Steven Scotten - Positronic Works

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Steven Scotten

Steven Scotten is an instructor at Tech Valley Center of Gravity.

Low-resolution LCD with three lines which read 0.716V, -0.5mA, and 0mW

Going With the Flow

Sometimes victory is hard-won. Other times it just requires patience and laziness. Way back in 2016 I bought Adafruit's breakout board for the INA219 high-side current sensor so that I could play around with measuring current. Sure, I can do that with my multimeter, but with the actual sensor I

News Flash: Usual Technique Actually Works

News Flash: Usual Technique Actually Works

TL;dr: Someone else did this test before I did [https://stackoverflow.com/a/3239181]. For some time now I've been skeptical of the practice of minifying code before it gets sent from a webserver to a browser. Minification is the practice of (usually automatically) removing most or all of

Makerfront Rebuild Part 3: Upgrades!

Makerfront Rebuild Part 3: Upgrades!

When I first brought the Makerfront frame home I intended to buy only three additions to modernize the printer, naïve child that I was. Feature creep is a recurring theme in this project. The further along I got the more ambitious it became. My plan (if you can call it

Makerfront Rebuild Part 2: Printed Parts?

Makerfront Rebuild Part 2: Printed Parts?

Makerfront’s press releases for the i3PRO boasted: no printed parts! And in fact the extruder and z-axis carriages, commonly made from printed parts, were made of steel plates assembled with captive t-nut joints, just like the rest of the frame. I appreciate the purity of design that went in

Makerfront Rebuild Part 1: Frame Job

Makerfront Rebuild Part 1: Frame Job

Makerfront was a company in Altamont NY that made and sold 3D printers in the twenty-teens. They made a number of printer with laser-cut acrylic frames in their early days but gained some real attention with printers based on the P3Steel design. We have a few of them at Tech

Raspberry regulator run-off

Raspberry regulator run-off

Ever since I got my first Raspberry Pi (and before; I never did anything with battery-powered applications for the Beaglebone but I certainly had some in mind) I've been thinking about putting them out in the world.

Test platform: linear regulator versus switcher

Test platform: linear regulator versus switcher

There’s little doubt about the question of efficiency: linear regulators are less efficient than switching regulators. Though I have no doubt that someone can find an example of a very efficient linear regulator that is more efficient than a poorly-designed switching regulator, such an example would be a rare

FreeBSD on the Beaglebone Black

FreeBSD on the Beaglebone Black

An American-made Open Source Hardware computer deserves some good old American-made freedom in its operating system. Steve swaps Linux out for Berkeley Unix.

Infrared Inhaler

Infrared Inhaler

Back when Sam [https://positronic.works/author/analog-sam/] and I were running SumoBot matches as corporate teambuilding events at TechShop San Francisco [http://www.techshop.ws/tssf.html] one of the common issues the participants encountered was a failure of the bot to detect objects in its path. The cause

USB knob rescue

USB knob rescue

One of the devices which Atticus destroyed a while back is a favorite, even though I don't use it often. It's my Griffin PowerMate [https://griffintechnology.com/us/products/stylus-keyboards/powermate], which is, in a word, a knob. Don't get me wrong. It's a nice knob. Very pretty. It's aluminum

Licensed to filament

Licensed to filament

This afternoon I took the Type A Machines [http://www.typeamachines.com] Safety and Basic Usage class [http://www.techshop.ws/take_classes.html?storeId=4&categoryId=17#917] at TechShop San Francisco [http://www.techshop.ws]. This means that I am now permitted to reserve and use TechShop’s

Navigation error

Navigation error

In which the Positronic team enjoys a pair of toy remote control quadcopters. They turned out to be a little harder to control than anticipated.

A kilobyte of comments

A kilobyte of comments

Some say that well-written code needs very few comments, and that the higher the ratio of comments to code, the poorer the code is likely to be. They might be right.

SSL on a Beaglebone Black: balancing performance with security

SSL on a Beaglebone Black: balancing performance with security

(Originally posted to Monochromatic Outlook [https://splicer.com/]) I’ve recently set up a local server on a Beaglebone Black [http://beagleboard.org/Products/BeagleBone+Black], which is a credit-card sized computer with a 1GHz ARM Cortex-A8 processor. I’m using it as a cloud server to sync my calendar