Alasdair Allan
@aallan
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Scientist, author, hacker, maker, and journalist. Writes, speaks, and builds. Accidental privacy advocate. Previously wrote things down at @Raspberry_Pi .
Exeter, UK and ✈️
Joined March 2008
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If you couldn't make it to my
@NDC_Conferences
keynote in Oslo last week, I've gone ahead and posted the video along with a transcript of the talk to
@Medium
.
#AI
#MachineLearning
#ChatGPT
#NDCOslo
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Good morning, and say "Hello!" to Raspberry Pi 5! The
#Pi5
is ×2–3 faster, has PCIe support, a new RTC, and our own silicon designed in‑house here in Cambridge The everything computer. Optimised, . More at .
#RaspberryPi
#RaspberryPi5
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All those younger programmers advocating “throwing that COBOL in the garbage and rewrite it from scratch,” don’t understand legacy systems. You should (almost) never rewrite from scratch, and (almost) never throw the legacy system away, it’s your institutional knowledge.
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You have no idea how long I’ve been waiting for someone to notice this… 😂
Well played,
@Raspberry_Pi
. You put the start of the chapter on the RP2040's timer on page 555 of its data sheet.
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It's new product time! Say "Hello!" to the new
@Raspberry_Pi
Camera Module 3. Now with autofocus and HDR! The new camera module comes in four versions; a standard (66°) and wide (102°) FoV with both regular and NoIR models.
#RaspberryPi
#CameraModule3
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This is how easy processing images in real time is now, 57 lines of code to implement license plate recognition.
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Liftoff for the
@ISRO
's
#GSLV
MkIII rocket and
#Chandrayaan2
from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota is scheduled for 02:51 tomorrow, July 15 (so that's 14:21 PDT, 17:21 EDT, 21:51 GMT - 1 day). Watch live at, .
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I'm really rather excited to announced that from the start of next week I'll be joining the team at
@Raspberry_Pi
to work on their technical documentation. Don't jump into my email all at once, but if you've got pain points, you now know who to talk to on the team.
#NewYearNewJob
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Some thirty five years on, the original source-code for MS-DOS 1.25 and MS-DOS 2.0 is on Github, and there are already pull requests. 😂
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So if you're running a
#cryptocurrency
exchange you must be shaking with fear right now. Think about the implications of
#meltdown
and
#spectre
and all those wallet private keys going through memory. Target rich environment. If we see exploits, that's where it'll start.
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It's new product time! Say "Hello" to
@Raspberry_Pi
Pico W. It's a Pico, but with wireless, and priced at just $6.
#RaspberryPi
#PicoW
#RP2040
#IoT
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Side channel analysis of RF emission using
#MachineLearning
and
#TensorFlow
to steal PIN numbers from thin air. This is really impressive work… and also deeply scary. HT
@LargeCardinal
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So. It really is the end of an era, the era of shortage.
@Pimoroni
has just announced that you can purchase up to ten
#RaspberryPi
Zero W boards in a single order — you are no longer limited to a single board per order.
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I'm actually rather excited about the
#RaspberryPi4
Desktop Kit for weird retro-computing reasons. It's a computer in a box, for about £100. Everything you need. The last time that happened we were in the 8-bit era and we were buying Sinclair Spectrums.
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Welcome to the new normal. Anyone that tells you that this will be over next month, or the month after, or the month after that. They're either lying, or they are an idiot.
#COVID19
Mark Zuckerberg on his Facebook page: "We're canceling any large physical events we had planned with 50 or more people through June 2021."
You read that right...2021
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Ever used this picture in a talk? Time to pay back, the kid's dad needs a kidney transplant,
http://t.co/D7rjVd3ZH8.
http://t.co/oKmC8cMNjX
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There is a new thing in the world! Today
@Raspberry_Pi
is introducing our first microcontroller, welcome to Raspberry Pi Pico! Built around our own silicon, designed by us here in the UK. Pico can be found today on the cover of
@HackSpaceMag
.
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As a Brit I don’t understand how the American government can just shutdown? I mean here, if the government couldn’t pass the budget, that would be a vote of no confidence and new elections would be called immediately. I mean, this is fairly basic stuff here..? 🤔
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If you want a
#RaspberryPi
4 you can get a Raspberry Pi 4, right now, at RRP. The supply chain is recovering, as promised.
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In today's mailbag, a 1.28-inch TFT watch built around the
@Raspberry_Pi
#RP2040
microcontroller, . Comes with pre-blown firmware, but no documentation at all. So I guess it's time to try and figure out how they're talking to the screen. Fascinating one!
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@Mirko_DIY
I've got a
#Pi5
booting from NVMe on my desktop right now with our prototype M.2 HAT. The only thing we're promising is that the production version isn't going to look like this. Proper documentation around PCIe connector is coming soon, in the next week or two!
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I’ve come to the conclusion that we fundamentally need more people to stand up and say, “…cryptocurrency should die in a fire.” 🔥
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@jonathan_ukc
@shockvaluecola
@BipolarBearDick
@DarioColon1
@badevel
@AstronomerAmber
As an actual astrophysicist who left academia and now works in AI… Astrophysics uses some gnarly ancient software dependences. The installed development stack for these two fields clashes horribly. I've done the same. Maybe you'll believe me because I'm a middle aged white guy?
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The new
#MacBook
logic board is smaller than a
#RaspberryPi2
,
http://t.co/pWPFr4bmd1.
Impressive! (via
@stevensande
)
http://t.co/QiEfF0GTSZ
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If you’re a developer, and your manager asks you to implement something illegal, guess who goes to jail? If you’re building a smart connected device, you need to think about that.
#iot
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I didn’t know you could 2FA your SSH connection. Why didn’t I know this!? 😮
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A legacy software system is years of undocumented corner cases, bug fixes, codified procedures, all wrapped inside software. If you start from scratch you’ll miss things. There is no guarantee that you’ll end up in a better situation, just a different one.
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For everyone that has ever looked at the
@Raspberry_Pi
keyboard and thought, I wonder if a Raspberry Pi would fit inside? For everyone that grew up with the Commodore 64, BBC Micro, Amstrad CPC464, or Spectrum. Say "Hello!" to the
#RaspberryPi400
. More at .
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Really rather regretting not buying $100 worth of
#bitcoin
back when it was $1 a coin. Almost. Almost. 😧
Extraordinary things happening to Bitcoin price - through $1000 in March, $2000 on Saturday, now above $2200
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“Introducing the Everyday Calendar by
@SimoneGiertz
,” by me for
@HacksterIO
, “It’s like getting a gold star sticker, but way less sticky.…we’re adults now, so we only get gold stars if we give them to ourselves.”
#Kickstarter
#Crowdfunding
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It's new product time! Say "Hello!" to the new
@Raspberry_Pi
Global Shutter Camera. Most cameras, and all our previous Camera Modules, used a rolling shutter, this new camera uses what's called a global shutter. Perfect for capturing fast-moving objects!
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What have I done for you lately? Well, after several months of back-breaking work, the results of what has internally been called "documentation-ng," launches today. Welcome to the new
#RaspberryPi
documentation site.
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“The new
@Arduino
Portenta,” by me for
@HacksterIO
. Designed for industry, and the Internet of Things.
#IoT
#CES2020
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When you're having a panel on Community at
#MakerFaire
, , and manage to persuade
@SimoneGiertz
to join you on stage through vigorous waving. 🤔😂
#MFBA19
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My first product launch now I'm working for
@Raspberry_Pi
. Want a Raspberry Pi that can do PCIe? Say "Hello!" to the new Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4. Built on the same BCM2711 processor as Raspberry Pi 4, the
#CM4
has a new form factor. More at
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I just pushed the v2.1 documentation release out the door. This is a major update to the
#RaspberryPiPico
,
#PicoW
, and
#RP2040
PDF documentation. You can grab the documentation directly from . Or go to for links to what you need.
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Okay, I’ve been waiting for this one. This is going to be a major enabler for adoption, the first
#LoRa
system-on-chip. The STM32WL from
@ST_World
.
#TheThingsConference
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It's new product day! Say "Hello" to the Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W, the long-awaited successor to the original Zero. Built around our first System-in-Package (SiP), the RP3A0, the Zero 2 is a whole lot faster but remains form-factor compatible with the Zero.
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Tomorrow is
#Manhattanhenge
where sunset aligns with Manhattan's east-west numbered streets.
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This is what people don't seem to get about the EU🇪🇺. It's about keeping the peace in Europe. We have trade and free movement because we have peace, and to have peace we have to have trade and free movement.
#RevokeArticle50
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And here I present the first opensource(?) IMX sensor board:
Name the project as OneInchEye to represent the 1" sensor.
Feel free to take it to suit your needs!
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To everyone pushing
#blockchain
to solve all the problems. Nobody cares whether the solution to a problem is "…powered by the blockchain." That's not how life works. Unless you work in technology, nobody cares what technology solves a problem, so long as the problem is solved.
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If you work for a big company, or a government, take a look at the open source you use, the day to day tooling, and small libraries. You may find something where everything falls apart without it, is maintained by one person out of their own pocket. Do something about that.
curl is 24 years old, runs in some 10 billions installations world and now has a fair amount of sponsors.
I'm proposing I no longer have to pay with my own money for the server and instead spend some of our fund on it:
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@MartinSLewis
@GarethDennis
The BBC More or Less programme debunks the BBC's own story, according to their numbers a TV on standby all year will cost you £0.40, not £35. Original story seems to have been traced back to a British Gas press release based on data from California.
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I've seen some folks posting they've already received shipping notifications, or in some cases hardware, over the weekend. But today is the day.
#RaspberryPi
5 is now available!
#Pi5
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"Building gesture and vision models using TensorFlow Lite and Arduino," by me for
@HacksterIO
. A new joint release of
#TensorFlow
Lite for Micro-controllers by the
@TensorFlow
team at
@Google
in collaboration with
@Arduino
.
#MachineLearning
#EdgeComputing
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@wingod
@jasonrdavis
I’ve got a PhD in astrophysics and I swear to god orbital mechanics never made sense to me until I started playing Kerbal Space Progam. I mean, I got the math, but my gut didn’t get it. 🤔😂
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@jsrailton
@josephfcox
@amybwang
@Hawaii_EMA
Already in place, "…the employee was asked in the computer program to confirm that he wanted to send the message."
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Today I'm building a
@Raspberry_Pi
cluster. Three Pi2s for nodes, and an original Model B for the head node.
#bigdata
http://t.co/P8j1KtrJL9
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So
@Raspberry_Pi
just spun up a
@Mastodon
instance. I talk about why we're doing it, and how we did it. Because it's running on a Pi in the Sky☁️ on a
#RaspberryPi
4 with
#IPv6
only networking hosted at
@Mythic_Beasts
. We're part of the
#TwitterMigration
.
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It's happening! Official support for Bluetooth on Raspberry Pi Pico W is now available in both the C SDK and MicroPython.
#RaspberryPi
#Pico
#PicoW
#Bluetooth
#BLE
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When someone told me about this one on the internal Slack I figured they'd made a mistake. But no, someone really did
#overclock
the
#RaspberryPi
#RP2040
all the way from 133MHz up to 1GHz, .
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Enough people asked me about it, so I sat down and wrote it up properly. Here's how to hack an
@IKEA
#Vindriktning
air quality sensor using a
@Raspberry_Pi
Pico W and
@MicroPython
to make it into a network connected
#IoT
thing.
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@zimm3rmann
@Raspberry_Pi
That’s for individuals. For companies it’s $1,000 a month. Which is somewhat more!
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Today's potentially controversial opinion. A video tutorial is not a substitute for written instructions. Even, especially, when we're all working from home.
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Building an
@Arduino
out of paper,
http://t.co/xE21KCQCWr,
for just US$4.
#paperduino
#arduino
http://t.co/fjeCNtljbF
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If you found a
#RaspberryPi
under the tree this year, this is where you should start.
#happychristmas
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“If you want to build your product on a microcontroller you can actually buy in 2022,
#RP2040
is your friend…” the solution to
#chipageddon
. We have silicon. Now available in volume direct from
@Raspberry_Pi
.
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I’ve yet to speak to anyone that’s been involved with a project to reimplement a large legacy code base from scratch that has anything good to say about the idea. Document, improve the build system, modernise the infrastructure around it. Write tests. But don’t throw it away.
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This👇. Anyone weighing a scientist by lines of code written has it all wrong. A doctorate is awarded for an original contribution to human knowledge. Bouman could contribute all or none of the lines of code, and still be the person responsible for the science.
#EHTBlackHole
Aside from all the embarrassing sexism, this Katie Bouman story illustrates how little understanding many people have when it comes to the workings of academic science.
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@doctorow
@HNTurtledove
The inability of most Americans, including those on the left, to realise that "the far left" in the US is pretty much centre or right-of-centre most other places around the world is also going to lead to some surprises. I'm almost looking forward to them. The NY Times? Left wing?
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Today has mostly consisted of me playing with
#TensorFlowLite
and the new
#Picamera2
library on
#RaspberryPi
to do real-time object detection using MobileNetV2 trained on the COCO dataset. Blog post coming soon! More about the new Picamera2 library at .
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"Introducing the
@Raspberry_Pi
3 Model A+," by me for
@HacksterIO
. The last of the 'classic'
#RaspberryPi
boards.
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The number of times I've yet again gone to look for "web 3.0" because I've seen yet another piece talking about it, and found nothing of substance beyond new ways to sell me pictures of monkeys, is getting dull. 🤷♂️
I'm really getting tired of telling journalists how "web3" doesn't even exist.
If you can't point to anything real or concrete this should be the obvious deduction. But no, people like to pontificate endlessly about the marketing buzzword shadows on the cave wall. 🙄
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"Meet the New Raspberry Pi 4, Model B," by me for
@HacksterIO
. The newest Raspberry Pi has some big architectural changes.
#RaspberryPi4
#RaspberryPi
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This article is fascinating because both halves — keep reading you’ll get there — are about commoditisation, and the changing levels of abstraction in computing. The two halves just come at it from very different angles.
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Just getting a modern build system on top of your legacy code base, getting it into revision control system, writing tests. That's years of work right there. Afterwards you'll be left with something that you can build and test easily. What's else did you want?
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Just added a second NIC to the head node in my
@Raspberry_Pi
Cluster, now acts as a DHCP server for the other nodes.
http://t.co/Y1rqgoLgyu
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"Hearing that crew members are onboard helicopters and are enroute back to the Baikonur cosmodrome at this point…"
#SoyuzMS10
#ISS
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@Adafruit
Monster Eyes are now running on the
@Raspberry_Pi
#rp2040
Pico!
The original Arduino SAMD21/51 based code has been ported to run on any RP2040 based board using DMA on one or two SPI peripherals.
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@will_whang
The PCIe FPC connector documentation isn't public yet, sorry. But I've got a
#Pi5
booting from NVMe on my desktop right now, and the documentation around PCIe is coming soon, in the next week or two. Just want to do some more internal testing and verification.
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How to teach kids to program? How to teach kids who can’t yet read & write to program?
#ecmmf
http://t.co/9tGWQUi0rV
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"TensorFlow Lite ported to Arduino," by me for
@HacksterIO
. Looks like
@Adafruit
wins the race to port
@TensorFlow
Lite for Micro-controllers to the
@Arduino
development environment.
#MachineLearning
#EdgeComputing
#Arduino
#IoT
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First espresso in space,
http://t.co/Tv1dWCnPKm.
Because standards have to be maintained.
#civilisation
#iss
http://t.co/fyL6ffv2av
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"Announcing the
#AIYProjects
Vision Kit," by me for
@HacksterIO
. Following the successful launch of the Voice Kit, the second AIY Projects kit for the
#RaspberryPi
is Machine Learning powered Vision Bonnet for the Raspberry Pi Zero.
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Musk is going to push hard to EOL the
#Falcon9
as soon as
#Starship
is even close to being functional. Because he's Musk, and that's how he does things. There is going to be a lot of government pressure to keep the Falcon flying well beyond the point where Musk wants to stop.
Here is the state of medium-lift in the free world:
Atlas V: Sold out
Delta IV: Two left
Vulcan: No spare capacity for awhile
Ariane 5: One left
Ariane 6: Not ready soon
LVM-3: Slowly scaling up
H3: Failure on debut flight
Falcon 9: Near unlimited capacity due to reuse
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I’ve been excited about this one for ages, and it’s amazing to see it public. The new
#RaspberryPi
HQ Camera🎥 has a 12.3 MP sensor capable of full frame 4K at 60fps with 10-bits per colour channel. It can take standard C- and CS-mount lens, and has a tripod mount point.
🚨 New Product 🚨 We’re pleased to announce a new member of the Raspberry Pi camera family: the 12.3-megapixel High Quality Camera, available today for just $50, alongside a range of interchangeable lenses starting at $15.
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