My name is Alasdair Allan, I work as a consultant and journalist focusing on open hardware, machine learning, data science, and emerging technologies — with expertise in electronics, especially wireless devices, distributed sensor networks, and embedded computing.
I’ve actually had a pretty odd path to where I am now, I’m on my third, maybe fourth career now. I started as an astrophysicist, doing research into the high-energy physics of collision shocks in accretion disks surrounding white dwarf stars. But then I sort of drifted sideways into playing with the toys.
After spending a few years building an agent-based system to schedule a network of robotic telescopes, I became interested, and did a bunch of work around, machine learning and what later became known as Big Data. I spent a lot of time investigating the “data exhuast” and data that lives outside the cloud, in embedded and distributed devices. Which is how I got interested in cellphones and microcontrollers.
In fact I got really rather interested in sensors and mashing them together with the, then new, smart phones. I ended up writing a few books about that, including one on how to get RS-232 devices to talk to an iPhone, and it was during this period in my life that I was responsible for causing one of the first big privacy mobile privacy scandals, which later became known as "locationgate." This caused a US Senate hearing, and got me a mention on South Park. A decade later, I'm still not sure what to think about that.
I then spent a few years as a technology journalist for the most part writing, and talking, about the maker movement and the sometimes new (and sometimes recycled) things that were happening there. Laterly, I also did a bunch of work around the new Tiny ML movement, the folks attempting to cram machine learning inferencing onto microcontrollers, and while I was doing that I spent a lot of time talking to the folks at Raspberry Pi.
Which is how I ended up heading up documentation for Raspberry Pi leading the the pre-launch effort to document their new RP2040 microcontroller and Raspberry Pi Pico board and other new products, including the flagship Raspberry Pi 5.
After leaving Raspberry Pi I have gone back to writing and talking about the things that interest me.
All of this sort of made sense at the time.
You can find me on social in the following places: