Working with a professor at my college and Carolina Edge of Space in May of 2010 I, along with a small group of friends, sent a weather balloon 74,642 feet into the sky.  This post is mainly about the payload I designed, built and tested for the project.
This project was inspired by many seen recently online where students have been sending cheap payloads into the stratosphere. It started around December 2009 when we all met for the first time to discuss the project. It turns out that one of the …

Many people are curious about linux, or maybe have even tried linux at some point. There is a huge difference between people trying linux, and people using linux. Hopefully this article will sort of ease your transition into using linux, either as a full time OS or even just enough to get around if you ever encounter it. Once you are familiar with software on one OS, its tough to move on but with this article I hope to list out some linux software that replaces many of the …

I’ve had a FTDI cable for a while for testing serial communications between my microprocessors and my computer and for that job, it works great. However, I recently grabbed a couple Ardweenies from Solarbotics and decided to use my FTDI cable to program them.  The FTDI cable doesn’t have an automatic reset, so you have to push the reset button on the board at exactly the right time when trying to program it from your computer.  This causes tons of frustration.
Oddly, a few days of experimenting with …