Closed for St. X-Men Day

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 […]

We laser lots of wood and acrylic... like seriously, it's hundreds if not thousands of sheets per year. This volume of throughput tends to cause the lasers to build up a lot of gunk and debris that needs to be cleaned on a regular basis. Besides being safer, it reduces the "flash" marks which are […]

Last summer during a Solarbotics Robotics for Educators session, one of the teachers noted something about many of the mainstream robotics and electronics learning platforms commonly used in classrooms. He said that those platforms suffered from the Black Box Effect. This effect was where the “black boxes,” the controllers, were plugged into the computer and […]

Here's a tip submitted by Rick Steenblik regarding hacking our SCC3733 for less voltage, but more current: After using your SCC3733 solar cells for a couple of bots I noticed that they can be altered to provide about 3.3v at 80ma (in full sun) by cutting the bus connector on the back to electrically separate […]