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About the Book
Everyday objects are becoming smart. In just a few years everything you wear or carry with you, everything you own, will be smart and network enabled; they will be part of the Internet of Things. But the Internet of Things isn’t just about adding a network connection to an object, it’s about putting both general purpose computing and sensors everywhere. In a few short years your world will be full of sensors.
Right now those sensors mostly live in our cell phones, all of which come laden with accelerometers, gyroscopes, magnetometers — some even have thermometers, pressure, and humidity sensors. But the "peace dividend of the smart phone wars" means the cost of those sensors is plummeting, and they have become readily available. That means it's not just our cellphones, it's our things. Things like Internet-enabled weather stations, electricity monitors, smart thermostats, or light bulbs.
However the same peace dividend that is driving the growth in smart devices built by the big manufacturers is making it possible to build your own Internet of Things at home.
About the Author
My name is Alasdair Allan. I’m a scientist, author, hacker, maker, and journalist. I started my career doing research into the high-energy physics of collision shocks in the accretion disks surrounding white dwarf stars, but gradually drifted sideways into playing with the toys. After spending some time working with agent-based systems to solve scheduling problems for networked robotic telescopes I became interested in machine learning, and what later became known as Big Data. From there I spent time investigating the “data exhaust” and data living outside the cloud inside embedded and distributed devices, and as a consequence did a lot of work on mobile systems. Which led me to do some thinking, and work, on what’s now known as the “Internet of Things.” All of this made some sort of sense at the time.
I was behind one of the first big mobile privacy scandals, uncovering that your iPhone was accidentally recording your location all the time, this eventually became known as “locationgate” and caused several class action lawsuits, as well as a U.S. Senate hearing. Some years on, I’m still not sure what to think about that. I work as a consultant and journalist, focusing on open hardware, machine learning, big data, and emerging technologies — with expertise in programming, electronics, especially wireless devices and distributed sensor networks, mobile computing, and the Internet of Things, and have done several high profile deployments, including a 500-node mesh networked sensor network at Google I/O.
I’m well known for hacking hotel radios, bluetooth beacons, and retro-computing builds. I’ve written for Make: Magazine, VICE/Motherboard, Hackaday, Hackster.io, the Adafruit blog, and the O’Reilly Radar. I’ve authored over eighty peer reviewed papers, and eight books.