Open Source Hardware User Group

Event #6

At Home (Tacticalendar, Denkimono Clock)

Open source hardware is not just about catering for niche applications and marginal use cases and many projects are concerned with creating devices for everyday use. For the sixth OSHUG meeting we'll have presentations on two projects targeted at the home and one that doesn't even involve electricity!

Tacticalendar

Tacticalendar is an open design project for a timeless 4-week-ahead rolling planner. New versions are managed through a github issue-tracker, laser cut from plywood and acrylic, articulated with duct tape, offered at a discount to release candidate testers and finally shared with premium customers. A continually evolving product, it is the first to market from the Enigmaker.org open prototyping experiment - a two-month project to prototype an invention every week in the public domain. Patent protection has been rejected in favour of a share-alike design and an open innovation community. Near-term feature testing includes Google Calendar synchronization using machine-vision and augmented-reality techniques.

Cefn Hoile sculpts open source hardware and software, and supports others doing the same. Drawing on ten years of experience in R&D for a multinational technology company, he works as a public domain inventor through Enigmaker.org, and an innovation catalyst and architect of bespoke digital installations and prototypes, working most recently with Tinker.it, BT, the BBC, EDF, Nokia. Cefn is a founder-member of the CuriosityCollective.org digital arts group, and a regular contributor to open source projects and not-for-profits.

Denkimono Clock

TheDenkimono Clock is a kit to build a countdown timer, fully functional alarm clock and stopwatch, that is not only fun to build but that also provides a practical device for everyday use. This talk will cover the initial design and build as a personal hobby project, to its redesign as a commercial kit and the associated sales, marketing and after-sales service. Initial concerns over open sourcing and how these turned out to be unfounded will also be covered.

Mark Longstaff-Tyrrell trained as an electronics engineer and was seduced by the money and glamour of software and began his career writing code for fruit machines in a shed in Wolverhampton. He subsequently progressed to developing for mobile handsets with extendible aerials in the late 90s, and then for stylus driven PDAs and currently develops software for Android devices.

Lightning Talks

Take the stage for five minutes and tell us all about your open hardware home hacks!

Note:

• Please try to arrive slightly early if possible, e.g. from 17:45.