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Wuthering Bytes 2016, OSHCamp, LoRaWAN & more!

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A Festival of Technology in the North of England, Friday 2nd – Sunday 11th September.

It's just over a month to go now until the fourth annual Wuthering Bytes technology festival held in Hebden Bridge (W. Yorks) and this year it's set to be even bigger and better than before, with over 70 talks being hosted over the course of 10 days, plus some great hands-on workshops also.

But before we take a closer look at what people can expect, as one of the festival organisers I'd first like to take this opportunity to thank DesignSpark and the other sponsors, who with their support have helped to make the festival possible and enabled us to secure some fantastic speakers.

Festival Day

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Project Nimbus laser zoopraxiscope

Proceedings will get off to a start on Friday 2nd September with the Festival Day, a celebration of technology in everyday life and beyond, looking to the future and past, with common themes including the intersection of technology and art, culture and society, and personal journeys in tech.

Previous speakers have included luminaries such as Sophie Wilson, inventor of the ARM processor, along with local heroes such as Ann Kilbey, who was programming mainframe computers back in the early 60s. Memorable talks also include one on rocket science which featured a live demo!

This year is no different and we will be treated to an opening keynote from Dr Lucy Rogers, on hacking robot dinosaurs. Talks also include one from Dave Lynch on Project Nimbus, which involved projecting lasers onto clouds from aircraft! Rachel Coldicutt will be telling us about how Doteveryone are prototyping for public good, Phillip Roberts will be revealing the history of the magic lantern, there will be a talk on (and demo of!) mass spectrometry — and much more.

You should definitely check out the programme.

Open Source Hardware Camp

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Thing Innovations RN2483-based Arduino shield

The first ever Open Source Hardware Camp (OSHCamp) was held back in 2011 and a one day affair. Over the years it has also grown, currently taking place over the course of a weekend and this year with 13 talks on the Saturday and 4 hands-on workshops on the Sunday.

The Internet of Things (IoT) is once again a major theme and this time in particular, LoRaWAN. On the Saturday there will be a talk from Andrew Lindsay on using it on Martha's Vineyard to build a “smarter island”, with greenhouses, aqua farms, buildings, trash and traffic being monitored. There will also be a talk from Mike Beardmore and Mark Hill on The Things Network (TTN). LoRaWAN and TTN both being hot topics right now and ones that I've wrote about here previously.

Other talks include one on open source digital cinema (hardware & software), indie manufacturing, LabRTC, scaling IoT with open data, making laser light synths (!) and FPGA programming.

In one of the workshops on the Sunday participants will assemble a LoRaWAN Arduino shield that is based around the excellent Microchip RN2483 module. Another will include a demo of the world's first ever open hardware 4K digital cinema camera, the Axiom Beta. Our trainee engineer and also a regular DesignSpark blogger, Chelsea, will be hosting a soldering workshop. And there will be an introduction to FPGA programming using the open source Yosys-based flow.

For further details see the programme (details of 13th talk to be added!)

Open for Business

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The BCS Open Source Specialist Group and Open Source Consortium will once again be hosting the Open for Business conference, with the theme this year being effective open source adoption. Speakers include Mike Little, co-founder of the immensely popular open source blogging/CMS platform that now powers a staggering more than 26% of the Web! Along with Maartec Ectors, Vice President of IoT at Canonical, Matija Šuklje, open source legal expert and others.

Open for Business 2016 is free to attend.

Open Smart Cities

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On Tuesday 6th September the Open Data Institute (ODI) Leeds Node are hosting a day dedicated to the exploration of open smart cities, with a show & tell and focus on collaborative work.

LLVM Cauldron

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Thursday 8th September will see the first ever LLVM Cauldron take place. Styled after the GNU Tools Cauldron, this is a one-day conference with a single talks track and a space for breakout sessions, birds of a feather, and potentially tutorials.

The meeting is free to attend and open to anyone whether a hobbyist, from academia, or from industry, and regardless of previous experience with the LLVM compiler and toolchain.

GNU Tools Cauldron

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Finally, the festival will draw to a close with the GNU Tools Cauldron, which runs over the course of Friday 9th to Sunday 11th September. This will see a truly international delegation come to town, many of which leading experts on GCC, GDB, binutils, runtimes and associated technologies.

Something for everyone

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Soldering workshop hosted by Chelsea at OSHCamp 2014

Over the course of the 10 days there should be something for just about everyone: from those with a passing interest in technology or perhaps its intersection with art and culture, through to those who work in hardware and software development (including serious compiler technology experts!)

Andrew Back

Top image: the Axiom 4K digital cinema camera

Open source (hardware and software!) advocate, Treasurer and Director of the Free and Open Source Silicon Foundation, organiser of Wuthering Bytes technology festival and founder of the Open Source Hardware User Group.
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