Monthly archives: March 2016


Open Source Where You Least Expect It – London 21/4/2016

The BCS OSSG and the OSHUG are hosting a talk that takes a look at the use of open source hardware and software in less obvious places..

The event will be held on Thursday 21st April at BCS HQ – 1st Floor, The Davidson Building, 5 Southampton Street, London, WC2E 7HA, [map] from 6:00pm to 9:00pm.

Note: Please aim to arrive by 18:15 as the event will start at 18:30 prompt.

Please register to attend and share on Lanyrd.

Ownership and Gift; Open Source and God; How a Vicar values Open Source

Do we really own anything, or is it a gift? When we try to claim ownership how does that affect our attitude and our freedom? Does my choice of software really have a spiritual dimension? How can I give something back? These are all questions which arise for an ex-compiler-writing Vicar who wants software which does the job at hand but also wants to live with integrity and Christian values. In his talk Rev Peter Salisbury explores these questions through examples of the way his church uses Open Source software and hardware.

Peter Salisbury was an electronics geek in his teens just as logic chips first hit the Maplin catalogue. From building computers in a cupboard he went to study Computation at UMIST, graduating in 1980. He worked in system tools with Burroughs Machines, then moved to language design and compiler writing for a Project Management company. In 1989 he moved to Salisbury to study theology in preparation for becoming a vicar. He was ordained in 1992 and is currently Vicar of Lymington on the south coast near Southampton. He has never really forgotten he’s a geek.

Update: the event recording is now available.

Open hardware for open science

Is science open source and should it be? This talk will look at the current state of open software and hardware in scientific practice. Example open hardware projects from the worlds of biology, astronomy and computer science will be presented.

Sarah Mount is a Research Associate on the Efficient Editing of Homogeneous Programs (Editors4) project. Previously, she was a Senior Lecturer at the University of Wolverhampton, and before that she held a number of positions at Coventry University.

Update: the event recording is now available.

Hacking the atmosphere

The AirPi is an open source board he designed for measuring and recording air pollution and weather information. Despite its innocuous goal, that board has ended up in some fairly weird situations — come along to find out where!

Tom Hartley is a student at Imperial College, currently sitting on the fence between software and hardware. Prompted by a mysterious fascination with the Raspberry Pi that lives on to this day, he developed the AirPi 2 years ago as part of a competition and went on to sell over 1,000 kits to people who care about the air they breathe. A devotee of open source, the code he writes and the boards he designs are all available freely online.

Update: the event recording is now available.


Embedded platforms (BSD, OpenWRT, Plan 9 & Inferno) – London 17/3/2016

The BCS OSSG and the OSHUG are hosting a talk on embedded platforms, with talks on the BSD family of operating systems, Linux and OpenWRT, and Plan 9 and Inferno in distributed systems.

The event will be held on Thursday 17th March at BCS HQ – 1st Floor, The Davidson Building, 5 Southampton Street, London, WC2E 7HA, [map] from 6:00pm to 9:00pm.

Note: Please aim to arrive by 18:15 as the event will start at 18:30 prompt.

Please register to attend and share on Lanyrd.

The BSD Family of Operating Systems: a familiar environment for your VAX, PIC32 or RISC-V ISA and many other platforms.

BSD The Berkeley Software Distribution started out as a patch set to AT&T UNIX in the 70’s and grew to a complete Operating Systems. Today several projects continue to develop variant operating systems based on the work originally started by the Computer Science Research Group, each with a different area of focus.

This presentation will cover some of the benefits these operating systems can offer to aid the workflow of a hardware project.

Sevan Janiyan is founder of Venture 37, which provides system administration & consultancy services. As a fan of operating systems and computers with different CPU architectures, in his spare time he maintains builds of open source software on a variety of systems featuring PowerPC, SPARC and armv7l CPUs. He hopes to own a NeXTcube & OMRON LUNA-88K2 one day.

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