Modern smart phone platforms, like Apple’s iPhone, come with a growing range of sensors; GPS, accelerometers, magnetometers and more recently gyroscopes. They also have a (near-)ubiquitous data connection, whether via a local wireless hotspot or via carrier data, and user positioning via multiple methods including GPS. They can make an excellent hub for a distributed sensor network, or a ready built user-interface for custom hardware. However interfacing external hardware can be challenging. In the case of the iPhone the proprietary dock connector is a major stumbling block. This session will present several methods for connecting iOS devices to external hardware using serial connections.

Alasdair Allan is the author of Learning iOS Programming, Programming iOS Sensors, Basic Sensors in iOS, Geolocation iOS, iOS Sensor Apps and Arduino and Augmented Reality in iOS, all published by O’Reilly Media. He is a senior research fellow in Astronomy at the University of Exeter. As part of his work there he built a distributed peer-to-peer network of telescopes which, acting autonomously, reactively scheduled observations of time-critical events. Notable successes include contributing to the detection of the most distant object yet discovered, a gamma-ray burster at a redshift of 8.2. Alasdair also runs a small technology consulting business writing bespoke software, building open hardware and providing training. He sporadically writes blog posts about things that interest him, or more frequently provides commentary about them in 140 characters or less.