Recent News

Woo, we’ve had a busy week! To start things off, we have a new category - Temperature Sensors! So far it has the following items:

• Humidity/Temperature Sensor
• DS1620+ Serial Digital Thermometer
• DS18B20+ Temperature Sensor
• Devantech TPA81 8×1 Thermopile
• LilyPad Temperature Sensor

Yeah, it’s a pretty bare category at the moment, but we’ll be adding to it over the next few weeks.

The other piece of news we have for you is that we’ve just completed and posted a new Instructable! This one is for a Solar-Powered Battle Symet - yeah, it’s like the other symet, except it’s turned up to eleven. This guy will go absolutely nuts once it’s discharged its power, spinning like crazy. Get two or more of them together and watch ‘em duke it out! Hey, look, we even made a movie for it! Oh, and here’s a parts bundle - it’s just like the other instructable (the Wannabe Miniball).

And that wraps things up - have a good weekend everyone!

Well, it’s been one of those weeks where we don’t have anything to post, so… HEY LOOK! THE ARDY IS BACK! From now until the end of March, the ARDY bundle gets you the Arduino Experimenter’s Kit with a free Ardweeny.

Oh, and did we mention that we just took a picture of (almost) all the staff?

Alriiiiight. We’ve teased at it off and on for the past little while, but it’s official - Solarbotics now carries sensors! Right now we’ve just added a big fist-full of distance / proximity sensors (17 items in total!), and a couple accessories. Stay tuned - we’ll be adding more to these categories as well as temperature, infra-red, motion, ultrasonic, force, light, and BittyBot sensors over the next months.

A great part of our line of business is that we have a bunch of customers that take our products and turn them into something really cool. This week we have no less than three cool projects we’d like to share with you:

• C Limber crafted this little model airplane actuator using a GM15.
• D Rainger put together this slick Solarroller, using a Solar Engine kit.
• T Özuygur made the Vacumminator - a really impressive home-made vacuum cleaner, using a pair of GMPW deals with GM3s and a BoArduino. Be sure to check out his work-in-progress post that shows off the internals.

…and that about wraps things up. Thanks to the above contributors for sharing their work. If you ever feel like showing off what you’re working on, don’t hesitate to let us know. Have a great weekend everyone!

Alrighty, the week has already slid by and it’s time for another update. We have one new product to show off - Practical Arduino by Jonathan Oxer and Hugh Blemings. It contains 13 projects packed into 16 chapters/420+ pages, covering a wide array of an Arduino’s potential. It’s a pretty comprehensive read.

Perhaps the biggest chunk of news, which has very little to do with us, is that SparkFun is still standing after their Free Day. We found it particularly fun to watch, and one of us got so far into it and answered the phone with “Hello, SparkFun”. True story. Anways, SparkFun posted a pretty nifty video they recorded during the day:

We did our part to contribute by sending a mourning/rest in peace flower bouquet for each of their poor, dead servers. Check out the 4:12 mark in the video.And in other news, our Twitter account just reached 300 followers. Be sure to check it out for the odd piece of news and random tidbits.