[HacktionLab] Open Source Hardware Camp 2012, Hebden Bridge

[Gareth Babb]

Thought this might be of interest to some here.


// Open Source Hardware Camp 2012

On the 15th September 2012, 09:00 - 16th September 2012, 16:00 at The
Birchcliffe Centre, Birchcliffe Road, Hebden Bridge, West Yorkshire, HX7
8DG, UK

Registration: http://oshug.org/event/oshcamp2012

Open Source Hardware Camp 2012 will take place place in the north of England
in the Pennine town of Hebden Bridge. Building on the success of last year's
OSHCamp, it will be a weekend long event with nine talks on the Saturday and
four parallel workshops on the Sunday.

Hebden Bridge is approximately 1 hour by rail from Leeds and Manchester.
Budget accommodation is available at the Hebden Bridge Hostel which adjoins
the venue, with discounts available for group bookings.

- Practical Experiences with the Google Android Accessory Development Kit (ADK)

The ADK is an exciting development platform that makes it possible to easily
combine Android applications with custom hardware built around Arduino. Such
combinations have the best of both worlds by enabling the creation of a
mobile phone application with access to peripheral devices that is only
limited by your imagination.

This talk will cover two projects that extend what the phone can do by
integrating both input and output devices. And will cover some of the dos
and don'ts of using the ADK and associated IDEs. If time permits there will
also be a demonstration with a quick run through of the code.

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.

If you can't wait to get your hands on the ADK software browse to
http://developer.android.com/tools/adk.

- The Internet of Things and Arduino

As connecting hardware to the network becomes cheaper and cheaper we're
seeing the rise of what is being called the Internet of Things, or IoT for
short.

This talk will give an introduction to the Internet of Things and explain
how open hardware platforms such as Arduino are helping it grow. With plenty
of examples of IoT projects, from using sensors to map global radiation
levels to bakeries that tweet when the bread is fresh out of the oven.

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. As the mobile phone and
set-top box work became more mainstream he dropped down a level to Arduino
which led to Internet-enabled bubble machines and chicken-food silos...

Adrian has been working with Arduino since 2008 which is when Bubblino, the
aforementioned bubble machine which watches twitter, was created and is
charge of the Arduino Ethernet library. He is based in Liverpool, where he
runs MCQN Ltd, a company that builds IoT devices and products.

- Developing Linux on Embedded Devices

This talk will provide an introduction to developing Linux on embedded
devices. Firstly we will look at the capabilities of popular boards such as
the BeagleBone and the Raspberry Pi. Then using the example of a BeagleBone
controller for a 3D printer the talk with explain how to develop for an
embedded device. It will consider what comprises an embedded Linux software
stack. The talk will discuss boot loaders, kernels and root filesystems. We
will discuss what are the minimum software packages required in a root file
system. The talk will then go on to consider the tools required to develop
for an embedded target. It will look at what tools are available to help the
embedded developer and speed up this development process. Once you have
developed your software you need to debug it. The talk will look at what
debugging tools are available for debugging embedded devices.

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.

- Interfacing the Raspberry Pi to the World - Everything you need to know
about P1

You've received your Pi, set up a web server on it and maybe played a few
rounds of Quake. You're looking for a new challenge and suddenly the header
on the corner of the board catches your eye. A quick Google search for "P1
Raspbery Pi" gets you to the eLinux wiki page on Low level peripherals, and
you suddenly realise that you can do all sorts of fun stuff by adding extra
bits to your Raspberry Pi using this magical expansion port. Where do you
start? Is it safe to connect a motor directly to the pins? What sort of
interesting components are out there?

In this talk we will look at the ways we can communicate with the outside
world using the GPIO pins on the Raspberry Pi. We will explore the
mechanical, electrical and software side of things and talk about a few
example projects you can try at home, and the hardware limitations will be
covered and workarounds provided.

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.

This talk will also serve as an introduction for the Raspberry Pi workshop
on the Sunday, where we will explore the example projects covered in more
detail.

- Sensing Wearable Technology

An introduction to wearable technology that will include examples which
incorporate sensors, plus work which makes use of the LilyPad Arduino, an
open source, sewable microcontroller.

Rain Ashford creates wearable technology & electronic art, her most recent
work involves investigating physiological sensing technologies and how they
can be applied to wearable artworks to measure and interpret moods, health
and lifestyle data. Rain also creates fun, interactive and aesthetically
pleasing works that include gaming and musical elements. She is keen to
demonstrate that electronics, components and circuitry doesn't have to be
regarded as cold, boring, hard and boxy and instead can be fun, colourful
and elegant, plus be integrated into an overall design of a work.

Rain's background is in developing online activities for the BBC as a Senior
Producer at BBC Learning and also as Technologist at BBC R&D, co-running BBC
Backstage. She currently works as a freelance consultant for the Open
University and for Technocamps designing and leading workshops in coding and
electronics in the form of wearable technology for 11-19 year-olds, plus is
a PhD researcher, peering into wearable electronics & art.

- Running OpenBTS in the Real World

This talk will explore the OpenBTS project and describe how it uses
software-defined radio and open source Internet telephony to create a small
but complete GSM mobile phone network.

Experiences of operating OpenBTS installations on the Pacific island of Niue
and at the Burning Man festival in the Nevada desert will be covered, along
with how OpenBTS has been integrated with other systems for use in disaster
relief. Licensing permitting there will also be a live demonstration.

Tim Panton is a software engineer with a particular interest in projects
that blend web applications and person-to-person speech into an integrated
user experience. He has many years hands-on experience with the OpenBTS
project, working closely with the core development team on numerous
installations.

Tim is currently working on the Phono.com, Tropo.com and Rayo.org products
at VoxeoLabs, producing web developer-friendly APIs by using XMPP protocols
to drive innovative telephony applications that can be used anywhere by
anyone.

- The 3D Printed Revolution

Over recent years Open Source 3D printers have quickly developed alongside
their commercial counterparts offering affordable and accessible
alternatives. This talk will cover experiences using commercial printers and
how the speaker's interests have moved to open source designs and how the
two compare. Examples will be shown of projects using these technologies,
such as "Fable", a clock manufactured by Selective Laser Sintering, and a
wrist watch designed to be printed on a RepRap. There will also be a run
through of the design considerations and how files were created, fixed and
sliced in preparation to print on a RepRap.

Mark Gilbert graduated in 2000 from Sheffield Hallam University with a
degree in Industrial Design Innovation. After several years working as a
design engineer, Mark started working as a freelance industrial designer for
several companies in the Northwest. Over the last 6 years he has also worked
closely with the Bolton Science and Technology Centre as the "Designer in
Residence" where he has developed workshops around the centre's 3D printing
and CAD facilities.

In 2008 Mark set up the design studio Gilbert13 with his wife Angela where
they design and develop products inspired by experimentation into digital
manufacturing processes, 3D printing and additive manufacturing. Recent
projects have taken their experience from rapid prototyping to use 3D
printing as a manufacturing tool that can change the way people design, co
create and distribute objects.

- The Bots are Coming

In the last two decades we have seen software and data change the fabric of
economics, and the advent of personal computing and the Internet enable many
new business models. However, the next two decades will be even more radical
as that wave of innovation shifts from the virtual domain to a physical
manifestation. Atoms are the new bits and the open sourcing and
democratisation of bot technology is allowing us to enter into an era of
personal production. And this talk will explore how 3D printing and additive
manufacturing are revolutionising production as we know it.

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

- DIYBIO - The Next Frontier

DIYBIOMCR is an public group based at MadLab dedicated to making biology an
accessible pursuit for citizen scientists, amateur biologists and biological
engineers who value openness and safety. This talk will give an overview of
the movement, and what is going on at MadLab involving not only biology but
also diverse fields such as hardware-hackers, artists, journalists and the
open-source movement.

Hwa Young Jung is a co-founder and a director of MadLab, a community centre
for creative, tech and science based the Manchester. Over 50 user groups
meet once a month, including DIYBIOMCR, initially a joint funded project
with MMU and the Wellcome Trust.

** Sunday Workshops

Workshops will be reasonably informal and shaped by the participants, and
details are subject to change depending upon the level of interest
expressed.

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!

- Practical IoT Applications with the Google ADK and Arduino

Hands on IoT building sessions that follow on from Saturday's ADK and
Arduino talks.

- Interfacing the Raspberry Pi to the World

Here you will learn how to connect a selection of devices to your Raspberry
Pi utilising the methods discussed during Saturday's talk. We will have a
few Raspberry Pi boards available for the workshop but please bring your own
if you were one of the lucky ones to have received one.

- Building GSM Networks with Open Source

A look at the practical steps involved in creating a low power GSM network
using open source technology.

Note: this workshop will be subject to a spectrum licence being granted.

- Practical 3D Printing

Details TBC.

Note:

* Please aim to arrive for 09:00 on the Saturday as the event will start at
09:30 prompt.
* A light lunch and refreshments will be provided on the Saturday.

                            Sponsored by:

        Capital SCF:  http://www.capitalscf.com
        DesignSpark: http://www.designspark.com
        Cosm:           https://cosm.com

                  OSHCamp kit bags provided by:

       SK Pang:      http://www.skpang.co.uk
       Oomlout:       http://oomlout.com