[Wylug-discuss] OSHCamp 2019 (31/08 + 01/09) programme and Wuthering Bytes.

[Andrew Back]

Hello,

The programme has now been announced for Open Source Hardware Camp 2019,
with a total 12 talks and 6 workshops confirmed. Topics including
customising a RISC-V core, building an FPGA network-on-chip for a
Raspberry Pi Zero cluster, open source test & measurement, gearing up
for volume manufacture, next generation open source FPGAs, SMD
soldering, EMC design for open source hardware, and more!

Thanks to the generous support of RC2014, all delegates will also
receive an RC2014 Micro Z80 SBC kit upon registration on the Saturday.

As in previous years, there will be a social event on the Saturday
evening and OSHCamp returns to Hebden Bridge in 2019 and once again will
be hosted to coincide with the Wuthering Bytes technology festival.

  https://wutheringbytes.com/

We have some fantastic talks lined up for Festival Day, including a
keynote from JP Rangaswami plus talks on using anti-matter emitters to
map the human body, the incredible story of the Lyons Electronic Office
that put Britain at the forefront of business computing in the 1950s,
amateur nano and pico-satellites, and an introduction to Tesla coils —
with live demo! — to name but a few.

You're encouraged to check the website for details of other
participating events, as some of these are likely to be of interest. In
particular a free-to-attend workshop on Mon 2nd Sept, “From Hello World
to professional IoT applications with Zerynth”, where attendees will
each leave with a free PSOC 6 based microcontroller development kit
worth around £120.

Cheers,

Andrew

//

    Open Source Hardware Camp 2019

On the 31st August 2019 at Hebden Bridge Town Hall, St. George's Street,
Hebden Bridge, HX7 7BY, UK.

  Registration: http://oshug.org/event/oshcamp2019

Open Source Hardware Camp 2019 will take place place in the Pennine town
of Hebden Bridge, where it will return to be hosted for the sixth year
as part of the Wuthering Bytes technology festival.

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 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 from 8PM.

*** Saturday :: Talks ***

— Customising a RISC-V Core

This talk walks through the RISC-V ISA and the microarchitecture of an
open-source RISC-V core, to provide an understanding of how new
instructions can be added to the hardware.

RISC-V is an open Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) that can be
implemented freely. The ISA is modular, providing a base set of integer
instructions alongside standard extensions for multiplication, floating
point, atomic operations, and many other categories. In addition to
standard extensions, the ISA reserves space for user-defined extensions,
providing the flexibility to add custom instructions that fulfil any
purpose.

There are many open-source implementations of RISC-V cores - in this
talk we will look at a small core written in SystemVerilog that is
simple enough to be understood by those relatively new digital logic
design. We will walk through the different components of the core and
how they fit together to build a picture of how instructions are decoded
and executed, and go through an example of the changes to each component
needed to support a custom instruction.

* Dr Graham Markall is a software toolchain engineer at Embecosm, which
provides open source toolchain services. Most of his work focuses on GNU
toolchains (GCC, Binutils, GDB, etc.) and the use of cycle-accurate
simulation for pre-silicon toolchain development and testing. His
current projects focus on the development of customised toolchains for
various RISC-V systems, ranging from small, deeply-embedded applications
up to high-performance multicore systems.

— Building A Network on a Chip for a Raspberry Pi Zero Cluster

A Raspberry Pi cluster is a popular platform for experimentation and
learning about parallel computing. The tiny Raspberry Pi Zero has no
built-in ethernet capability, so a Pi Zero cluster needs an alternative
way to connect the CPUs. By implementing a specialised local network on
an FPGA chip, linked to a serial or SPI port on each CPU, we can avoid
the need for bulky ethernet cables and switches, and build a very
compact cluster with low cost and low power consumption.

* As a member of Oxford University's Programming Research Group in the
1980s, Richard Miller wrote software for parallel computing systems from
the transputer to the Cray T3D. More recently as a freelance software
engineer, he ported the Plan 9 operating system to the Raspberry Pi. His
current focus is on FPGA circuit design.

— From humble beginnings to manufacturing the HILTOP open source test
and measurement platform and the problems along the way!

The story of how three entrepreneurs with a vision and willingness to
succeed have carved out an open source test and measurement business and
the details behind the hardware and software problems they had with
early prototypes and product integration.

* Tim Telford is a hardware engineer with diverse skill set and highly
motivated self starter. Passionate about design detail and experienced
in high reliability solutions for the Aerospace, Defence, Telecoms and
Nuclear industries.

Development of test equipment and measurement systems for Rolls-Royce
Aerospace. Systems and Electronic engineering experience within the
nuclear industry. Design of commercial test equipment and high
integrity, high value projects.

Analogue and Digital board level design, Schematics, PCB, FPGA
development, DFM, DFT, Simulation, systems design and
integration/testing. Requirements management, FMEA, WCA & PSA analysis
techniques.

* Joe Burmeister spent nearly 12 years in the console and PC game
industry. He worked in a number of areas from graphics and animation
engine to art and animation tools, finally file systems and databases.

Joe comes from a multiple platform background, partly as consoles used
to not be PCs, but also having grown up on RISC OS (Acorn’s desktop ARM
OS), before moving to Windows for work then Linux for fun and finally
work. For the past five years Joe has done work on GNU/Linux, often on ARM.

Having started out bedroom programming, Joe is a strong believer that
everyone should have the option of source code and learning how things work.

— Linux on Open Source Hardware and Libre Silicon

This talk will explore Open Source Hardware projects relevant to Linux,
including boards like BeagleBone, Olimex OLinuXino, Giant board and
more. Looking at the benefits and challenges of designing Open Source
Hardware for a Linux system, along with BeagleBoard.org's experience of
working with community, manufacturers, and distributors to create an
Open Source Hardware platform. In closing also looking at the future,
Libre Silicon like RISC-V designs, and where this might take Linux.

* Drew Fustini is an Open Source Hardware designer at OSH Park, board
member of the BeagleBoard Foundation, maintainer of the Adafruit
BeagleBone Python library, and Open Source Hardware Association vice
president.

— Exploring the Gigatron TTL Computer

The Gigatron TTL computer is an open source computer constructed almost
entirely from TTL logic - without the need for a microprocessor. The
unique design combines 36 standard 74HCTxx TTL devices with ROM and RAM
chips to make a platform capable of colour VGA video and sound. The
machine can host 1980's style games and can be programmed in interactive
Tiny BASIC.

In the last year, Ken has explored the architecture of this machine and
achieves some performance gains by overclocking the cpu by over 200%.
This has yielded a platform that is rated at about 2 to 3 times the
performance of the classic 1980's machines, such as the C64, Spectrum etc.

Working with an unfamiliar architecture has meant creating some
programming tools and also simulating the machine behaviour on an ARM
processor.

Ken discusses the progress to date - and poses the question, "What would
computers be like had the microprocessor not appeared when it did?"

* Ken Boak began programming computers in 1979 at school, and has
continued to do so - somewhat infrequently over the last 40 years. The
Gigatron rekindles old memories of TTL logic and working with resource
limited computing. It illustrates just how much can be done with such a
minimal machine.

— Gearing up for Volume Manufacturing: Tales from China

The journey of a design from engineering sign-off all the way to
customer shipment takes many months of hard work and the smallest of
hiccups could translate to severe delays. With many actors involved, how
does it all work? What is involved in designing and shipping a consumer
product with high volume manufacturing in mind?

This talk will give the audience a behind the scenes look at what it
takes to ship electronics products at scale, particularly focusing on
the approach, dialogue and the processes required to run a successful
manufacturing project.

* Omer Kilic is an embedded systems engineer who works at the various
intersections of hardware and software engineering practices, product
development and manufacturing.

— Saving Your Electronic Conference Badge From A Life On The Shelf

As the creator of an electronic conference badge, you want to create
something memorable, a badge with Wow! factor which will be remembered
fondly and remain in use for years afterwards. Unfortunately so many
badges end up sitting in drawers gathering dust, never to see the light
of day again. Firmware,hardware, or documentation haven't been kind to
the conference attendees, and though you've given them an amazing piece
of hardware they just haven't been able to get a handle on it and use it
in their own projects.

This talk gives a few ideas about how that might be avoided, how an
awesome badge can avoid being an ignominious piece of e-waste and become
a valued piece of hardware used in projects for years afterwards.

* Jenny List is an electronic engineer and technical writer who spent a
long career in electronic publishing from CD-ROMs to dictionaries before
breaking out and forming her own hardware business, and writing about
hardware as a contributing editor for Hackaday.com.

— What's So Good About The Z80 CPU Anyway?

This talk will briefly cover the history of the Zilog Z80 CPU including
early development, some predictable places where it turned up, as well
as some more less expected uses. It will include a look at the
architecture of the Z80 itself and then an overview of how to build a
simple Z80 based computer and program it in BASIC. This will lead on to
a description of the kit in your goodie bag and a plug for the workshop
on the Sunday.

* Spencer Owen like many kids in the 80s, loved his ZX Spectrum and
other 8 bit computers. This set him up for a career in IT, and he worked
as a server engineer and network engineer for many years. In 2013, in a
bid to see if he really understood how computers worked at the lowest
level, Spencer went back to his roots built a simple Z80 based machine
on a breadboard. This was to mature in to the RC2014, which Spencer
started selling in his spare time in 2015. Within a few months it was
clear that the RC2014 was taking up more time than he had spare, so he
quit network job and started a retro computer kit company. Spencer is
now the largest supplier of Z80 computers worldwide.

— Next Generation Open Source FPGAs

After the success of Icestorm and the growth of the open source FPGA
ecosystem, work started on the next generation of open source FPGA
toolchains in 2018. This includes the next-generation place-and-route
tool nextpnr, designed to support a wide range of FPGA architectures as
well as producing higher quality results with less runtime. Combined
with Project Trellis which provides bitstream documentation for the
Lattice ECP5 FPGAs, a wide range of advanced projects such as
Linux-capable RISC-V SoCs with fast memory, Ethernet and video
interfaces are possible with an end-to-end open source flow.

This talk will introduce these new tools and their capabilities, as well
as discussing what lies ahead for open source FPGA tools, and how you
can get involved in this exciting new open world!

* David Shah is a engineer at Symbiotic EDA and a Electronic and
Information Engineering student at Imperial College London. He entered
the world of open source FPGAs by extending Project Icestorm, the iCE40
bitstream documentation project, to include the newer iCE40 UltraPlus
FPGAs. As well developing Project Trellis, he has been involved in the
development of a new open source FPGA place-and-route tool, nextpnr.

— Heterogeneous design for embedded development

Developing embedded solutions for today's challenging applications be
them IoT, consumer, automation or robotics requires a heterogeneous
technology approach involving hardware, FPGA, µC Firmware, and software
combined at multiple levels. Concepts such as Machine Vision/Learning,
Artificial Intelligence coupled with traditional embedded hardware and
software stacks require hybrid approaches to design and implementation.
I take a look at typical hardware being used and platform sweet spots I
have been identified. I also take a look at some emerging tools and
approaches for tackling these heterogeneous projects.

* Alan Wood has been working with parallel distributed programming for
several decades. His recent work includes smart grids, 3D printers,
robotics, automation and biotec diagnostics. His current research is
focused on machine learning for embedded automation using FPGA and µC.
He is a long term advocate of open source communities, a moderator (aka
Folknology) for xCORE, the co-founder of myStorm open hardware FPGA
community, as well as a co-founder of Surrey and Hampshire Makerspace.

— EMC Design for Open Source Hardware

Many Open Source electronics designs start off as cool development tools
and end up being integrated into commercial products due to their low
barrier to entry and ease of development.

Now your hardware becomes subject to various Regulatory requirements,
Electro-Magnetic Compatibility (EMC) amongst them. Whilst it might not
be viable for an Open Source project to undergo full compliance testing,
there are things that can be done to improve the EMC performance of your
system.

In this talk, James gives an overview of common problems encountered
during EMC testing of Open Source hardware and the fixes required to
resolve them. We'll also look at some key electromagnetic concepts
(don't worry, no scary maths) that will help you look at your designs in
a new light.

* James Pawson runs Unit 3 Compliance, a West Yorkshire EMC test lab and
consultancy that offers practical advice and EMC problem solving for a
wide range of electronics products.

— The complex and simplistic elegance of the 1-wire protocol

The Dallas 1-wire protocol is a two-way communications bus that allows
microcontrollers to talk to a number of peripherals using just a single
wire. It promises high data rates, a range of peripheral types and very
long wires all with the minimum of resource requirements and complexity.
This talk will explore how it works, how to implement it and how to
actually drive those busses made up of very long wires.

* Andy Bennett trained as an Electronic & Electrical Engineer and has a
background in consumer electronics, FPGAs, operating systems and device
drivers. For the last 10 years he has been building companies around
distributed database technology. He is currently Director of Register
Dynamics who help companies and governments apply their data usefully,
responsibly and ethically.

Andy is a Technologist that likes to inhabit the void between users,
software and the hardware that it all runs on. His love of ceramic taps
is well-documented.

*** Sunday :: Workshops ***

— Customising a RISC-V Core - workshop

Starting from an Open-source RISC-V core, add a new instruction to it
that you design! This workshop will walk through the process of getting
started with simulating an open-source RISC-V core and making the
necessary modifications to decode and execute a new instruction.

A processor that supports a new instruction is not much good if you
can't write any code for it, so the second part of the workshop will
focus on adding support into the assembler for your new instruction, so
that you can write a program using the instruction and see that it
executes correctly (or does not, and helps you to work out the bugs in
your implementation).

The tutorial materials will provide enough of the implementation and
sufficient guidance to be able to work through with a little experience
of Verilog and C++. For those new to Verilog, the materials from last
year's talk and workshop ("Introduction to cycle-accurate Verilog
simulation" and "Open Source RISC-V core quickstart") will be available
to provide a more accessible starting point.
Participants should bring:

- A laptop

* Run by: Graham Markall

— A Crash Course in KiCAD

A KiCAD basics workshop that will be a crash course covering the main
aspects of schematic capture, PCB layout and generating the
manufacturing outputs and 3D models etc.

Participants should bring:

- A laptop with KiCAD version 5 installed ready to go.

* Run by: Tim Telford

— Gigatron TTL Computer demo and hands-on

There will be a demo of the machine and an opportunity to do some
retro-programming.

* Run by: Ken Boak

— SMD Soldering

In this workshop we will introduce common SMD soldering techniques,
including stencils and solder paste usage in a hobbyist home-lab
capacity. The format is a series of demonstrations followed by
exercises. Participants will be provided with a kit of parts and will
assemble their circuits taking turns on the equipment provided. There
will be a mixture of hand soldering and hot plate/air reflow techniques
covered and a variety of SMD packages including some fine pitch
components will be used.

Participant requirements:

 - Some familiarity with soldering and electronics in general would be
beneficial.

* Run by: Omer Kilic

— Assembling Your RC2014 Z80 Based Computer

This workshop will take participants through all the stages of
assembling and getting started with the RC2014 kit. Some basic soldering
experience is assumed and soldering irons and tools will be available
for groups of up to 6 people at a time.

There will be a nominal charge of £5 per person.

Participants should bring:

- A laptop.
- An FTDI cable if they have one.

— Heterogeneous embedded hardware example walk through

A walk through a practical heterogeneous application and its
development, based around the combination of a microcontroller and an
FPGA along with mixed tooling.

* Run by: Alan Wood

NOTE:

- There are separate tickets for Saturday and Sunday.
- A light lunch and refreshments will be provided each day.
- Delegates will receive an RC2014 Micro upon registration on the Saturday
- Please aim to arrive between 09:00 and 09:15 on the Saturday as the
event will start at 09:20 prompt.