About the Author

Kevin Townsend specializes in embedded design and development around the ARM Cortex M family of microprocessors, and has a long-standing interest in low-power wireless communication. He's active in the open source HW world as lead engineer at Adafruit Industries, where his job is taking interesting technologies in the embedded engineering space and getting them into the hands of domain experts in other fields to see what interesting solutions they can come up with when technology becomes invisible. Robert Davidson's passion in life is to apply what he knows about technology to solve real problems that are important to solve. He especially enjoys applications that involve materials, thermal, and electromagnetic problems with a mix of computation and experiment. At the same time, he enjoys sharing what he knows, both formally and informally. He believes really understanding a subject means that he can provide a clear explanation to the non-specialist as well as the specialist. He also loves non-technical subjects such as developing startup companies and learning what makes an organization successful, not only in a P&L sense, but also in a way that makes the lives of those involved feel rewarded and fulfilled. Akiba has been involved in wireless sensor networks since 2003. He wrote FreakZ, an open source Zigbee protocol stack, and also Chibi, an open source 802.15.4 protocol stack. He's a researcher for Keio University in the Internet and Society research group, and is a design consultant to the United Nations. His specialty and interest is in sensor networks for environmental monitoring. He currently runs FreakLabs, an open source wireless company, and is working on a hackerspace in the Japanese countryside called Hackerfarm.