Alasdair Allan

A good visualisation is important to convey information and get your story across. Whether that's a location privacy scandal that caused US Senate hearings, or something more day-to-day, presenting data in the right way can mean the difference between fame and obscurity; a successful application, or an ignominious failure.

This is a 12 minute "lightning talk"

Modern smart phone platforms, like Apple's iPhone, come with a growing range of sensors; accelerometers, magnetometers and gyroscopes. They also have a (near-) ubiquitous data connection, whether via a local wireless hotspot or via carrier data, along with user positioning via multiple methods including GPS.

They would make an excellent hub for a distributed sensor network. However it is actually quite difficult to interface these otherwise interesting devices to external accessories. In the case of the iPhone the proprietary dock connector is a major stumbling block. During this session we will present several different methods which will allow you to connect any iOS device to an Ardunio, or directly to an XBee mesh-network.

We will first discuss the official route making use of Apple's own External Accessory Framework. Whilst the most expensive route, it is also the simplest. However in addition to this we will go on to discuss using the headset interface to enable communication with external serial devices, this is a fairly well trodden route with several well known examples such as the Square credit card reader. Finally we will look at more off-the-wall routes such as repurposing the official MIDI interfaces for general serial.

This class will guide you through developing location aware applications for the iOS platform that make use of the onboard sensors: the three-axis accelerometer, the magnetometer and the gyroscope. You'll learn how to make use of these onboard sensors and combine them with the geo-capabilities of the iOS platform to build sophisticated location aware applications.

The development of such location-aware applications on these mobile devices has lead to an explosion innovative ideas and new business models.

We'll deep dive not only into the code, but also the underlying background knowledge you'll need to make proper use of the sensors on the device. This will give you a solid foundation to go and build your own applications independently using the hottest location-aware technology.