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The second annual Open Source Hardware Camp take place in the Pennine town of Hebden Bridge in the North of England, with ten talks on the Saturday and four hands-on workshops on the Sunday.

It's now coming up to a week since this year's OSHCamp and I have to say that my head has only just stopped spinning!

From the Internet of Things to biology

Dr Jeremy Bennett of Embecosm was compère for the Saturday and Adrian McEwen of Internet of Things (IoT) consultancy, MCQN, was up first to tell us about his experiences of building the IoT and working with the Arduino platform.

Adrian McEwen

Following on from Adrian was Paul Tanner of Virtual Technologies, who gave us an insight into the practicalities of developing hardware and software with the Google Android Accessory Development Kit.

Seasoned embedded Linux developer, Melanie Rhianna Lewis, took to the stage next and walked us through the process of doing embedded development on Linux and how to go about setting up the required toolchains etc.

Melanie Rhianna Lewis

We then broke for refreshments and everyone had chance to visit stands with projects that included RepRap 3D printers, wearable technology and IoT projects.

After the break Omer Kilic did an excellent talk on interfacing the Raspberry Pi through its P1 connector, before Rain Ashford took to the stage and had us all captivated with her experiences of creating wearable technology that is able to sense the environment.

Afternoon proceedings got off to a start with a presentation from Tim Panton, who had recently returned from the Burning Man festival which is held at Nevada's Black Rock Desert and and where he had been involved in running a GSM network powered by open source technology. Tim took us through the OpenBTS architecture and practicalities of operating a small scale mobile network, before outlining just some of the opportunities that this technology presents.

Edward Strickland was up after Tim and told us about his work on developing an open source UAV airframe for the OpenRelief project, the cost of materials for which comes in at around £500 and is orders of magnitude less expensive than proprietary alternatives.

The OpenRelief open source UAV

Following on from the afternoon break we had a talk from professional product designer, Mark Gilbert, entitled the 3D Printed Revolution. In which he took us through the evolution of 3D printing, the different technologies available and his experiences of using these.

Alan Wood is another advocate of 3D printing and other enabling technologies for micro-manufacture. However, his talk, The Bots are Coming, was rather more humorous in nature and explored the development of small scale CNC driven tools, or “bots”, from the playful perspective that they're plotting to take over the world. One of highlights of which being his suggestion that there exists a “3-axis of evil”, namely X, Y and Z!

In the final talk of the day we heard from MadLab's Hwa Young Jung on the DIYBIO movement. Which may seem like something of a diversion for a group concerned with hardware, but there an increasing number of projects creating open source alternatives to expensive proprietary lab equipment, and the movement shares the same core open source principles.

Showing and telling

Participation plays a large part at events such as OSHCamp and many people brought their own projects along to demonstrate during the breaks.

The wireless display from the OpenEnergyMonitor project

Omer Kilic and SK Pang's Ponte hardware, which builds a bridge between Arduino and Raspberry Pi

Cefn Hoile demonstrates the Shrimping project

Getting hands-on

The conversations continued well into the evening at a social event held in a local pub, and I suspect that many were glad that the next day did not start until 10AM!

The were four workshops on the Sunday and these ran in parallel, with the Raspberry Pi workshop run by Omer Kilic and Melanie Rhianna Lewis by far the most popular (no surprises there).

I took part in the open source GSM workshop where we were very fortunate to have Iain Sharp participating, who had worked with GSM from the early days and spent around 20 years working on ETSI/3GPP standards. The workshop got off to a start with Iain taking us through the GSM architecture, before Tim explained where OpenBTS fits in and then I did the same for OpenBSC.

Tim Panton brought along OpenBTS development hardware from Range Networks and I had been loaned hardware for OpenBSC by sysmocom. We had secured a non-operational spectrum licence from Ofcom and were able to set up local development networks using both OpenBTS and OpenBSC, enabling us to go through configuration and to explore the protocols in a little detail.

A call between two handsets via the local GSM service

There was also a 3D printing workshop and a joint workshop on building the IoT and Google ADK. However, I didn't get the opportunity to spend any time with these, although they appeared to be well attended and I heard excellent feedback from those who took part!

Looking forward to next year

We had around 100 taking part in this year's OSHCamp, I feel privileged to have met so many incredibly smart and enthusiastic people, and it's difficult to put into words the palpable sense of energy present. There has already been some excited discussion about what we'll do next year and I'm sure it will be every bit as enjoyable and informative.

Lastly, a huge thanks to the sponsors that provided their support and made OSHCamp possible: DesignSpark, Capital SCF and Cosm. With many thanks also to Oomlout and SK Pang for providing the extremely cool OSHCamp kits and enamel badges!

Andrew Back

Top image: Rain Ashford's talk on Sensing Wearable Technology.

 

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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