London Show, Sat 28th October 2017

The RISC OS London Show

Saturday 28th October 2017 – 11am–5pm

£5 on the door, under-16s free

http://www.riscoslondonshow.co.uk/

This year’s RISC OS London Show is now only three weeks away and it’s looking like being another bumper show! Just a few of the things to look forward to are:

- The return of the games arcade, run by the Archimedes Software Preservation Project. Try some classic games and see an enhanced version of Zarch on the big screen. Bring your (grand)children!

- R-Comp with the ARMX6 and TiMachine, and emulation solutions

- CJE’s growing RapidO range of desktop systems and the PiTopRO laptop

- ROOL with the latest OS and documentation updates

- Two new games from AMCOG, built using their software development kit

- Elesar will have CloudFS and FontDirPro, plus a mystery new product

- Chris Hall with the latest version of his Pi based GPS unit using PaPiRus and OLED displays

- Neil Fazakerley will be demonstrating robot interfacing and control

- The Acorn and BBC User Group with amazing addons and new software for Acorn Atoms, Beebs, and Electrons

- Plus all the latest releases of Organizer, RPCemu, Impression-X, etc

The charity stand will be raising money for Combat Stress so bring along your old Acorn hardware and software, and pick up some bargains, all for a good cause.

There will also be a full set of theatre presentations, details to be announced soon. Keep an eye on the show website for the latest news.

Bryan.

Very pleased to announce that this year we have the much anticipated return of Martin Wuerthner :-)

We (R-Comp) should also have three significant software releases ready too, this year (if all goes to plan). And maybe a few surprises ;)

The show is next Saturday, hope you are all prepared!

The full list of theatre talks is now up on the website. We have eight speakers this year, including two newcomers – http://www.riscoslondonshow.co.uk/theatre.php

In other news, Sine Nomine have teamed up with RISCOSbits and will be announcing a mystery new product at the show, and 3rd Event will have a new version of their Advanced Music Creation System.

Has anyone used the Bus link from Heathrow airport – how long does it take – and cost?

Is there a map of where the busses come and go at Heathrow airport?

Thanks

Has anyone used the Bus link from Heathrow airport – how long does it take – and cost?

According to TFL, around 30 minutes on the 490 or 40 minutes on the 285. You’ll either need a (visitor) Oyster Card, travelcard or Contactless bank card to travel, as London’s buses don’t take money on board.

Is there a map of where the busses come and go at Heathrow airport?

Does this one help?

This page might also help: put in 285 and 490 as per the show website, then download the PDFs that interest you. Although, as I’ve just done that myself:

• Buses from Heathrow Terminals 2&3
• Buses from Heathrow Terminal 4
• Buses from Heathrow Terminal 5
• Buses from Heathrow Airport North
• Buses from North Feltham
• Buses from Feltham

The hotel is near the bottom of the North Feltham map, IIRC.

There will be a new version of RiscOSM available at the London Show. The big new feature is rendering of contour lines, which we know a lot of people will find useful. Currently we only have contour data for Great Britain, but we hope that we can make contour data for other counties available later this year.

As usual we will have newly converted map data for various countries available on SD cards and USB sticks. If you bring along old cards or sticks you have previously purchased from us then we’ll be able to knock something off the cost of new ones.

The latest version of SatNav (1.90) will be demonstrated at the show.

I started to write some software in September 2016 to interpret the output from a GPS module and present it as a desktop application, called SatNav. It could send data to RiscOSM to display a map of where it was, updating its position. Clearly a monitor would not be a sensible thing to carry around with such a device, but a small touchscreen would be OK. Other displays, such as an LCD 16×2 text display, a 128×64 pixel OLED display and even a 200×96 pixel electronic ink (PaPiRus) display were also added to SatNav’s portfolio, being controlled either via IIC or SPI pins on the Raspberry Pi.

A system of Wimp messages were jointly developed with Sine Nomine to improve the data exchange and a lot of work was put into exactly which items of data should be recorded when logging a journey (trackers fitted to cars for insurance companies can be very poor at identifying position if satellite reception quality varies).

Battery life has been extended in two ways: by time slicing its operation (15s on 10 min off for example) using a Witty Pi and by float charging an internal LiPo battery using a power boost board and an external power source (powerbank or mains adapter). A circuit to control power by push button so that power was only removed under software control (i.e. so that no writes to SD card were occurring) was added.

The development of SatNav has been described in Archive Magazine 24:2 and 24:3 with the third part expected in 24:4. Its history is also available on line here

That latest version (1.90) will be on show with further improvements in the following areas:
- a larger OLED display;
- spurious movement shown in the odometer due to inherent GPS inaccuracy has been improved;
- a single power bank as sole source of power has been replaced by internal and external power sources;
- a smaller and stronger case has been provided;
- any errors that occur are now shown on the OLED display (with no visible desktop the error box could not be seen);
- a single ‘on’ button had advantages for simplicity but the surge reset the real time clock to January 2100, now overcome;
- shut down was controlled by software (so was avoided whilst writing to the SD card) but just removed power leaving the CMOS ‘last shutdown’ time unchanged, now overcome;
- the logging format had been designed with debugging in mind rather than usefulness, it now uses GPX format and is thus internationalised;
- still no means existed of external communication except by plugging in a USB pen drive but a *Particle proton is being examined.

These improvements will be described in an article for Archive (part 4) but I will be able to explain these at the show. A description of what will be on show is given here and includes a 4″ × 3″ × 1½" unit with push button on/off control and a larger unit with timed on and off cycling as well as a breakout board circuit to show how the various displays and power control circuits are laid out.

@Collin
I have used the 285 bus as a link in my journey from Surrey to Heathrow airport via Feltham railway station, but not for the RISC OS Show. It takes about half-an-hour. The buses are about every 12 minutes. However, you need to check which terminal you are using at the airport, because they don’t do the same terminals. The 285 uses the Central Bus Station at Heathrow which serves terminals 1, 2 and 3 while the 490 serves terminals 4 and 5. The 490 should take about half-an-hour too. You can get out at Feltham station if you miss the previous Fern Grove stop which is slightly closer.

There is a show report on Iconbar at http://www.iconbar.com/articles/RISC_OS_London_Show_2017/index1387.html

Thanks for posting. It’s good to be able to read the news “on time” rather than having to wait a few days for it :)

Yes thanks for the quick post. Living in Australia makes it a bit hard to get to the show but thanks to Mark and also Vince, the posts are the next best thing.

I am impressed ROOL have already sent me the dde update I purchased at the show. They obviously put the extra uk hour from clocks going back to good use

Thanks for all the effort – for the London Show.

Very interesting – even for one’s that couldn’t go.

The RISCOSitory show report is now online – not quite as long a turnaround as the other shows of 2017! :)

I need to do a massive speed-read of all my various unread forums and compile a mega-snippets post (or possibly divide it into a few posts), and then I’ll start thinking about the 2017 awards; the poll is going to be late, but it will happen.