When it’s time to mass produce your PCBs, you’ll no doubt want to start working with SMCs — surface mount components — as a replacement for the through-hole components you’ve been using. The most effective way to solder SMCs to your PCB is through the use of a reflow oven.
Before any of that happens, though, you gotta get the solder paste on those tiny pads! Bob from SparkFun Electronics shows you how in this short tutorial video.
Over the last few weeks I’ve been messing around quite a bit with the Processing programming language. I was drawn to it initially because it is a close cousin to the Arduino language and programming environment (which is based on Processing), so naturally I wanted to find a way to combine the two in a project.
Background
What I had in mind, of course, was an outlandishly-complicated, full-screen Processing user interface, with dials and button and knobs and sliders and big maps and graphs of data readouts and a little videoport showing the view from the Kinect-based eyes of some hardy Arduino-powered robot as it trundled bravely into the caldera of a smoking volcano.
But alas, I thought it would be better to start small — with one little graphical slider control, one Arduino, and one LED. The slider would command a brightness level for the LED, serial communication would do the talking, and pulse-width modulation (PWM) would do the legwork. In my quest for the ultimate ready-made user interface, however, I did stumble across the awesome-looking and fully-featured controlP5 GUI library for Processing.
I dug up some old Principia Aerospace footage for my first foray into iMovie (yeah, I just got my first Mac since OS 8), and put together this little 3-minute video chronicling a launch and CATO event from January, 2007.
Lots more information and some extended video footage related to this project can be found in the following articles:
Hope you enjoy it!
For the past few days, I’ve been jumping-out-of-my-shoes excited from reading the cover story of the February 2010 issue of Wired magazine entitled “The New Industrial Revolution,” by long-tail theorist Chris Anderson, and the related issue of Make magazine, the theme of which is “Desktop Manufacturing.”
