Fire Stuff, Light Stuff, New Stuff

We don't know about you, but we're ushering in the New Year with a BANG. That's the sound our metaphorical sledgehammer of rage made while we beat the snot out of our internal server this week, after it refused to come into 2012 in an operational status. Fortunately, our crack IT squad has patched up a solution and our office operations are back up. Our phones are still being rather... difficult, though, but we hope to get those co-operating shortly. We apologize for the hassle, and we'll post an update when they're back online.

Last week we mentioned a certain CNC woodburning device made from the LMR-SH kit. It looks like it's entered in a contest over at Buildlounge, and we encourage everyone to go and cast a vote for it. The polls will close pretty soon, so go and show some support for lighting things on fire making cool solar-based contraptions.

In other news, some of our pals from the local Protospace have recently worked on a neat-o project that used an Ardweeny for brains. They designed a really cool ornament for the top of a Christmas tree in Calgary's East Village, based around the idea of a Tesseract/Hypercube built with Acrylic rods and lit by LEDs. The result is pretty stunning. Go check out this post for some more pictures and some details on the build. Unfortunately, all good things come to an end, and the tree and decorations will be taken down this week. Still, we want to congratulate the team behind this project on a job very well done.


And now, as is the tradition with these news posts...

New Products!

	Wireless Proto Shield - $21.85 USD / $22.95 This proto shield comes with a socket for wireless modules, such as the Digi XBee, and a built in regulator and a big ol' prototyping area.
	Wireless SD Shield - $29.15 USD / $30.60 CAD This Arduino shield rocks a socket for wireless modules, such as Digi Xbee, so that you can float your bits and bytes of data through air with the greatest of ease.
	Kingston 2GB Micro SD TF Memory Card (with SD Adapter) - $9.50 What good is an SD shield without an SD? A 2GB microSD Card is surprisingly hard to find these days as SDHC has taken over, but here's a card that is compatible with all our microSD products. It also comes with an SD adapter for easy use in other applications.
	ProtoSnap - LilyPad E-Sewing Kit - $19.95 The ProtoSnap series is a new way to prototype your projects without a breadboard. This box of goodies comes with a bobbin of conductive thread, needles, a battery and a sewable slide switch, battery holder, push button, and LEDs to jump start you into E-textile circuits!
	12 VDC 2A Switching Power Supply AC Adapter - $13.50 This is a VERY common regulated 12 VDC 2000mA output power supply used for many common gadgets.
	Graphic LCD Serial Backpack - $19.95 This is the serial backpack (not to be confused with a serial handbag) for graphic LCDs, providing a simple serial interface to a full range of controls.
	Graphic LCD 160x128 Huge - $49.95 Compact and cost effective display module, with an embedded GOLDELOX-GFX2 graphics processor that delivers 'stand-alone' functionality to any project. Powerful graphics, text, image, animation and countless more features are built inside the GOLDELOX-GFX2 chip.

And that pretty much covers what's been going on this week. We're desperately hoping that the technical problems we've been facing so far isn't an indication for how the rest of the year will unfold, because that would really suck. Now if you'll excuse us, we need to get back to beat-the-server-with-a-metaphorical-sledgehammer duty.

But before we disappear, we just wanted to take this one quick opportunity to express our gratitude to our purchaser, Chuck, who will be starting at a new job this week. And even though we also want to beat that company with a metaphorical sledgehammer for stealin' him away, we want to say that it's been a pleasure and that we wish him all the best.