The University of of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has been running a BEAM-style mechatronics program (GE100) for the last few years. The purpose of the class is to build a self-powered device that can propel itself over both smooth and rough terrain, using a pair of servos and a BEAM-style servo-controller circuit (similar in function to […]
More about website development
Dave Hrynkiw
October 15, 2019
A decent website is a core of a web-centric store like ours. Back in the early days, I hand-coded HTML (yeah, go back to waybackmachine to admire that work), and what you got is what you got. Since then, we rebuilt Solarbotics.com through 3 more iterations of totally refactored hand-coded platforms, and then 2 aborted attempts as re-releases on Magento and then WordPress/Woocommerce. Those last two attempts cost us the ball-park of a really really nice Tesla with nothing much to show for it, with a devastating website hack in-between to kick us in the nether-regions. Many expensive and painful lessons were learned in this process.
Since then, we've released unsatisfactory consultants, brought the development management in-house, and piece-mealed specific development aspects to consultants with MUCH better results. It's come at the cost of letting our internal R&D coast for the better part of a year while we focus our top-talent on getting the website reworked, but its something that needed to be done.
We are about to re-release Solarbotics.com on a WordPress/Woocommerce platform, with some new features added, and some others removed. We'll be staging out further enhancements as we get comfortable with the platform, and hope you'll continue being good customers of Solarbotics.com.
MORE POSTS
Farewell, Mr. McKee!
After 5 years of employment with Solarbotics Ltd., Grant McKee has submitted his letter of resignation to Solarbotics, effective August 16th 2005. Mr. McKee has been an invaluable resource at Solarbotics, but is off to hunker down and gather resources before making the leap to further advance his education. Although he will be greatly missed, […]
Maker Faire Calgary TOMORROW!
Hey! Are you in Calgary? Are you near Calgary? Is your name Calgary? If you answered yes to any of the first two questions (but not the third one - that's just plain weird), then you might be interested in hearing about the Mini Maker Faire that's happening here in the city tomorrow. From 10am […]
Monday (!) New Product: Arduino Micro, O...
As Valentine's Day is fast approaching and the geeky internets are full various fuzzy, sugary, and/or blinky items of unknown nature in different shades of red and pink... We find ourselves with nothing to say on that particular topic. Instead, we bring you a double dose of new product, check it out: Arduino Micro $24.95 […]
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Warning: This product contains chemicals known to the State of California to cause cancer and birth defects or other reproductive harm.
Please visit www.P65Warnings.ca.gov for more information. This item was manufactured prior to August 31, 2018.