2006 Maker Faire

The Western Calgary Robot Games is fast approaching. It's held here in our own hometown of Calgary Alberta, and I can tell you that after visiting most of the major competitions on the west coast of North America, it's one of the most prize-generous! The registration page is now open, so get registered and come […]

We're having problems pinging the Yahoo BEAM list. With 800+ members, it's been the core way we've all be discussing things BEAM, so we're preparing for the worst. We're accelerating our deployment of a list replacement / backup / archive under solarbotics.net. We'll be attempting to send subscription invitation emails to members who posted messages […]

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, […]

We are going to be at one of the two coolest shows on earth, the San Francisco Bay Area MAKER FAIRE! (The other coolest show is the Austin version!) So we are packing up shop and heading down to beautiful California where it's warm and not snowing! If you are in the area, have a […]