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, [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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.”

Have you ever been messing around on your Ubuntu box, only to notice some sluggishness or some suspicious spikes in your internet connection, and wondered, “What the hell is using up all that bandwidth?” Or worse, “Have I been hacked?” If so, then NetHogs might be the program for you. NetHogs is a lightweight Linux [...]

Here’s the remastered final version of Andrew McCombs’ classic documentary “The Principia Process,” which chronicles the spring 2002 launch season, and the beginnings of Team Principia. Watch and enjoy.

One of the annoying little setup items on my list of things to do every time I reinstall Kubuntu is changing the bootsplash screen resolution from 800×600 to something more appropriate for my monitor, specifically, 1280×1024. Here’s how it’s done: sudo nano /etc/usplash.conf The file should be altered to read: # Usplash configuration file # [...]

So there was this web page, nothing more than a text file in fact, which I was compelled to check regularly. I had ordered something online from a company whose web-store design was still in the dark ages, and their “method” of letting customers know whether or not their products had shipped was to periodically [...]

So let’s say you have a private LAN running in your secret underground lab. Maybe you’ve got a Linux box hardwired to a WiFi router, and maybe a Mac or Linux laptop floating around somewhere, and you need a quick way to transfer files or execute shell commands remotely. What you need is SSH, the [...]