Last night I attended the Open Source Hardware User Group meet up in London. It's a regular free event where like minded people get together to talk about designing, building and using open source hardware. There were three very different talks given based around the theme of "Arduino: An open source hardware success story".
Current Cost Bridge - an Arduino based, hackable consumer device
The first talk given by Chris Dalby (@yellowpark) gave details of how Current Cost used Arduino to prototype and develop a device to take information from their energy monitor and send it to the Internet without needing a PC.
More info on the Current Cost Bridge
Concurrency.cc - parallel programming for makers and artists
Omer Kilic (@omerk) and Adam Sampson from Kent university spoke about an Arduino clone they had designed, built and will be putting into production soon that utilises the programming language Occam and an extensive library of ready made processes to speed up and simplify the software aspects of prototyping and development.
More info on Concurrency.cc
LilyPad - an Arduino based platform for wearables and e-textiles
The last talk of the evening was given by Rain Ashford (@rainycat) on the Lilypad Arduino development platform and how she was using it to create interactive electronic clothing. The whatever is a T-Shirt that has the words of "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star" embroidered on it with conductive thread and when each word is touched with the the attached stylus it would play the corresponding note from the well known song.
More info on the Lilypad Arduino board
Down the pub
Such is the tradition with events of this ilk, the talks were followed by a freeform conversation session in the pub. This is where the world changing ideas happen... Now if only someone could develop a piece of hardware for recording these ideas... For some reason I can never remember them in the morning!
Final thoughts
It was an enjoyable and insightful event with a very broad scope with regards to technical knowledge and experience. To me this proves that platforms like Arduino are ideal for turning great ideas into great things quickly, easily and without needing to be an electronics or software genius.
Bring on the next event!
Links:
http://oshug.org/
http://www.currentcost.com/product-bridge.html
http://concurrency.cc/
http://rainycatz.wordpress.com/
