Open Research Institute / Presentations

QSO Today Academy September 2023 video recording of "A Shortened HF Antenna" by @MichelleThompsonAbraxas3D and ORI.

Project roundup and Q&A
Summary of all the "big" projects at ORI.

FPGA Meetup, Matlab Class, Office Hours, new hardware, Opulent Voice, and BIRD-X CubeSat design

Paul KB5MU describes the adventure of understanding and fixing an unexpected failure in the Interleaver test of the C++ implementation of Opulent Voice, the baseline high-quality digital voice mode for the Phase 4 Ground and Space stations, including the Haifuraiya satellite project.

https://openresearch.institute
https://github.com/OpenResearchInstitute

Paul KB5MU describes the adventure of understanding and fixing an unexpected failure in the Interleaver test of the C++ implementation of Opulent Voice, the baseline high-quality digital voice mode for the Phase 4 Ground and Space stations, including the Haifuraiya satellite project.

Modern machine learning has origins in human learning, taking cues from human perception to build, train and evaluate machine learning models. As machine learning (ML) has begun to outperform humans in many challenging tasks, the focus has shifted from modeling humans to simply improving the performance of these ML models. We focus instead on what can be learned from human perception to improve these models and make them more transparent and understandable. With many applications of machine learning having real-world impacts on humans, we consider explainability essential for these models. In this talk, I will detail our approaches to explainable attribute recognition, prominent feature recognition, and face recognition. With each problem, we will highlight our influences from human perception.

Neuromorphic Computing promises orders of magnitude improvement in energy efficiency compared to the traditional von Neumann computing paradigm. The goal is to develop an adaptive, fault-tolerant, low-footprint, fast, low-energy intelligent system by learning and emulating brain functionality which can be realized through innovation in different abstraction layers including material, device, circuit, architecture, and algorithm. As the energy consumption in complex machine learning tasks keeps increasing exponentially due to larger data sets and resource-constrained edge devices becoming increasingly ubiquitous, neuromorphic computing approaches can be a viable alternative to a deep convolutional neural network that is dominating the field today. In this talk, I introduce neuromorphic computing, outline a few representative examples from different layers of the design stack (devices, circuits, and algorithms) and conclude with a few important challenges and opportunities in this field.

Presented by Srijan Kumar PhD

The safety, integrity, and well-being of users, communities, and platforms on the web and social media is a critical, yet challenging task. In this talk, I will describe the AI and machine learning methods, advancing natural language processing, graph machine learning, and adversarial machine learning, that my group has developed to efficiently fight malicious users and bad content online. I will talk about the four main pillars of my research: 1) Detection: developing multi-lingual, multi-modal, and multi-platform detection models; 2) Robustness: developing adversarially robust detection models; 3) Attribution: quantifying harms and impact of bad actors; 4) Mitigation: developing solutions and tools to mitigate online harms.

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0:09 History of Presentation and About ORI
5:38 Slides presented

Ham Expo presentation from September 2022 by Paul Williamson, KB5MU.

Transmitted voice can never be perfect. Some amateur radio voice modes, especially digital ones, are very much less than perfect. We propose and demonstrate a prototype of Opulent Voice, a higher bit rate digital voice mode that brings voice quality up to a new level.

Ham Expo presentation from September 2022 by Paul Williamson, KB5MU

Satellite communications systems are subject to a broad range of potential abuses. As satellite communications systems become more useful, they can even attract pirate users from outside the intended community. We propose a system for P4XT that securely authenticates every user on the uplink of a digital system in real time, so that the satellite owner's authorization policy can be enforced.

Open discussion at ORI office hours.

All of Open Research Institute's live demonstrations from DEFCON 30. Exhibit in @RF Hackers Sanctuary

See https://openrtx.org to support OpenRTX
see @M17 Project to find M17's videos.

Open Research Institute at DEF CON 30

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This talk is by Andre Souto (subscribe to his YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCqKVoVhkMJdDF4ThSSQ_vZw) presents a high level of the project then dives into how baseband scrambling, BCH encoding and LDPC encoding have been implemented. It also provides information about the how the DVB-S2 specifies these components.

Welcome to Practical Open Source Engineering: International Standardization and the M17 Protocol. My name is Michelle Thompson and I'm your host for today. Thank you for being here.

Practical Open Source Engineering is a series of talks from the San Diego Chapter of Information Theory Society of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, or IEEE for short. IEEE is the world's largest professional engineering society.

Open Research Institute, a non-profit dedicated to open source research and development of digital radio in all aspects, is the co-sponsor of the Practical Open Source Engineering series and is the fiscal sponsor of the M17 Project. To learn more about ORI's work, please visit openresearch.institute on the web.

M17 project development is the subject of today's talk. To find out more about M17, please visit m17project.org

Technologies do not grow and mature in isolation. To maximize utilization, organizations often turn to ecosystems of partners to drive collaboration and integration of these technologies. One structured and proven way of establishing such an ecosystem is via standardization. Standards provide vehicles to establish best-practices and define interfaces for compliance, allowing users to have confidence that the products they employ are safe, reliable, and are of good quality.

M17 Project has developed a new digital radio protocol for data and voice, made by and for amateur radio operators.

The protocol's voice mode uses the free and open Codec 2 voice encoder. This means there are no patents, no royalties, and no licensing or legal barriers to scratch-building your own radio or modifying one you already own.

This freedom to build, understand, and innovate is core to amateur radio, but has been missing from the commercially available digital voice modes. This is part of why amateur radio digital voice modes have largely stagnated since the 1990s and we're almost wholly dependent on commercial products that aren't well designed for amateur radio users.

Protocol specification can be found here: https://spec.m17project.org/

Erin Bournival is a Distinguished Engineer from the Office of the Corporate CTO at Dell Technologies.

She is an experienced Technologist with a demonstrated history of working in the Information Technology industry. Skilled in system architecture, Virtualization, Storage, the Internet of Things, Digital Twin, and National/International Standards development, Erin illuminates the process of international standardization for a promising open source communications protocol called M17.

Please welcome our speaker.

No description provided.

Jump to:
M17 - CODEC2 work https://youtu.be/dou6hyj7SIc?t=86
M17 - Beyond RRCs https://youtu.be/dou6hyj7SIc?t=2263
M17 - Module 17 https://youtu.be/dou6hyj7SIc?t=2580
OpenRTX - RC-1 Board https://youtu.be/dou6hyj7SIc?t=2766
P4DX - End to End Demo progress https://youtu.be/dou6hyj7SIc?t=4677
Remote Labs - Polar Codes with MATLAB workflow https://youtu.be/dou6hyj7SIc?t=7306

Open Source Cubesat Workshop 2021 Video Presentation about Open Research Institute narrated by Michelle Thompson W5NYV

Second Orbit Workshop after Debris Mitigation meeting with FCC on 28 October 2021.

Presentation about ORI with a Multimedia DVB-S2 Beacon Demo.

1) Ensure sufficient architectural clarity for daily development work
2) Ensure the technical roadmap is clearly defined into sub-projects and communicated with the wider community. In particular, we will aim for concise definitions of development steps that interested members (or prospective members) can get involved in.

Links mentioned today:

https://github.com/phase4ground/documents/tree/master/Engineering/Requirements/Architecture

https://github.com/phase4ground/documents/tree/master/Remote_Labs

Greetings from Open Research Institute!

We are a a non-profit research and development organization which provides all of its work to the general public under the principles of Open Source and Open Access to Research. We're primarily focused on digital communications work for the amateur satellite and terrestrial services.

We believe that the lack of accessibility and access is a threat to both critical infrastructure and our economy and we're doing our part where we can to address that. Our activities range from technical work to regulatory work to practical initiatives such as the Engineers General program, citizen science initiatives, and more.

We emphasize accessible, equitable, and open access to advanced technology for non-profit and educational purposes. Most modern communications technology is possible today from significant public support in the past. Someone has to close the loop and make sure we fully enable public and educational participation.

Directors decide things and set policy. Directors can be as hands on or as hands off in organizational activities as they prefer. Organizational structure is very flat. ORI consists of teams formed around projects and goals. We generally use Agile methods to organize work. Participants, once they agree to the developer and participant policies, which includes a code of conduct, then usually join a project. We publish work as it is created and give regular presentations at conferences throughout the year, like TAPR DCC.

So, what do we do?

FPGA design and development for microwave band multiple-access amateur communication systems. This work delivers a hardware prototype that can be integrated as a satellite payload or as a terrestrial central node. Work is carried out by an international open source team using resources like the ORI Remote Labs, and taking advantage of community assets like Vivado floating licenses, and more. The hardware prototype is on the microwave bands at 5 and 10 GHz. If you have the skills or interest, you are welcome to join.

ORI is the fiscal sponsor of the M17 Project. This exciting project offers an amateur open source VHF/UHF digital voice and data service that can be used today. Multiple hardware options are available or in rapid development.

AmbaSat Inspired Sensors. Taking the Ambasat open source satellite project, we add a microwave beacon to the sensor array, and develop a path forward for amateur deployment of the main board.

ORI does regulatory and legal work. On 2 September, we received the third and final, in a series, regulatory result from the US government on a year-long effort to free the amateur radio satellite service from ITAR and EAR. Open Source Satellite Work is Free of ITAR and EAR, and publication rules have been clarified. This is the best possible result. The entire body of work, from CJ request to advisory opinion, is donated to the amateur community at no charge.

https://github.com/phase4ground/documents/tree/master/Regulatory

Current regulatory and legal work concerns Debris Mitigation and open source.

The IEEE Space and Satellite Symposium is a half-day virtual event on 30 October 2021, and all recordings will be available. The theme emphasizes the intersection between amateur radio satellites and Information Theory, which involves the study of digital codes and modulation. IEEE Computer Society and Information Theory San Diego Chapters are co-sponsoring the event. Open Research Institute is the logistics sponsor.

Speakers so far will present work on QO-100 narrowband modulators, link budgets for a new approach to Ambasat, Information Theory with respect to music (!), and open source LDPC work targeting FPGAs.

Two pieces of space and satellite themed music will premier as part of the event, and there will be an Information Theory analysis of the work. If you have ever wondered what the connection between math and music looks like, then this is your chance.

Talks in development address the connection between amateur radio and the Mars helicopter team, the role of amateur activity in commercial work, and more.

Register at https://events.vtools.ieee.org/m/280774

Volunteer at https://forms.gle/4UXvYeszrU1rgJxH6

Event Page at https://www.openresearch.institute/space-and-satellite-symposium-the-role-of-information-theory-in-space-with-special-emphasis-on-amateur-radio-and-amateur-satellite/

ORI is funded by your donations, Conference Badge sales, Yasme Foundation, ARRL Foundation, and ARDC.

ORI works with TAPR in several areas, most visibly in support of DCC and at HamCation. TAPR is a wonderful organization to work with. We are looking forward to another joint forum in Florida. If it's in person then there might be a special event or contest. If it's online again, then you will find us there.

Want to get involved? Visit https://www.openresearch.institute/getting-started/

Thank you to TAPR DCC organizers for another great year of talks and open source amateur radio work.

Attending technical contributors: Jonathan Corgan, Steve Miller, Ed Wilson, Wojciech Kaczmarsk, Mike McGinty, and Rob Riggs from M17.

Support staff: Michelle W5NYV from ORI.

We have at least two technical questions that need to be answered.

One directly affects the protocol definition. There are differences of opinion on the end of stream, or EOS. There are multiple ways to do this and all of the different ways have assumptions, axioms, stipulations, and reasoning behind them. If all we do today is clearly identify several methods that can then be tested in simulation and over the air, then that is a huge step forward. Documenting all of the choices and showing the process of decision making is of great value to the community.

The other question affects usability, testing, verification and validation for the silicon path, and that is bit error rate testing. Team to discuss an approach to BER.

Scheduler for dynamic patching of task. It's based over FreeRTOS and it helps the user to dynamically update / patch the task without the need for system reboot.

A walkthrough of Jan King's Link Budget Spreadsheet. Given to Wally Ritchie and Michelle Thompson for Open Research Institute on 12 May 2021.

Many of us in the amateur satellite community are familiar with Jan King's link budget spreadsheets.

This version incorporates a large amount of new content. The project addressed in this version is Open Research Institute's microwave broadband digital DVB-S2/X transponder work. However, this spreadsheet can be adapted for many different projects.

The current version of this spreadsheet can be downloaded from here:

https://github.com/phase4ground/documents/tree/master/Engineering/Link_Budget/Jan-King-Link-Budgets

Note: This is a long video! This video explains the spreadsheet in detail. There's action items and changes that are discussed in the video that will appear in later versions of the spreadsheet.

For an introduction to the open source amateur satellite system that this link budget is being developed for, please see the introduction to this video presentation.

https://youtu.be/fCmzS6jBhHg

ORI's work is internationally developed and free for all to use. Our mission is to support organizations with advanced digital tools, techniques, and designs.

Learn more about ORI at https://www.openresearch.institute/

Comment and critique about this spreadsheet is welcome and encouraged. 

-Michelle W5NYV

Next steps for the Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) work at Open Research Institute (ORI). Recorded 3 April 2021.

https://github.com/phase4space/p4xdmt_hw_protoype
https://github.com/phase4space/receiver-development

Machine Learning and Ham Radio ID of HFVHF Signals Bob McGwier N4HY

Anshul Makkar presents his work on FreeRTOS dynamic Task Upload Iteration 1 Close Out

HamCation 2021 Update from ORI on recent technical and regulatory work, and upcoming technical demonstrations.

This is the TAPR/ORI intro for HamCation 2021.

Attendees heard about fun and exciting developments for amateur radio in space and space science from two non-profit organizations that work together to advance the radio arts.

Remote Labs are two physical lab benches. They have equipment for advanced digital communications design work. This equipment will be accessible online to anyone, anywhere that wants to work on open source amateur radio satellite service or open source amateur radio terrestrial engineering development.

The primary focus of the equipment list reviewed today is to support the design, verification, and test of the DVB family of links. DVB-S2, S2X, and T2 are all commonly found in amateur radio. DVB-S2X is the protocol family used by Phase 4 Ground and Space.

Open Source Satellite Work Has Been Determined to be Free from ITAR

AMSAT Symposium 2020 Proceedings Paper: https://www.openresearch.institute/2020/10/15/amsat-symposium-2020-video-submission-and-paper/

Original Press Release: https://www.openresearch.institute/2020/08/18/cj-determination-open-source-satellite-work-is-free-of-itar/

The Final Determination letter, Commodity Jurisdiction cover letter, and the application itself can be found at:
https://github.com/phase4ground/documents/tree/master/Regulatory

The summary of the Commodity Jurisdiction request will eventually be published by the State Department at:
https://www.pmddtc.state.gov/?id=ddtc_kb_article_page&sys_id=6ea6afdcdbc36300529d368d7c96194b

ORI’s developer and participant policies can be found here:
https://openresearch.institute/developer-and-participant-policies/

Open source tools and open source hardware should be used whenever possible. There must be a constant disciplined commitment to this as part of the practical approach to open source work. One of the most exciting areas of open source FGPA design right now is the emergence of a complete end-to-end open source toolchain for FPGA work.

See Project IceStorm here:
https://github.com/YosysHQ/icestorm

With software, using a completely open source toolchain is much easier to accomplish than it is with hardware. The CERN open hardware license was designed to address this exact issue, and it does so firmly and well.

Learn more about CERN open hardware license here:
https://www.ohwr.org/cernohl

This Final Determination is a landmark result in the commercial and industrial world as well as in amateur and academic circles. Goals for the amateur radio satellite service are the absolute minimum regulatory fear and risk for amateur volunteers, and a maximum amount of free and open international technical cooperation.

Thank you! Contact ORI with questions about this Commodity Jurisdiction Request at ori@openresearch.instiute

Presented by Jim Kulp at GNU Radio Conference 2020 https://gnuradio.org/grcon20

Software-Defined Radio (SDR) applications developed using GNU Radio are typically based on embedded heterogeneous systems with a variety of processors, FPGAs and transceivers. But the ability of a GNU Radio based SDR application to target a variety of different heterogeneous system configurations is limited and requires significant configuration-specific development work. The existing method for GNU Radio to support various hardware configurations is through specific software and toolsets that support specific vendors’ hardware.

An alternative, and better solution is for GNU Radio to have an open infrastructure that supports heterogeneous processing and a breadth of hardware and toolchains in order to avoid the limitations of vendor-based hardware and tool-chain solutions. The breadth of hardware that it supports must include multiple processor architectures (e.g. general, multi-core, manycore processors, GPUs), different FPGA and FPGA toolchains, and devices such as transceivers. The infrastructure must be well suited to maximize data transfer rates within heterogeneous systems and must maintain the GNU Radio component-based workflow, including the GRC application development environment.

OpenCPI is an open-source software framework for developing and executing component-based applications on heterogeneous embedded systems. The latest OpenCPI integration with GNU Radio, now provides the needed open infrastructure for supporting heterogeneous processing. This talk presents the current state of the GNU Radio integration with the OpenCPI infrastructure, some of which was previewed at GRCon17. It will discuss how the integration of OpenCPI with GNU Radio will allow GR blocks to have alternative implementations, such as C++ or VHDL, ready to run on CPUs or with different FPGA vendors and configurations. The OpenCPI framework selects the appropriate performance-oriented implementation of every block to be used depending on the available hardware and can execute an application across multiple, different SDRs.

This talk will address how OpenCPI provides hardware vendor independence and tool-independent infrastructure and development flow. It will present how the integration of OpenCPI with GNU Radio will enable applications to both exploit all the hardware as well as be easily ported to very different hardware or facilitate technology insertion.

The speaker for this talk will be James Kulp, the founder and architect for the OpenCPI project.

James Kulp has more than 30 years of experience in the real-time computing industry. Currently he is a Consulting Software Architect involved with several DoD related embedded architecture efforts. He previously was the architect for scalable heterogeneous multi-computer operating systems at Mercury Computer Systems, Inc.

Before joining Mercury, Mr. Kulp served as a product architecture consultant and board member of Surety Technologies, Inc. He was a systems software consultant for operating systems analysis and remote management at Digital Equipment Corporation; founder and vice president of Superscript, Inc., which made tablet-based systems; vice president of intelligent data acquisition subsystems technology for Event Technologies, Inc.; and founder and program manager at Symbolics, Inc. Mr. Kulp has also served as the computer services department head at the International Institute of Applied Systems Analysis, and was founder and vice president of technology for Graphic Management Systems, Inc.

Mr. Kulp attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he studied computer science, management, and architecture.

No description provided.

"How to Knit a Popular History of Media"

Kristen Haring
Auburn University
October 13, 2011

Abstract: As part of a study of the cultural history of binary systems, Kristen Haring undertook an unusual hands-on project. Her talk will explain how her knitting of Morse code serves to engage a general audience in discussion of communications theory, binary systems, and the history of media. She will also recount the surprising ways that physical production deepened her historical understanding. The talk will highlight the rich answers that can come from explorations that are at once artistic and technical, popular and scholarly, historical and contemporary.

(Co-sponsored by the Berkeley Center for New Media.)