The programme for this year's Festival Day has been announced and we're deeply honoured to once again be joined by a truly fantastic speaker lineup, featuring an opening keynote from Dr David Hartley FBCS, University of Cambridge, on the early history of computing in Britain — a topic which he can speak on with great authority and a field to which he himself has made many significant contributions.

Other talks that we are particularly looking forward to include one by Dr Suzie Sheehy on the secrets of particle accelerators, a talk from Kevin Murrell on the charmed life of the Harwell Dekatron Computer — a whirring, clicking and glowing delight of a machine — and a talk from Jenny List, contributing editor to a favourite read of ours, hackaday.com/.

Open Source Hardware Camp

The initial programme for Open Source Hardware Camp (OSHCamp) has also been announced, with 8 talks confirmed for Saturday 2nd September and 6 workshops confirmed for Sunday 3rd.

Notable talks include an introduction to the RISC-V free and open instruction set architecture (ISA), insights into the development of the BBC micro:bit, and a talk on Robot Operating System (ROS).

Workshops include one on OpenScope MZ and that will be run by engineers from Digilent, another on running NetBSD on embedded systems, and of course the ever popular kit assembly/soldering workshop for novices.

For full details see the event website and note that additional talks and workshops will be added in due course.

Thanks to Co-op Digital!

Finally, a huge thanks to Co-op Digital, who are supporting the festival this year. It honestly wouldn't be possible without the support of sponsors and we're incredibly grateful for this.

  — Andrew & Tim