Steven Scotten - Positronic Works

News Flash: Usual Technique Actually Works

TL;dr: Someone else did this test before I did. 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 the code that the interpreter

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

3D Printing

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 decided not to use these.I appreciate the

3D Printing

Makerfront Rebuild Part 1: Frame Job

Makerfront is 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

Random Roundup of Makerspace Websites

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

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

Beaglebone

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.

DIY

Infrared Inhaler

Back when Sam and I were running SumoBot matches as corporate teambuilding events at TechShop San Francisco one of the common issues the participants encountered was a failure of the bot to detect objects in its path. The cause would be related to the infrared sensors (the ’bot’s “eyes”

Atticus Wrecks

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, which is, in a word, a knob. Don't get me wrong. It's a nice knob. Very pretty. It's aluminum and the base glows. It turns very

Licensed to filament

This afternoon I took the Type A Machines Safety and Basic Usage class at TechShop San Francisco. This means that I am now permitted to reserve and use TechShop’s 3D printers for my projects (I’m scheduled to take the MakerBot SBU soon as well.) Basic operation is actually

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.

Coding

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.

Security

SSL on a Beaglebone Black: balancing performance with security

(Originally posted to Monochromatic Outlook) I’ve recently set up a local server on a 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 and contacts, having moved the ownCloud instance (mentioned the