We're drawing to a close of the Mark Tilden/Solarbotics B.I.O.Bug contest. Due to close March 4 (the Monday after the weekend), this event is to see who can perform the best hack/reverse engineer on a Hasbro/Wowwee B.I.O.Bug. Two lucky winners get a full Quad of BIOBugs (one of each type) from Mr. Tilden, and if […]
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
Shok Circuits
Here's a little something from Grant in the development lab - a very simple pair of circuits based on Mark Tilden's Bicore Shok architecture. This circuit makes for a very simple, effective Photovore robots, or even a photo-head. Take a look - schematics & parts listed included! We've also added a gallery entry for these […]
2001 Solar Cell Analysis Data - Direct S...
At Solarbotics, we've been getting quite a few questions regarding the "real-world" performance of our solarcells. Although we do have the official Panasonic Sunceram datasheets, it is written in a quite technical manner and does not include practical design data.
Sumovore Line-follower
This link is a bit on the old side, but if you are thinking of entering the WCRG event next month, here's last year's champion's (Craig Limber) webpage about turning his Sumovore into an almost-as-good line follower! It's a good way to get into this rapidly-growing event...
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