[Flux-announce] May 10 Meeting Announcement

[talk@flux.org]

It seems like stores put up holiday decorations earlier every year.
Well, FLUX is going to go beyond even that by starting the holiday
season this month!


TOPIC:  Solving Problems with FOSS - Using GNU/Linux to control holiday lights!
PRESENTER:  Don Law, Software Developer and Longtime FLUX Member!
DATE:  Thursday May 10, 2007
TIME:  6:30pm Refreshments & Networking, 7:00 Presentation begins
LOCATION:  Nova Southeastern University, in our regular room (directions)


IMPORTANT NOTE! This will be a two-part presentation with part two
covered next month at our June 14 meeting. In addition, we will
organize a Saturday event (date to be determined) where anyone
interested in doing this project themselves can get help with the
hardware!

ABOUT THE PRESENTATION:

Part One will cover the following topics...

Circuit design with gschem, a tool from GPL Electronic Design Automation (GEDA)
Circuit board fabrication with the pcb tool (from GEDA)
Using open designs from a community website (computerchristmas.com)
A Linux device driver from scratch
A sample C program that uses the above driver
Problem yet to be solved: how to fade
Show and tell with hardware component
About the speaker:

Don Law has been a Unix developer in South Florida since 1984 and has
worked on software for mobile phones, mainframes, high availability
clusters, operating systems, storage controllers, nuclear power
plants, missile simulators, and security appliances. He sometimes
modifies his computer systems with a hacksaw. He has been an
electronics hobbyist since middle school. To demonstrate his partial
lack of sanity, for fun in college he wrote an arbitrary precision
arithmetic program in assembly for a 12 instruction single register
CPU that required self-modifying code using punch cards. Don has a BS
in Math and Computer Science from Furman University and a MS in
Software Engineering from Carnegie Mellon and FAU.

See you this Thursday at Nova Southeastern University!