code. A side-benefit is that energy efficient code turns out to be much faster code.

Superoptimization as a technique to achieve the ultimate in compiled performance has been around in academic circles for nearly 30 years.

During the summer of 2014, Innovate UK funded a feasibility study to see whether any of these techniques were commercially viable. The good news is that some techniques could now, or with a modest amount of further industrial R&D, offer exceptional benefit for real-world software. And once again the software is open source.

MAchine Guided Energy Efficient Compilation (MAGEEC)

A study carried out by James Pallister at Bristol University and funded by the UK compiler development company Embecosm in summer 2012 found that choice of compiler optimization  flags had a major effect on the energy consumed by the compiled program. The bad news was that the options to be used varied from architecture to architecture and program to program [1].

The MAGEEC project was funded by the Technology Strategy Board (now Innovate UK) under its Energy Efficient Computing initiative, to develop a machine learning based compiler infrastructure capable of optimizing for energy. Running from June 2013 to November 2014, it was a joint feasibility study between Embecosm and Bristol University, to develop a machine learning compiler infrastructure that could optimize for energy. Key criteria were that the infrastructure should be generic, it should optimize for energy, that it should be based on real energy measurements, not models and that it should create a fully working system. The entire project was free and open source. (more…)

Wiring the Internet of Things with Raspberry Pi & Node-RED – London 21/05/2015

 in Education / Hardware / OSSG Events  tagged ibm / internetofthings / node-red / raspberrypi by (updated 3008 days ago)

The BCS OSSG, IBM UK and the OSHUG, with support from the Knowledge Transfer Network and hardware sponsored by RS DesignSpark are hosting an event on wiring the Internet of Things.

The event will be held on Thursday 21st May at Fab Lab London, 1 Frederick’s Place, Off Old Jewry, London, EC2R 8AE from 12:30:00pm to 6:30pm.

This event is free to attend for both BCS Members and non-members but booking is required.

Node-RED

Node-REDNode-RED is a visual tool for wiring together hardware devices, APIs and online services in new and interesting ways. Used together with Raspberry Pi it provides a compact, powerful platform that is able to read sensors, control outputs, and send and receive data to and from the Web and other systems.

This workshop will provide an introduction to Node-RED and integrating simple sensors and outputs, applying basic processing and publishing data to the Web. No prior experience with either Node-RED or electronics is required. However, while not strictly necessary, some experience of JavaScript would be beneficial as this is used to implement custom functionality within Node-RED. (more…)

Hackerspace/makerspace/fablab panel discussion – London 16/04/2015

 in Business / Hardware / OSSG Events  tagged fablab / hackerspace / makespace by (updated 3289 days ago)

HackspaceThe BCS OSSG and the OSHUG are 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.

The event will be held on Thursday 16th April at BCS HQ – 5 Southampton Street, London, WC2E 7HA from 6:00pm to 8:00pm.

This event is free to attend for both BCS Members and non-members but booking is required.

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Make a Shrimp for Easter – a practical embedded computing workshop for kids and their parents/guardians – London 01/05/2015

 in Education / Hardware / Knowledge / OSSG / OSSG Events  tagged arduino / shrimp by (updated 3314 days ago)

The BCS Open Source and Software Practice Advancement specialist groups are hosting a workshop which looks at embedded computing for kids. The event will be held on Wednesday 1st April 2015 at BCS HQ – 5 Southampton Street, London, WC2E 7HA from 6:00pm to 8:00pm.

This event is free to attend for both BCS Members and non-members but booking is required. Places are limited; please book as soon as possible.

Synopsis

ShrimpThe Shrimp is an incredibly fun, low cost computer that can be built and programmed by just about anyone, in only a few hours and with no prior experience of electronics or programming. Comprising of a simple circuit that is assembled from a handful of components, it can quickly be made to flash LEDs and put to use in exciting projects that have switches, sensors and outputs.

During this workshop participants will first construct the basic Shrimp circuit, before programming it to blink a single LED, and then go onto a more advanced project – such as adding more LEDs and programming it to paint letters in the air with these as it is waved about (using a phenomenon termed persistence of vision). At the end of the evening, teams will demonstrate the fruits of their labours to each other and there may well be some Easter eggs to share around as a reward!

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Low Power to the People – take back Bluetooth Low Energy control! – London 19/03/2015

 in Hardware / OSSG Events  tagged bluetooth / internetofthings / Linux / open hardware / open source hardware / rfid by

The BCS OSSG and the OSHUG are hosting three talks which look at Open Source wireless communications. The event will be held on Thursday 19th March at BCS HQ – 5 Southampton Street, London, WC2E 7HA from 5:30pm to 8:00pm.

This event is free to attend for both BCS Members and non-members but booking is required.

Programming BLE the hard way: bare metal programming of nRF51 BLE tokens for fun and profit

Bluetooth Low EnergyThe 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.

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