New Atmel Brainboard

We've been having fun playing with the L293D driver chip. It's one of those things to see how much you can make it do by itself (like with any BEAM application!). Grant McKee has been experimenting with some simple additions to the chip to make it (unto itself) a suitable brain for a simple mini-sumo […]

As we all know, the 'A' in 'August' stands for 'Arduino'. So it's with great sorrow that this will be our last mega Arduino-centric update. We'll still be adding to our selection, but not in as massive amounts. The Arduino Components category is still rather sparse, so hopefully that'll see some love soon. But in […]

Unlike Sparkfun, who actually manage to find fake Atmel ICs, we just get strange batches. The Atmel ATMega328 is the power behind the Arduino/Freeduino/*duino, and we have to set up a programming system to burn the venerable Arduino Bootloader into these chips. We normally use an AVR STK500 in HVSP (high voltage serial programming) mode, […]

Solarbotics has been on "the internets" for quite some time now. We've seen many websites come and go, but we've recently jumped feet-first into the cold, frigid water of this "social web 2.0 happy fun time" thing we keep hearing about. I mean, it's Web 2.0. That's, like, twice as much as Web 1.0. And […]