AROS Research Operating System

AROS is an open source re-implementation of Amiga OS 3.1. This year with the Directory Opus 5 bounty, the ABI V1 on-trunk merge and the release of Icaros v2, that will be covered, it has been a very significant year for the project.

Simone Bernacchia is a web developer with a background as graphic artist and musician on a couple of Amiga games. He also has a blog where he writes about retro Amiga games, protracker music composing and AROS.

Speaker: Simone Bernacchia

Meetup Event Page

Presentation Material: PDF


Amateur High Altitude Ballooning

This talk will cover the stories and engineering challenges faced by the Null Space Labs High Altitude Ballooning team and how they designed, analyzed, and flew hardware and software to survive the harsh conditions of near space. Recent flights include CUBEX, a payload capable of live image transmission, solar changing, power management, and position reporting, as well as the HABEXpico flight which flew half way across the United States.

Presenter: Arko

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Links mentioned in the talk:


Git and GitHub Tips and Tricks

Git is a popular distributed version control system, and GitHub is a platform for Git users to share their code and projects with others, among other things. Lan will share tips and tricks for Git and GitHub that will be useful to users of all levels. Feel free to come and share your own tips.

Presenter: Lan Dang

Meetup Event Page


PostgreSQL Authentication Mechanisms.

PostgreSQL is the only open source database that supports identifying users with either of the non-password standards, and the ability to do it on both Windows and Unix platforms. Henry Hotz will illustrate how to make use of each, and discuss the security implications of using better authentication mechanisms.

Presenter: Henry Hotz


Building Droplabs: A Business Model for the Open Source Community

Christefano Reyes and Lee Vodra will present: Building Droplabs: A Business Model for the Open Source Community

Founded in 2011, Droplabs is a coworking space, classroom and makerspace in Downtown Los Angeles. Our community is made up of members who support each other personally and professionally in a positive environment.

The coworking services and developer programs we offer, like Free Coworking Days, Coders with a Cause, Mobile Device Lab and Developer Boot Camps, were made possible because of our love of open source and a passion for learning.

We'd love to see more places like Droplabs, and we're happy to talk at SGVLUG about how others can replicate our success - and avoid or overcome the challenges we've had over the years:

  • Identifying a space to build a location-based community
  • Traffic and parking in Downtown Los Angeles
  • Making decisions in a consensus-based organization
  • Empowering members to become leaders
  • Disrupting the coworking business model
  • Paying the bills (rent, insurance, staff, etc.)
  • ... and still having fun!

Raspberry Pi Retro Camera

James McDuffie gave a presentation on his Raspberry Pi Camera project. He has hollowed out a film camera and put in a Raspberry Pi, camera, and some other electronics to make a retro-looking camera that actually takes digital photos -and- allows ssh access.

He had close-up pictures of the electronic components and detailed explanations of why he chose a particular component, why he modified it, and how it fit into the project. James' particular focus was on energy efficiency, so he went through a lot of trouble to modify the board to use 3.3v power from a cellphone battery. He also looked for low-power components and ways to save power. Because there is no leds or lcd, he used beeps to provide feedback from the camera during operation. He also has a six-position knob that allows him to do things like turn on the system, turn off the camera portion, or to send the halt command to the Raspberry Pi. There is room for more features.

He has set up a webserver on the Raspberry Pi using nginx and Flask. This allows access to the photos on the Pi. Aside from a serial connection and the controls from the camera, the only way to "talk" to the Raspberry Pi is through the webserver or ssh. The Raspberry Pi is set up to automatically connect to known networks in the wpa supplicants file. The actual camera operation is handled through a Python library called picamera.