News

Open Source Hardware User Group meeting #19 will take place on Thursday 31st May 2012.

For those that are new to hardware development it can prove a daunting prospect, and kits that address the needs of those with little or no experience in this area have a vital role to play. At the nineteenth OSHUG meeting we will be hearing about two such kits, one that was designed to support user-led smart home innovation and that was based around the Arduino platform, and an experimenters kit for the Raspberry Pi that is currently in development.

For more information and to register visit the OSHUG event page.

Issue 10 of the RS Components magazine, eTech, features an article I wrote on the need to move towards social hardware development.

It is increasingly rare to find end-to-end design and manufacture taking place under one roof. This “vertical disintegration” has led to a reconfiguration of the electronics industry value chain, creating a growing need for collaboration across many specialist firms and coordination across countries. As the intense pressure to specialise continues to drive outsourcing, now more than ever before, the development of hardware needs to become a social act.

Open Source Hardware User Group meeting #18 will take place on Thursday 26th April 2012.

At the eighteenth OSHUG meeting we will hear how open source collaboration is being used to transform data centre design, and how open source hardware and software have been used to enable low cost ARM development. It will also be the OSHUG 2nd anniversary, and two years on we are delighted to welcome back XMOS, who will be giving us an introduction to event-driven programming with XCore.

For more information and to register visit the OSHUG event page.

The H have published an article I wrote on building a GSM network with open source:

Over the last few years open source technology has enabled mobile phone networks to be set up on a shoestring budget at hacker conferences, on a tiny Pacific island and at a festival in the Nevada desert. Andrew Back takes a look at how this has been made possible and at what’s involved in building a GSM network using OpenBTS and OpenBSC…

I’ve been interviewed by EEWeb.

Open Source Hardware User Group meeting #17 will take place on Thursday 29th March 2012.

At the ninth OSHUG meeting we were given an introduction to FPGA development, and to the OpenCores community and the OpenRISC 1000 open source processor family. At the seventeenth OSHUG meeting we will be given a comprehensive introduction to the practicalities of programming your own open source FPGA system-on-chip.

For more information and to register visit the OSHUG event page.

Open Source Hardware User Group meeting #16 will take place on Thursday 23rd February 2012.

At the sixteenth OSHUG meeting we will be hearing about first-hand experiences of taking an open source hardware design from being a project to a product. With insights into prototyping, some of the manufacturing options available and the challenges that may be encountered.

For more information and to register visit the OSHUG event page.

The H published an article I wrote on five open source hardware projects that could change the world:

Open source hardware is increasingly making the news as companies such as Ford partner with Bug Labs to “advance in-car connectivity innovation”, thousands of US Radio Shack stores start stocking Arduino, and Facebook release the plans for energy-efficient data centre technology via Open Compute. But could it change the world? Andrew Back takes a look at five projects which just might …

Issue 9 of the RS Components magazine, eTech, features an article I wrote on The Google ADK. The abstract is as follows:

A year ago the question “Why would Google be interested in a microcontroller platform?” would have been met with blank expressions. Yet at the keynote for the Google I/O conference in May 2011 they unveiled the Arduino-based Accessory Development Kit (ADK) for Android. Why are Google supporting microcontroller development and why choose Arduino? In this article we’ll take a closer look at the ADK and consider the wider opportunity for Open Source Hardware (OSHW).

Open Source Hardware User Group meeting #15 will take place on Thursday 26th January 2012.

At the fifteenth OSHUG meeting we’ll be taking a look at wireless technologies. We will hear how you can repurpose low cost commodity equipment, we will be given an introduction to RF basics, and we will learn about the Contiki operating system.

For more information and to register visit the OSHUG event page.