They hired an architect and called him an engineer.
He told them he wasn’t one. They said, “you’re smart — figure it out.” So he took the defense work, reduced it to first principles, and made it work. That instinct — decompose anything until it can be solved — became the method behind everything since.
E.T.T.S. builds advanced systems through Digi-DNA.
Extra Terrestrial Technology Systems LLC operates through the Digi-DNA brand to design and deploy intelligent systems for the physical world — work that sits at the intersection of architecture, measurement, embedded technology, building environments, software, automation, and applied systems thinking.
Digi-DNA reflects a long-standing conviction: technology should be embedded into the system itself, not treated as an afterthought. The intelligence layer is designed in from the beginning — connecting physical conditions, sensors, interfaces, software, and workflows so they operate as one coordinated environment.
One operating procedure. We call it Sequence.
It isn’t a brand voice — it’s how the work actually gets done, and it has been consistent for twenty-five years.
Find the irreducible unit
Break the system down to the smallest part that makes it what it is. You cannot improve what you have not reduced.
Capture every variable
Make each variable that governs the system measurable. Not a proxy — the full set of inputs.
Solve at the connections
The value lives in the integrations between units. Solve there, then close the loop with intelligence.
“You’re smart — figure it out.”
The line that started it was almost a dare. A junior architect, handed engineering he hadn’t been trained for, was told to reason it out himself. The defense work that followed succeeded — and a few years later the same instinct collapsed a 32-operation manufacturing line down to a single operation on a Mori Seiki mill-turn.
That is Sequence, lived: take something over-built, find the one operation that matters, and remove everything that isn’t it.
Physics, then design — always carrying the computation in.
One path, one method, across very different rooms: a science foundation, an architecture education that never left the software behind, a decade in precision manufacturing and fabrication, formal study in autonomy and robotics, and finally a practice of his own.
- 1992 — 1993 · RIT
Physics
The deep-tech root. Physics, assembly, Fortran, C/C++, Unix — low-level systems and early web work before the web was the web. Transferred to architecture in 1993, carrying the computation along.
- 1993 — 1997 · Clemson
Design / Architecture & Planning
Architecture and planning — with virtual-reality coursework and a role running the campus internet help desk. Design school for someone who never stopped building systems.
- 1997 — 2003
Architecture-as-software
Inside architecture firms and a design studio: interactive media, UI/UX, object-oriented programming in service of the built environment. An ADDY award along the way. The architect who was also the technologist.
- 2003 — 2008 · Laurentide
Precision manufacturing & fabrication
Engineering and fabrication for the defense sector — V-hull vehicle structures, a purpose-built plasma cutting table, jig fixturing for the Boeing 787 line, and the 32-to-1 CV-joint redesign. Where systems thinking met metal.
- 2013 — 2015 · MIT · TU Munich · Berkeley
Autonomy, robotics, and AI — formal study
Underactuated robotics (MIT), autonomous navigation for flying robots (TU Munich), artificial intelligence (Berkeley), aerodynamics and hypersonics. The childhood instinct for building and rebuilding control systems, taken to graduate-level rigor — exactly as the drone and sensing work matured.
- 2011 — now · E.T.T.S. / Digi-DNA
The practice
From the founding wearable through the sensing platform, drones, and the Kernal orchestration layer. RC cars to drones to reading the body without electrodes — one continuous instinct, now a practice.
The engineering is real, and it’s documented.
The autonomy and sensing work isn’t a pivot into a trend — it’s backed by formal study in precisely the fields the platform depends on.