About Frog Hill Labs
Practical technology, built close to home.
Frog Hill Labs is an independent workshop and living lab in northern Wisconsin. It is where software, electronics, radio, automation, and homestead systems are built to solve real problems at Frog Hill—and documented so the useful parts can travel farther.
The projects begin with actual needs: equipment that deserves a better interface, infrastructure that should remain understandable, sensors that must work outside, or a technical question worth testing rather than guessing about. Some become durable systems used every day. Others become experiments, field notes, repair stories, or foundations for whatever comes next.
A lifelong habit of building
Technology was the family trade in Mathias Smith’s house. His father was an early computer and software engineer, and Mathias began programming on a Commodore VIC-20 at five years old.
He wrote text adventures and joystick games in BASIC, then moved on to a Macintosh Plus, Lightspeed C, BASIC, and HyperCard. For an elementary-school science fair, he built a breadboard logic circuit that converted binary inputs into a seven-segment display. Later came a home bulletin board system built on the WW2 BBS platform, along with increasingly ambitious experiments in electronics, audio, video, and radio.
Professional software work began at eighteen and developed into a career designing software, technical platforms, workflows, and systems for complex real-world environments. Frog Hill Labs brings that software background back together with the electronics, fabrication, repair, radio, and hands-on experimentation that were there from the beginning.
What happens here
Projects span local-first infrastructure, embedded controllers, sensors, radio and SDR, home automation, electronics repair, reverse engineering, homestead systems, and practical software.
The common thread is useful capability: technology that solves a real problem, remains understandable, and does not become disposable the moment a vendor loses interest.
How the lab works
Frog Hill Labs favors systems that are durable, repairable, recoverable, and understandable.
Bench success is only the beginning. Projects are measured in actual use, tested under field conditions, and documented with the wiring, configuration, tradeoffs, failures, and fixes intact. The goal is to leave behind enough evidence that a result can be maintained, repeated, improved, or adapted.
The work is practical rather than performative—but when something proves genuinely useful or interesting, it belongs here.
Meet the lab
Beacon keeps watch, Pip rarely stays still, and Quill writes things down.