CONNECT WEEK: SGVLUG: Rovers and FPrime and SCALE

We will have brief talks about the Southern California Linux Expo and about the open source projects developed at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Stick around to talk one-on-one with the guest speakers.

Agenda: 6:45pm Announcements

7:00pm Southern California Linux Expo Call for Papers and call for volunteers

7:15pm Michael Starch will give a tour of the newly released F' system reference. The F´framework was developed at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory to make spacecraft control and embedded software simpler to design, develop, and test. F´ was released as Open Source in 2017 and has continued to grow as a project and community.

7:30pm Lini Mestar and interns Victor Jimenez and Jack Cheng will talk about the current work they're doing with the JPL Open Source Rover at JPL. The OSR was developed by JPL summer interns as an inexpensive project for high school and college classes to exercise mechanical and electronics and software engineering. It is currently being developed by the https://github.com/nasa-jpl/open-source-rover, but the OSR has proved to be a useful robotics platform at universities and at JPL.

7:45pm Achille Verheye will talk about the Open Source Rover community and the work they've been doing on a complete redesign of the OSR.

8:00pm Lan Dang will be soliciting advice and interest in restarting work on the SGVHAK Rover, which was part of the pilot for the Open Source Rover, but has evolved to its own design.

8:05pm Break up into individual discussions

8:45pm Wrap up

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About the speakers

  • Michael Starch has worked at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory for over 10 years. His latest job is designing and building the software used to control JPL's spacecraft. He is also the community manager overseeing the development of the F´ software framework.
  • Lini Mestar is a Senior Research Engineer for the Artificial Intelligence, Analytics and Innovation Development Organization in the Information Technology and Solutions Directorate (ITSD) at NASA JPL. (See his official bio for more details.
  • Victor Jimenez is a second-generation Latino at East Los Angeles Community College passionate in research and design of mechanical vehicles. He is looking to transfer and obtain a Bachelor's of Science in Mechanical Engineering from Cal Poly Pomona.
  • Jack Cheng is a student at Pasadena City College and obsessed with robotics and technology. He spends all his free time designing and making things.
  • Achille Verheye is a Sr. robotics engineer at Freedom Robotics where he builds management and control software for fleets of rovers. He has designed and built several robots from scratch and maintains the NASA-JPL Open Source Rover in his spare time.
  • Lan Dang is a leader of the SGVLUG and its sister group, the SGVHAK hardware hacking group, mentors new hires at work as well as local high school and college students, and volunteers with various STEAM groups and events. She has a lot of experience herding cats.

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About Connect Week

Innovate Pasadena launched Connect Week as a festival of independently organized talks, workshops, and social events produced by independent organizers and hosted in venues all across Pasadena. During Connect Week we invite entrepreneurs, engineers, investors, scientists, educators, businesspeople, designers, and students to unite and celebrate the creativity and ingenuity that’s right here in our own backyard.

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NOTE: The SGVLUG meetings are primarily organized on Meetup. We have had regularly monthly meetings from July 2020 to current day, but we had not been doing a good job of keeping the website up-to-date.

Meetup Event Page


Web Exploits/CDA Section 230 and Free Speech

We are continuing to be virtual this month on Google Hangouts Meet. If you're new to this platform: https://support.google.com/a/users/answer/9303069

The Hangouts Meet link https://meet.google.com/myv-zoid-tgh

Please be patient, as Lan may have to approve each connection. Please turn on video during introductions. Mute unless you're speaking.

This month's topic is informal.

A brief survey of web exploits By Jackie B.

Jackie will cover a few basic exploits using PortSwigger Academy for labs.

Why saving Section 230 is crucial to protecting free speech online

By Jess Bermudes

In recent years, people from all areas of the political sphere have sought to curb the protections provided to online platform operators by Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act, including most recently a congressional bill that would have hampered end-to-end encryption and an executive order by President Trump to investigate and draft legislation to repeal the act itself. This is a mistake that will severely inhibit free speech online. We'll talk about the history of legislation in this area, common misconceptions about these Internet laws and what we can do to protect a free and open Internet.

Agenda:

6:45 - Introductions, chat

7:05 - Announcements.

7:15 - Talk starts

Meetup Event Page


A pragmatic approach to bash scripting

We are going virtual this month on Google Hangouts Meet. We'll see how things go with this format. If you're new to this platform: https://support.google.com/a/users/answer/9303069

Please be patient, as Lan will have to approve each connection. Please turn on video during introductions. Mute unless you're speaking.

This month's topic is informal.

Lan Dang will do a brief intro to shells and shell scripting before going through both easy and advanced uses of bash constructs to get work done. If you don't know anything, this will help you get started. If you know a little shell scripting, you might pick up some advanced techniques. This is also a good opportunity to ask questions. Lan spends most of her time on the Linux command line using advanced features of bash, awk, and sed.

Agenda:

6:45 - Introductions, chat

7:05 - Announcements, discussion about future LUG meetings.

7:15 - Talk starts

Meetup Event Page


Postprocessing videos for SCALE

We are going virtual this month on Google Hangouts Meet. We'll see how things go with this format. If you're new to this platform: https://support.google.com/a/users/answer/9303069

Please be patient, as Lan will have to approve each connection. Please turn on video during introductions. Mute unless you're speaking.

This month's topic is informal.

Many SGVLUG members volunteer with the A/V team at the Southern California Linux Expo. Part of what we do is enable video streaming of most of the talks on YouTube. After the conference, we try to edit the daylong streams into individual videos per talk. https://www.youtube.com/user/socallinuxexpo

Vincent Wong will go over his scale-av-cutter software, which was developed this year to support this post-processing. Depending on which A/V team members are available, we may talk more about the rest of the process.

Agenda:

6:30 - Introductions, chat

7:15 - Announcements, discussion about future LUG meetings.

7:30 - Talk starts

Meetup Event Page


General meeting

We will have our usual meeting. It will be at IHOP in Pasadena. Topic: a discussion of the LUG, thoughts on the future of LUG, and social time.

Covid-19: We thought about it, and the current (March 10) CDC recommendations are to not cancel events unless there is community transmission in your area. Pasadena, at this time (March 10), has one "case under investigation", which is not "community transmission".

Still, please remember: - Do NOT come if you or someone you know is vulnerable to the disease

  • Do NOT come if you or someone you know is sick, or showing flu-like symptoms

  • Wash your hands regularly

  • Feel FREE to skip this LUG should you choose

  • Watch for other announcements, the situation might change

Meetup Event Page


SCALE 18x

Join us at the SCALE! SCALE is the largest community run open source tech / FOSS / pro-EFF conference and expo in North America. It is family-friendly and caters to a diverse audience of IT professionals, hobbyists, educators and students. https://www.socallinuxexpo.org/scale/18x/

You can use promo code SGVLG to get 50% off the registration cost of the full conference pass.

You can generally get in for free if you volunteer with SCALE. See their website. Many of the SGVTech folks help out with the SCALE A/V team. If you're interested, please visit their website http://socallinuxexpo.github.io/scale-av-web/

We will have a community booth at SCALE for SGVTech, so please leave a comment if you are interested in helping to man the booth (Friday afternoon through Sunday afternoon) and represent SGVTech or any of its subgroups.

Also comment if your talk got accepted at SCALE :)

This year there will be a ton of presentations and workshops on topics like Container and Virtualization, Observability, Embedded, Kubeflow, Open Government, PostgreSQL, DevOps, LibreGraphics, MySQL, openSuse, Security, Cloud, Mentoring, Developer, Open Data, Open Source in Enterprise, SysAdmin, HAM Radio. There is a co-located Ubucon, Open Embedded Summit, DevOpsDay, OpenSUSE Summit

Meetup Event Page