Alasdair Allan

Alasdair Allan

Greater Exeter Area
2K followers 500+ connections

About

Alasdair Allan works as a consultant and journalist focusing on open hardware, machine…

Experience

  • Hackster.io Graphic
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    Exeter, United Kingdom

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    Exeter, United Kingdom

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    London

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    New York

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    Exeter, United Kingdom

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    Chelmsford, United Kingdom

Education

Publications

  • The Kerbal Player Guide

    O'Reilly Media

    Kerbal Space Program (KSP) is a critically acclaimed, bestselling space flight simulator game. It’s making waves everywhere from main-stream media to the actual space flight industry, but it has a bit of a learning curve. In this book, five KSP nerds—including an astrophysicist—teach you everything you need to know to get a nation of tiny green people into space.

    KSP is incredibly realistic. When running your space program, you’ll have to consider delta-V budgets, orbital mechanics…

    Kerbal Space Program (KSP) is a critically acclaimed, bestselling space flight simulator game. It’s making waves everywhere from main-stream media to the actual space flight industry, but it has a bit of a learning curve. In this book, five KSP nerds—including an astrophysicist—teach you everything you need to know to get a nation of tiny green people into space.

    KSP is incredibly realistic. When running your space program, you’ll have to consider delta-V budgets, orbital mechanics, Hohmann transfers, and more. This book is perfect for video game players, simulation game players, Minecrafters, and amateur astronomers.

    Other authors
    See publication
  • Make: Bluetooth

    Maker Media

    This book is where your adventures with Bluetooth LE begin. You'll start your journey by getting familiar with your hardware options: Arduino, BLE modules, computers (including Raspberry Pi!), and mobile phones. From there, you'll write code and wire circuits to connect off-the-shelf sensors, and even go all the way to writing your own Bluetooth Services. Along the way you'll look at lightbulbs, locks, and Apple's iBeacon technology, as well as get an understanding of Bluetooth security--both…

    This book is where your adventures with Bluetooth LE begin. You'll start your journey by getting familiar with your hardware options: Arduino, BLE modules, computers (including Raspberry Pi!), and mobile phones. From there, you'll write code and wire circuits to connect off-the-shelf sensors, and even go all the way to writing your own Bluetooth Services. Along the way you'll look at lightbulbs, locks, and Apple's iBeacon technology, as well as get an understanding of Bluetooth security--both how to beat other people's security, and how to make your hardware secure.

    Other authors
    See publication
  • Learning iOS Programming

    O'Reilly Media

    Now in it's 3rd edition. Get a rapid introduction to iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch programming. With this easy-to-follow guide, you’ll learn how to develop your first marketable iOS application, from opening Xcode to submitting your product to the App Store. Whether you’re a developer new to Mac programming or an experienced Mac developer ready to tackle iOS, this is your book.

    See publication
  • Distributed Network Data

    O'Reilly Media

    Build your own distributed sensor network to collect, analyze, and visualize real-time data about our human environment—including noise level, temperature, and people flow. With this hands-on book, you’ll learn how to turn your project idea into working hardware, using the easy-to-learn Arduino microcontroller and off-the-shelf sensors.

    Other authors
    See publication
  • Geolocation in iOS

    O'Reilly Media

    Take advantage of iPhone and iPad sensors and advanced geolocation technologies to build state-of-the-art location applications. In this hands-on guide you are taken deep inside Apple’s Core Location framework, Map Kit, and other iOS tools, using illustrative examples and sample Objective-C code. Learn how to build location-aware apps that detects hardware features and then adjusts your app’s behavior.

    See publication
  • iOS Sensors Apps with Arduino

    O'Reilly Media

    Turn your iPhone or iPad into the hub of a distributed sensor network with the help of an Arduino microcontroller. With this concise guide, you’ll learn how to connect an external sensor to an iOS device and have them talk to each other through Arduino. You’ll also build an iOS application that will parse the sensor values it receives and plot the resulting measurements, all in real-time.

    See publication
  • Basic Sensors in iOS

    O'Reilly Media

    What really sets the iPhone apart from laptops and PCs is its use of onboard sensors, including those that are location-enabled. This concise book takes experienced iPhone and Mac developers on a detailed tour of iPhone and iPad hardware by explaining how these sensors work, and what they're capable of doing.

    See publication
  • Learning iPhone Programming

    O'Reilly Media

    Get the hands-on experience you need to program for the iPhone and iPod Touch. With this easy-to-follow guide, you'll build several sample applications by learning how to use Xcode tools, the Objective-C programming language, and the core frameworks. Before you know it, you'll not only have the skills to develop your own apps, you'll know how to sail through the process of submitting apps to the iTunes App Store.

    Whether you're a developer new to Mac programming or an experienced Mac…

    Get the hands-on experience you need to program for the iPhone and iPod Touch. With this easy-to-follow guide, you'll build several sample applications by learning how to use Xcode tools, the Objective-C programming language, and the core frameworks. Before you know it, you'll not only have the skills to develop your own apps, you'll know how to sail through the process of submitting apps to the iTunes App Store.

    Whether you're a developer new to Mac programming or an experienced Mac developer ready to tackle the iPhone and iPod Touch, Learning iPhone Programming will give you a head start on building market-ready iPhone apps.

    See publication
  • Learning ESP8266

    O'Reilly Media

    In just a few short years, everything you wear or carry will be smart and network-enabled. But why wait? Build your own Internet of Things at home with the fully programmable ESP8266 microcontroller with onboard WiFi. This hands-on guide shows you how. You’ll learn not only how to build several network-enabled devices around the house, but also how to connect them together into your own cloud-based IoT network.

    See publication

Projects

  • .Astronomy

    - Present

    A conference series and community website that aims to bring together the international community of astronomy researchers, developers, educators and communicators to showcase and build upon web-based projects, from outreach and education to research tools and data analysis.

    Other creators
    See project
  • Benchmarking Machine Learning

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    Looking at machine learning on the edge, a series of articles trying to answer some of the questions that people have been asking about inferencing on embedded hardware.

    See project
  • Data Sensing Lab at Google I/O 2013

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    The O'Reilly Data Sensing Lab deployed over four hundred sensor motes—with over four thousand data streams running over Device Cloud by Etherios—to continuously monitor temperature, humidity, pressure, light, air quality, motion, and both RF and audio noise levels in San Francisco's Moscone Center during Google I/O.

    Other creators
    See project
  • The Thing System

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    Your life and your house went from one computer to an Internet of things. From tablets to lightbulbs, from sensors to media boxes, everybody gets their own Internet. Today, you have to fight your things. They don't talk to each other, the apps don't work, it's a tower of babel. Our solution — the Thing System — is open source. We'll talk to anything, you can hack the system, it has an open API.

    Other creators
    See project
  • Data Sensing Lab

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    Instrumenting the O'Reilly Strata conferences to give you a taste of your life in a more measured and quantified world. By instrumenting the conference environment with basic off-the-shelf sensors and mesh networking, we will observe and report on the conference, and generate interesting sociological data from the distributed sensor network.

    Other creators
    See project
  • The First Fifteen Minutes

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    High-caffeine tools for brewing new ideas. Companies spend a lot of time, money, and effort to improve the user experience of fickle consumers. Yet strangely they pay very little attention to the user experience of their products and services when their customer is another business. However, when new thoughtfully designed tools come along, they completely disrupt the way products and services are designed, developed, and brought to market. These new tools reduce the friction of innovation. They…

    High-caffeine tools for brewing new ideas. Companies spend a lot of time, money, and effort to improve the user experience of fickle consumers. Yet strangely they pay very little attention to the user experience of their products and services when their customer is another business. However, when new thoughtfully designed tools come along, they completely disrupt the way products and services are designed, developed, and brought to market. These new tools reduce the friction of innovation. They shift the effort from figuring out how a tool works to actually solving the problem at hand. You’d think that good tool design would be best practice, but it is not. Some tools set the standard for usability, showing transformational potential for the way work gets done. Some tools suck the life out of their users and stop projects in their tracks. How do we know which is which before investing time and energy into a particular tool? What is the DNA that defines a great tool versus a torture device? We can answer these questions by exploring what a tool can do for a user in the user’s first fifteen minutes.

    Other creators
  • iPhone Tracking

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    Uncovered a bug that left an unencrypted file on your desktop computer containing the approximate locations and times for your last year's travel after you synced an iPhone. The demonstration application received over 2 million downloads, and became a major international news story. It subsequently emerged from the Snowden leaks that the NSA had been making use of the flaw.

    Other creators
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  • Starlink Software Collection

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    The Starlink Software Collection (Draper 2005) is a large set of data-reduction applications, written over about two decades in a variety of languages. It runs on three different Unix platforms and contains around 100 separate software items, totaling 2.5 million lines of code

    The Starlink Project was a long running UK Project supporting astronomical data processing. It was shut down in 2005 but the software continues to be developed at the Joint Astronomy Centre and is open source.

    Other creators
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  • eSTAR Project

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    The eSTAR Project was a programme to build an intelligent robotic telescope network. It was a joint project between the Astrophysics Research Institute at Liverpool John Moores University, the Joint Astronomy Centre in Hawaii, and the Astrophysics Research Group of the School of Physics at the University of Exeter.

    Other creators
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  • ORAC-DR

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    ORAC-DR is an automated astronomical data reduction pipeline that reduces data from various telescopes, including UKIRT, JCMT, and the AAT. ORAC-DR can reduce sub-millimetre and infrared data taken in a wide variety of modes, including standard imaging and spectroscopy, polarimetry imaging and spectroscopy, and integral field spectroscopy.

    Other creators
    See project
  • Starlink Perl Modules

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    The Starlink Perl Modules are a Perl interface to and in support of the Starlink Software Collection, and are used by the ORAC-DR pipeline. The Starlink Project was a long running UK Project supporting astronomical data processing. It was shut down in 2005 but the software continues to be developed at the Joint Astronomy Centre and is open source.

    Other creators
    See project

Honors & Awards

  • Top 100 IoT Influencer

    CBT

    Was named one of the top 100 influencers to follow on the Internet of Things, https://www.cbtechinc.com/cbt-iot-awards-2022/.

  • Top 20 IoT Influencer to Follow

    insight.tech

    Was named one of the top twenty IoT influencers to follow in 2020, https://www.insight.tech/5g/20-iot-twitter-influencers-to-follow-in-2020.

  • Top Smart Home Journalists

    Your Smart Home Guide

    Was named one of the top smart home journalists by Your Smart Home Guide, https://yoursmarthomeguide.com/news/top-smart-home-journalists-2019.

  • Top 50 IoT Influencer to Follow

    IoT For All

    Was named one of the top 50 influencers to follow on the Internet of Things, https://www.iotforall.com/top-iot-influencers/.

  • Top 30 influencer on the Internet of Things

    relayr

    Was named one of the top 30 influencers amongst individuals engaging in the business of the Internet of Things, http://blog.relayr.io/top-30-iot-influencers.

  • Top Journalists to follow in the Internet of Things

    Huffington Post

    Named one of the top journalists, analysts, and thought-leaders in the Internet of Things to follow, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/57d2ca39e4b0273330ac3d60.

  • Top 100 Influencer on the Internet of Things

    Oanlytica

    Was named one of the top 100 influencers amongst individuals engaging in the discussion around the Internet of Things

  • Top 50 Influencer on the Internet of Things

    Oanalytica

    Was named one of the top 50 influencers amongst individuals engaging in the discussion around the Internet of Things, http://www.onalytica.com/blog/posts/the-internet-of-things-landscape-2015-top-100-individuals-and-brands/.

  • Top 50 Thought Leader on the Internet of Things

    Oanalytica

    Was named one of the top 50 influencers amongst individuals engaging in the discussion around the Internet of Things, http://www.onalytica.com/blog/posts/the-internet-of-things-top-100-thought-leaders/.

  • Best IoT DIY Project (People's Choice)

    Postscapes

    The Data Sensing Lab won the Postscapes' Internet of Things "Best IoT DIY" Project award (people's choice) in 2013 — Some products come pre-assembled, batteries included; others are made to be tinkered with. The DIY award goes to those projects and people harnessing connected technologies for their lives on their own terms. http://postscapes.com/internet-of-things-award/winners/

  • Best IoT Open Source Project (Editor's Choice)

    Postscapes

    The Thing System won the Postscapes' Internet of Things " Best IoT Open Source Project" award (editor's choice) in 2013 —The open source movement is in some ways the spiritual core of the Internet, encompassing much of the hardware, software, and protocols that make up the global communications infrastructure — as well as championing openness, transparency, and the power of collaborative development.

    The Open Source award honors projects that bring those values to the Internet of Things,…

    The Thing System won the Postscapes' Internet of Things " Best IoT Open Source Project" award (editor's choice) in 2013 —The open source movement is in some ways the spiritual core of the Internet, encompassing much of the hardware, software, and protocols that make up the global communications infrastructure — as well as championing openness, transparency, and the power of collaborative development.

    The Open Source award honors projects that bring those values to the Internet of Things, either by incorporating open source technology or by making public the details of their own designs and software. http://postscapes.com/internet-of-things-award/winners/

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