Yann Sionneau's stories

I've been invited by Andrew Back to give a talk during the OSHUG #8 to present the Milkymist project.

OSHUG means "Open Source Hardware User Group". It's located in London.

The OSHUG has already done 7 events like this one, too bad I couldn't come, they looked all very interesting, here is the list of their events : http://oshug.org/

I have to say those guys are really welcoming and friendly !

You can find the slides I used there and the sources of the slides there, the slides are under CC-by-SA license.

I met really interesting and nice people at this OSHUG event, it was really great !

I met Ömer Kiliç (blog, twitter), hardware designer of the concurrency.cc, an "arduino like" board.

The design adds a connector to wire a battery and several colored LEDs. But what's really interesting about the concurrency.cc arduino is the way of programming it

You can program it using the occam-π programming language. A book has been written about how to program arduinos with this language.

The nice thing is it's a concurrent language, like in HDL. You can tell the arduino to execute several statements in parallel.

for example just do

PAR
  blink (11 , 500)
  blink (12 , 500)

And two LEDs are gonna blink simultaneously at the same frequency. Brilliant isn't it ? And bloody easy !

blink() is an example, you can put whatever function you want, f() ... g() ... etc !

I also met Nick Ager the director of get it made , his web site looks great, especially the video which is really funny :)

I met a lot of other really interesting people, I don't remember all the names (sorry guys, I have a really bad memory for names ! I remember the two I quoted because they gave me their business card !!).

I've been told about Xmos chips and the programming style which is highly parallel too and event driven and resembles a lot the FPGA programming style.

I really enjoyed the OSHUG #8, I am blogging to report about my experience at this event and to thank everyone who came to listen to my talk and the guys who did the organization (mostly Andrew I suppose).

Very nice meeting you guys, see you around :)

Some pictures of the event on flickr : 

• http://www.flickr.com/photos/psd/5517276387/
  
• http://www.flickr.com/photos/37996583811@N01/5515334007/
  
• http://www.flickr.com/photos/37996583811@N01/5515329981/
  
• http://www.flickr.com/photos/37996583811@N01/5515334007/
  
• http://www.flickr.com/photos/37996583811@N01/5515332931/

I let you imagine what the next goodie is all about and how to use it ;) (Yes it's actually pined on my coat from now on ;))