Congrats out to Grant, for bringing his "Ender's Wraith" to first place in the advanced mini-sumo category at last weekend's Seattle Robothon. We also picked up an award for "Most Unusual Robot" with our Turbot prototypes! Additional to that, a Solarbotics Sumovore ("Oops" by Kristina Miles) won the amateur mini-sumo category!
Everybody have a good 2010? Good...
Dave Hrynkiw
January 12, 2011
Let's start 2011 by promoting a worthwhile event sponsored by one of our suppliers, SparkFun. Tomorrow is their 2nd "Free Day". Last year's event pretty much crashed their servers (we sent flowers of condolence). This year, they're going about it a bit wiser, offering several ways to taking advantage of their $150,000 give-away.
We're big fans of SparkFun, so at the risk of making our January 13 quite slow, go over there and take part, especially since that there's opportunity for $30k to be raised for charity!
A Makerbot "Thing-o-Matic" 3D printermade it's way to Solarbotics just before the Holiday break. I took it home and turned it into a holiday project, and we've just about got all the bugs squished out. We have some ideas we're looking forward to turning from "bytes to bits", and will be posting them as soon as we can.
We've just received our first batch of new prototype PCBs of the year. What's on the slate? Let's see... We're enthusiastic about the Synapse RF module, with offers XBee functionality in a more powerful and easy-to-use manner, so we've built some adapter boards. There's also an surface-mount Ardweeny, and a test PCB for Jimmie P Rodgers' "LOL Shield" (Lots 'o LEDs).
Soldering new PCBs while listening to the 3D printer hum, while watching the SparkFun servers get attacked... This should be a fun week!
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