Alasdair Allan

Consultant in Exeter, United Kingdom

Alasdair Allan

Consultant in Exeter, United Kingdom

Alasdair Allan is a scientist, author, hacker, and journalist. He currently works for Raspberry Pi, and is the person responsible for their technical documentation.

He is the author of a number of books, and sometimes also stands in front of cameras. You can often find him at conferences talking about interesting things, or deploying sensors to measure them.

He's known for benchmarking the new generation of Tiny ML accelerator hardware, and for hacking hotel radios.

Some years ago he rolled out a mesh network of five hundred sensor motes covering the entire of Moscone West during Google I/O. While a couple of years before that he caused a privacy scandal by uncovering that your iPhone was recording your location all the time. This later became known as #locationgate, caused several class action lawsuits, and a U.S. Senate hearing. Some years on, he still isn't sure what to think about that.

He sporadically writes blog posts, or more frequently provides commentary in 140 characters or less. He has written for Make: Magazine, Motherboard/VICE, Hackaday, Hackster.io, Raspberry Pi, and the O'Reilly Radar.

Alasdair is a former academic. As part of his work he built a distributed peer-to-peer network of telescopes that, acting autonomously, reactively scheduled observations of time-critical events. Notable successes included contributing to the detection of what—at the time—was the most distant object yet discovered.