Recent News

Wowza. It’s been a a busy couple of weeks. So let’s get the big thing out of the way, alright?

All inventory from HVWTech.com has been added to Solarbotics.com! Seriously. We got a million more categories to match the bajillion more items we’ve added, but it’s all there. We’ve even cleaned up some of the bugs, so everything should be working properly. If you stumble across a broken link or any other issues, please feel free to let us know. We ballpark that we’ve brought across more than 350 products, which is, quite frankly, nuts. We’re so glad we can offer you so much inventory, but we’re also so glad that we’re done bringing all of those items across. It was a lot of work. So take a look at what’s there, and enjoy!

BUT THAT’S NOT ALL! On top of bringing over all the existing items, we’ve also been adding a fistful of brand-new ones.  We just got a big shipment in from ThingM, which tops up our BlinkM supply and also adds the new MinM. Some other highlights include super-useful Pololu wheels and some kits from DaleWheat.com for making purdy, blinking lights. Check it all out:

• BlinkM MinM
• Pan & Tilt Bracket Kit
• Getting Started with Processing
• 433 MHz RF Transceiver
• MicroSD Shield (new version)
• Pololu 60×8mm Black Wheel Pair
• Pololu 70×8mm Black Wheel Pair
• Pololu 80×10mm Black Wheel Pair
• Pololu 90×10mm Black Wheel Pair
• tinyCylon kit
• Lux Spectralis
• Wee Blinky

And in other news, we’ve started to receive some reviews for the BeetleBot. If you aren’t quite sure about the kit, take a read through one of these links and get a point of view from someone else:

• Louis/DutchBot from Lets Make Robots
• Antony from Robotixlab
• Bruce from the Pictou County Electronics Club

Even if you aren’t interested in the Beetle, be sure to check out those sites - they have lots of great resources and information for robotics and electronics. We’d just like to quickly thank our reviewers for their hard work and excellent write-ups.

Around the office, Dave is playing with the new pick and place machine (that’s #3, if anyone’s keeping count) and yours-truly is the second fastest motor-tray loader in the west, behind none other than Cheryl “The Speed Demon” Hrynkiw herself (we’ve been holding time trials in the office to see who can load rig for 120 GM9’s the quickest for branding in the laser. Sorry Dave, I just robbed you of a top 3 finish and gave Tom the boot from 2nd). On a sadder note, Vinny in sales/order processing has moved on from the company. We’ll miss him. Being under the constant fear of having our kneecaps mercilessly crushed for the slightest mis-step is something we definitely won’t miss, however. All kidding aside, we wish him all the best with his next endeavour.

And that about wraps things up for another week. Autumn is slowly creeping up on us, so get out there and enjoy the last few drops of summer before it dries up.

Unlike Sparkfun, who actually manage to find fake Atmel ICs, we just get strange batches.

The Atmel ATMega328 is the power behind the Arduino/Freeduino/*duino, and we have to set up a programming system to burn the venerable Arduino Bootloader into these chips.

We normally use an AVR STK500 in HVSP (high voltage serial programming) mode, as that lets us be absolutely sure the fuses are set correctly and the burn is correct. Interestingly enough, this last batch of chips refused to work with our batch files. Asking the chip’s ID often returned 0×01 0×03 0X05 instead of the expected signature.

After spending a day checking to see if the programmer was broken (nope) or if the chips were fake (nope, we think), we did find that they did respond to regular old ICSP (in-circuit serial programming), but only partially.

Digging around, we found some older ATMega328 chips that worked fine, and compared them to this new batch. This troublesome batch has a date code of 1015 (15th week of 2010), and a batch code on the bottom as 9J4302 / 35473d / 1-P1015 e3.

So we re-wrote our batch file burning code to use AVRDude instead of the STK500 command-programmer, and to run it in ICSP mode on the STK500. The key addition is the “-B” part, which slows down the communication a bit. You want it as low as possible for fastest burn times. I tried a “-B 2″ on both fuse & programming lines, but that really slowed the process. What’s below is what we settled on.

: Set fuse bits, lock bits, voltages

.avrdude -c stk500v2 -i 20 -p m328p -P COM1 -b 115200 -B 1.8 -e -u -U lock:w:0x3f:m -U efuse:w:0x05:m -U hfuse:w:0xDA:m -U lfuse:w:0xFF:m

: Burn & Lock Arduino hex bootloader file

.avrdude -c stk500v2 -p m328p -P COM1 -b 115200 -B 1.1 -U flash:w:%HEXFILE% -U lock:w:0x0f:m

Hope that’ll save anybody else from blowing better part of a day figuring out why their Atmel isn’t programming normally!

So… We’ve finally decided to go all-out and bring over all the inventory from HVW Tech and integrate it into Solarbotics. This is a pretty big undertaking, and as such you’re going to need to tip toe around the construction tape and sawdust while we re-arrange everything. How will this effect you?

First off, we’re doing a MASSIVE restructuring of all out categories. Just like with your car keys, things are not going to be where you thought you left them. The fool-proof way to find items while everything is up in the air is to use the search field. And here’s a neat trick - if you know the SKU of the item you want to find you can alter the URL. Take a standard item address, and just enter the SKU in the last set of slashes. It’s that easy.

Another hiccup you may run into is that clicking on or navigating to a select few categories  will give you an error. This is a bug we’re aware of and in the middle of troubleshooting. We’ll try to fix it as soon as we can, but we don’t have a work around at the moment.

One last issue you might stumble upon is broken links in item descriptions. These actually point to products we haven’t brought over yet, so they’ll start working as more products come online.

We’re aiming to have this all wrapped up by the time the summer comes to a close, but it’s quite an undertaking. In the past two weeks we’ve brought over some 200 items (don’t believe me? Check out our brand-new Electronics Components section) , but there is still tons to go. Once we’re all done, though, you’ll have more selection on a better-functioning site, and won’t have the need to cross-shop at HVW Tech. Thanks for your patience - we want to get this wrapped up as much as you do. And in the mean time…

PAY NO ATTENTION TO THE MAN BEHIND THE CURTAIN.

With the departure of our two interns, we’re finding that we miss them. Damn them and their desire to complete their education…

Since they left, we’re finding we have too many projects and not enough hands to get them done. Got  some/any of the following qualifications?

• Practical experience with sensors
• Experience with 8-bit embedded computing (AVR, PIC 12/16F series).
• PCB CAD experience (we use Altium Summer ‘09)
• Robot-building skills
• Grok open-source hardware, MAKE and Arduino
• Live in/near Calgary, Alberta Canada?

You have to have some practical bench skills. I.e.: Can you program a “hello world” LED blinker onto a 12F675 at our workbench?

Drop us a line as jobs@solarbotics.com