Presentations
Under (re)construction. Change of theme (Oct 2025) has busted a lot of pages. I’m fixing them as fast as I can! I’m fixing newest presentations first.
Under (re)construction. Change of theme (Oct 2025) has busted a lot of pages. I’m fixing them as fast as I can! I’m fixing newest presentations first.
Open source voice interfaces in 2025
Event: Everything Open, Jan 2025 (Adelaide, South Australia, Australia) Slides Abstract 2023 was the “year of voice” in the open source home-automation world. In 2024 I took stock of the leading edge in open source voice interactions, focusing on solutions that do NOT require a cloud service. The state of the art moves fast, this talk looks at what’s hot this year, and what voice interfaces I’ve built over the last year. Caution the words “go go gadget bodypart” may be involved.
Event: Everything Open, Apr 2024 (Gladstone, Queensland, Australia) Slides Abstract I want to convince you that you should build yourself a micromobility vehicle and spend less time on cars or buses.
Spellcasting at home - voice interfaces without the cloud
Event: Everything Open, Apr 2024 (Gladstone, Queensland, Australia) Slides Video Abstract Voice assistants are bust. Cortana has retired, Siri is stagnating and Alexa is losing money hand over fist. But there’s some new kids on the block. Low cost AI acceleration engines built into recent CPUs mean that problems that used to require a connection to the cloud can now be handled offline. Voice activation - listening for a wakeword, and then conducting a domain specific voice interaction are now things that can be done with a twenty dollar embedded computer.
Useful Reality - Assistive AR on a budget
Event: Linux.conf.au, Jan 2022 (Online) Slides Video Abstract Greetings Earthlings meat and metal, and anyone receiving this out there in the wider universe. I want to confirm that planet Earth is ripe for takeover by exploring the hilariously poor state of our cognitive technology, and confirming that the inhabatants of this planet are still in the ludicrously early stages of uplifting themselves to higher sentience.
Linux and Zephyr, Sitting in a tree
Event: Linux.conf.au, Jan 2021 (Online) Slides Video Abstract Some tips on using Zephyr on a Raspberry Pi. This presentation has also given rise to a series of artcles on Zephyr development .
Event: Linux.conf.au, Jan 2020 (Gold Coast, Queensland, Australia) Slides Video Abstract Right now, the state of privacy on the Internet is “we collect every bit of data about you, crosslink everything and use it to manipulate your attention”. The internet of Things brings the promise (threat?) that “every bit” comes to mean not just everything you did online, but also everything you did in your home, workplace, car and bedroom.
The (awful) Design of Everyday Things
Event: Linux.conf.au, Jan 2020 (Gold Coast, Queensland, Australia) Slides Video Abstract As an evangelist, community leader and consultant in the Internet of Things space, I have strong opinions about how IoT can improve our lives. Thirty years after its publication, Donald Norman’s seminal book “The Design of Everyday Things”, which examined how the tiny usability touches in everyday items matter so much, remains relevant and important. In fact, Don just last year wrote that the technology industry badly needs to re-focus on the true meaning of Human Centered Design, observing that despite his decades of advocacy, the same kinds of design flaws continually recur.
Event Redland City Innovation Workshop, Nov 2019, (Alexandra Hills, Queensland, Australia) Slides Abstract A Tour of the Internet of Things: What, Why, How. A lightning tour of what the internet of things means, why you might adopt IoT technology to strengthen your business or benefit your lifestyle, and some questions to ask to ensure that you avoid risks and maximise benefits.
Recapture your privacy in the IoT age Living in the future is great. The gadgets are awesome, the convenience is great, oh, and your life insurance premium just went up because you bought crisps at the supermarket. Have you ever had your home voice assistant randomly burst out laughing? While you weren’t even talking to it? While you were getting dressed? While you were enjoying sexytimes? Does that freak you out?
So you have a bluetooth sensor and a thermostat, door lock or garden sensor, and you want to control it from your app… But you’d prefer to stay in React! We’ll look at some examples of how to do this and how to explore bluetooth low energy devices in general.
Solving the Pigeon Obesity Crisis
This presentation looks at how the hardware element of the Internet Of Things provides a secure channel for certificate distribution, rendering tractable previously rather difficult problems of key distribution. We have become used to the concept of servers using TLS certificates to provide authentication and confidentiality. But it is quite rare to use the authentication mechanisms of TLS to identify the client to the server. The difficulty has always been key distribution. In TLS server certification we use offline verification, or, in the case of services like LetsEncrypt, (ab)use DNS as a verification mechanism. Client key management is problem at a larger scape. It’s arguable that the state of the art in distributing cryptographic keys to clients has been surreptitiously exchanging briefcases while ostensibly feeding pigeons at a park-bench.
Recapture your privacy in the IoT age Living in the future is great. The gadgets are awesome, the convenience is great, oh, and your life insurance premium just went up because you bought crisps at the supermarket. Have you ever had your home voice assistant randomly burst out laughing? While you weren’t even talking to it? While you were getting dressed? While you were enjoying sexytimes? Does that freak you out?
Elm is a functional language for the web that compiles to Javascript. As you would expect with any zero-dot version, the language is still settling done, and with almost a year since the previous release there are a lot of changes, and many breaking ones. But one of the clear benefits of functional programming is ease of refactoring, so Elm 0.19 promises that most of the changes can be automatically applied to your program.
This presentation will give you a whirlwind tour of how the Node-RED visual programming system makes it easier than ever before to connect all data that surrounds us, and make it do more for us. Javascript just gets everywhere. And the Node-dot-js ecosystem has code for talking to so many other systems that it’s uniquely placed to be the duct tape in your data toolbox.
Recapture your privacy in the IoT age Living in the future is great. The gadgets are awesome, the convenience is great, oh, and your life insurance premium just went up because you bought crisps at the supermarket. Have you ever had your home voice assistant randomly burst out laughing? While you weren’t even talking to it? While you were getting dressed? While you were enjoying sexytimes? Does that freak you out?
Around the world in 80 MicroAmps
Learn how to design and deploy battery powered IoT sensors that can go years between charges. You could be forgiven for thinking (as I did) that the proliferation of wireless IoT solutions means that implementing environmental monitoring is a simple process. Typically, everything goes swimmingly for the first two hours until your battery runs flat. Many wireless development boards (even the ones with built in battery chargers) are actually not well suited to ultra-low-power applications.
For Christmas 2018 I made an IoT-enabled LED star for our Christmas tree. I designed it in an afternoon and had the circuit boards in my hands 5 days later, for a cost of $5.00 for ten. Learn how to get the most out of PCB design tools and PCB manufacture services to let your electronic circuits become a feature of your art. A circuit board doesn’t have to be green, and it doesn’t have to be rectangular. You can make your circuit part of your art by varying
A case study on Accelerando’s DevOps pipeline for ELK How to build an ELK pipeline that you can run on a laptop for development, and deploy to your cluster with the same tools. Best practices for integrating device fleets communicating via MQTT with ELK (Ab-)using beats protocol to implement reliable streaming over unreliable communication links
Elm for the Internet of Things (IoT)
The Internet of Things (or more prosaically “all the embedded computers out there without screens”) is a high-volume fast-moving field. The market forces on vendors favour “quick and dirty” user interface that is often unsatifactory and frankly ugly. I find that Elm allows my team to quickly produce user interfaces that are beautiful, compact and functional. An Elm user interface, with all fonts and icons, can fit in as little as half a megabyte of flash ROM on a postage-stamp sized IoT processor, yet still provide a pleasant and aesthetic user experience.
The Redesign of everyday things
Despite notable exceptions of telephones and TVs, significant parts of the design of our homes and workplaces have changed remarkably little in the last century. This presentation looks at what opportunities technology gives us to reimagine the interaction with our buildings and their fittings. I aim to give you inspiration and tools to design consumer devices and interactions that reduce frictions and annoyoances that we have taken for granted for decades.
Functional programmers are lovers of simplicity and order. Developing for the Web has become nothing like either of these. The number of tools and libraries you need to learn seems to multiply without end, and getting them to work together can be a nightmare. What if there was a language and environment that had no external dependencies, required no complex packaging tools, runs in the web browser, and oh yes, it’s purely Functional.
Test Automation in the Internet of Things
The Internet of Things is undeniably here. In the last year we have heard tell of of security cameras, dishwashers and even ovens roaming the internet unsupervised. As a consultant and writer specialising in the Internet of Things, I have worked to bring my experience from 20 years in manufacturing and internet security to the IoT world. This presentation will cover the tools and techniques I use to build secure, reliable and rapidly updatable IoT devices.
Open Sesame - An intro to shopping at AliBaba
A brief introduction into dealing with exporters in China, particularly for components, computer accessories and electronic tools.
Business Continuity - Three things you can do today
If you were struck by lightning, scammed by malware or hit by a car, would your business survive? Here are three things you can do today to keep your business running when disaster strikes.
Domains Dirt Cheap - Hosting your own email
A lightning talk aimed at explaining the internet domain name system to small businesses, and helping them to register their own email domain.
Maps and GIS are not scary. You can build a responsive user interface that has custom map displays remarkably easily. Most of us carry a geolocation device on us at all times. This opens up many applications for presenting information on a map. The Elm environment (a functional programming language that transpiles to Javascript) leads to beautifully small and bug-free sites that also happen to be responsive and look great (particularly when combined with the Material Design toolkit).
How do you motivate a child to remember to take their daily medication? One way is to create a physical replica of the “health pack” item from their favourite computer game. By day I solve real world problems with IoT. On the weekend, I attack more frivolous problems as a creative outlet. But this frippery also serves two serious purposes It helps you, the “Internet of Things” novice, understand the potential of the medium These projects serve as a demonstration of how technologies such as 3D printing, laser cutting and CNC milling can make rapid prototypes, and also art I talk about how to use 3D printing, re-usable modules and easy-to-learn software to make Internet of Things devices that bring enrichment and humour to your life. I also give examples of some of my projects that are both fun, and in some cases, literally life-saving.
The Internet of Things is undeniably here. In the last year we have heard tell of of security cameras, dishwashers and even ovens roaming the internet unsupervised. As a consultant and writer specialising in the Internet of Things, I have worked to bring my experience from 20 years in manufacturing and internet security to the IoT world. This presentation will cover the tools and techniques I use to build secure, reliable and rapidly updatable IoT devices.
Agile Up The Zambesi - Project management at Startups and tin sheds
This presentation covers some lessons learned when introducing agile practices at a number of small companies with no exposure to Agile, lean principles, or even software quality. We’ll talk about techniques used, the order in which to build competence, tools that are appropriate for small teams, and tell some (hopefully instructive) war stories.
The Internet of Textiles - Intro to wearable computing
An outline of how to get started with wearable computing. Simple computers that you sew into clothing which can make light, sound and even monitor vital signs.
The Internet of Things is undeniably here. In the last year we have heard tell of of security cameras, dishwashers and even ovens roaming the internet unsupervised. As a consultant and writer specialising in the Internet of Things, I have worked to bring my experience from 20 years in manufacturing and internet security to the IoT world. This presentation will cover the tools and techniques I use to build secure, reliable and rapidly updatable IoT devices.
IoT at Scale - or, From Little Things, Big Data Grow
The Internet of Things (IoT) is really about the ubiquity of data, the possibility of humans extending their awareness and reach globally, or further. IoT frees us from the tedium of physically monitoring or maintaining remote systems, but to be effective we must be able to rely on data being accessible but comprehensible. This presentation covers three main areas of an IoT big data strategy The Air Gap - options (from obvious to inventive) for connecting wireless devices to the internet
Problem to Product - The ‘Six Ps’ of getting to market
An outline of how Accelerando Consulting helps businesses turn problems into products, through exploring the problem landscape, and rapidly iterating from proof-of-concept through prototypes to products.
The Internet of Things is undeniably here. In the last year we have heard tell of of security cameras, dishwashers and even ovens roaming the internet unsupervised. As a consultant and writer specialising in the Internet of Things, I have worked to bring my experience from 20 years in manufacturing and internet security to the IoT world. This presentation will cover the tools and techniques I use to build secure, reliable and rapidly updatable IoT devices.
Open Sesame - An intro to shopping at AliBaba
A brief introduction into dealing with exporters in China. If you want promotional gifts, electronic equipment, gadgets or even clothing, you can get great deals by going direct to manufacturers.
Javascript Rules My Life (remix)
It’s never been easier to do home and offfice automation with inexpensive IoT devices, and it’s now possible in 100% JavaScript, from wall to cloud. This presentation explains how to use the ESP8266 and ESP32 microcontollers, MongooseOS, Amazon IoT and Amazon Lambda to hook physical devices to your phone or to your slack channels. For example: Voice control your lights. Send notifications to phone or slack on events like kettle boiled or toast ready. Make a visual “away board” that responds to team presence. Build “traffic light” status monitors for your CI. I will teach you how to get started with no soldering, 100% JavaScript, and as little as ten bucks (around thirty for a truly kickass setup).
The Internet of Things (IoT) has recently been somewhat of a laughing stock, with poorly designed and managed IoT devices being associated with severe privacy leaks, theft of service, and botnet-perpetrated denial-of-service attacks. The currently circulating joke goes “The S in IoT stands for Security!” This presentation covers how to recognise and avoid risks to your business from adopting IoT, some best practices for selecting and deploying IoT devices, and most importantly, for developers of IoT products, how to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past, through good architecture, quality processes and use of the right tools and frameworks. I will talk about ways to ensure that less-secure or rogue devices cannot damage your network or the Internet at large, how to monitor and control your IoT devices to keep them safe and functional, and how to choose among the growing collection of incompatible frameworks for IoT systems.
IoT in two minutes with Mongoose OS and AWS IoT
What’s the problem? The Internet of Things (IoT) is the third major computing revolution, the story so far being Personal computing Cloud computing and now Ubiquitous computing (IoT) The most annoying challenges in the Internet of Things (IoT) are connecting Things to the cloud safely, managing your Things, and updating them. What’s the solution? Mongoose-OS is the new hotness that solves all these problems for you out of the box, and lets you skip ahead to the cool stuff.
Many Agile organisations strive toward the goal of “continuous delivery”, which has been paraphrased as “move fast and break things”. That is, automate your testing and deployment to remove as many delays as possible between developer and production, and be prepared to react rapidly when something goes wrong. The trick is knowing whether something has gone wrong. Most businesses have analytics, monitoring and dashboards. In fact, if you look really hard, most businesses have a dozen or more different silos of monitoring data. But an Agile project is a moving target; the metrics, dashboard and alerts that worked yesterday may be obsolete tomorrow. What an organisation practicing Agile development needs is Agile data, the ability to develop and deliver data visualisation capabilities alongside code, and subject them to the same kinds of quality processes that are applied to code.
The Internet of Things (IoT) has recently been somewhat of a laughing stock, with poorly designed and managed IoT devices being associated with severe privacy leaks, theft of service, and botnet-perpetrated denial-of-service attacks. The currently circulating joke goes “The S in IoT stands for Security!” This presentation covers how to recognise and avoid risks to your business from adopting IoT, some best practices for selecting and deploying IoT devices, and most importantly, for developers of IoT products, how to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past, through good architecture, quality processes and use of the right tools and frameworks. I will talk about ways to ensure that less-secure or rogue devices cannot damage your network or the Internet at large, how to monitor and control your IoT devices to keep them safe and functional, and how to choose among the growing collection of incompatible frameworks for IoT systems.
Many Agile organisations strive toward the goal of “continuous delivery”, which has been paraphrased as “move fast and break things”. That is, automate your testing and deployment to remove as many delays as possible between developer and production, and be prepared to react rapidly when something goes wrong. The trick is knowing whether something has gone wrong. Most businesses have analytics, monitoring and dashboards. In fact, if you look really hard, most businesses have a dozen or more different silos of monitoring data. But an Agile project is a moving target; the metrics, dashboard and alerts that worked yesterday may be obsolete tomorrow. What an organisation practicing Agile development needs is Agile data, the ability to develop and deliver data visualisation capabilities alongside code, and subject them to the same kinds of quality processes that are applied to code.
The Internet of Things (IoT) has recently been somewhat of a laughing stock, with poorly designed and managed IoT devices being associated with severe privacy leaks, theft of service, and botnet-perpetrated denial-of-service attacks. The currently circulating joke goes “The S in IoT stands for Security!” This presentation covers how to recognise and avoid risks to your business from adopting IoT, some best practices for selecting and deploying IoT devices, and most importantly, for developers of IoT products, how to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past, through good architecture, quality processes and use of the right tools and frameworks. I will talk about ways to ensure that less-secure or rogue devices cannot damage your network or the Internet at large, how to monitor and control your IoT devices to keep them safe and functional, and how to choose among the growing collection of incompatible frameworks for IoT systems.
Many Agile organisations strive toward the goal of “continuous delivery”, which has been paraphrased as “move fast and break things”. That is, automate your testing and deployment to remove as many delays as possible between developer and production, and be prepared to react rapidly when something goes wrong. The trick is knowing whether something has gone wrong. Most businesses have analytics, monitoring and dashboards. In fact, if you look really hard, most businesses have a dozen or more different silos of monitoring data. But an Agile project is a moving target; the metrics, dashboard and alerts that worked yesterday may be obsolete tomorrow. What an organisation practicing Agile development needs is Agile data, the ability to develop and deliver data visualisation capabilities alongside code, and subject them to the same kinds of quality processes that are applied to code.
Control your home with your iPhone and HomeBridge
This presentation covers how to control your existing (non-Apple) smart devices with your iPhone and Apple TV.
Continuous Dashboarding (abridged)
Many Agile organisations strive toward the goal of “continuous delivery”, which has been paraphrased as “move fast and break things”. That is, automate your testing and deployment to remove as many delays as possible between developer and production, and be prepared to react rapidly when something goes wrong. The trick is knowing whether something has gone wrong. Most businesses have analytics, monitoring and dashboards. In fact, if you look really hard, most businesses have a dozen or more different silos of monitoring data. But an Agile project is a moving target; the metrics, dashboard and alerts that worked yesterday may be obsolete tomorrow. What an organisation practicing Agile development needs is Agile data, the ability to develop and deliver data visualisation capabilities alongside code, and subject them to the same kinds of quality processes that are applied to code.
Slack is a messaging platform with a robust add-on ecosystem, and supports both channel-based communications and direct messaging. NodeMCU is a Lua-based reactive programming environment (inspired by NodeJS) for the popular Espressif ESP8266 WiFi-enabled micro controller. This presentation will introduce each of the tools and then present several examples of using the NodeMCU IoT platform and Slack’s third party hooks to have physical computing devices communicate with humans via your Slack chat channels.
This presentation covers how to use Node-RED and Blynk to automate your home or office.
Slack is a messaging platform with a robust add-on ecosystem, and supports both channel-based communications and direct messaging. NodeMCU is a Lua-based reactive programming environment (inspired by NodeJS) for the popular Espressif ESP8266 WiFi-enabled micro controller. This presentation will introduce each of the tools and then present several examples of using the NodeMCU IoT platform and Slack’s third party hooks to have physical computing devices communicate with humans via your Slack chat channels.