New Wheels

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 will be at the Calgary City Teachers' Convention Thursday & Friday, February 16 and 17, 2017. We will demo a variety of educational kits for teachers to use in classrooms, including introductory kits to develop skills in programming, mechanical construction, and soldering. Come put a face to the name at booth 727 at Calgary […]

Well, we've found the ringleaders in this little impromptu telecommunications insurrection and took them out back, where we switched from our standard 'beat with a metaphorical hammer' to 'beat with an real hammer'. Which worked so well, actually, that our phones are now back up and behaving themselves. We can now take calls without any […]

After a long hiatus, our PP3 chisel-tip pogo pins are back! And it looks like they're here to stay, so no more drop-outs in supply. I know that we use them for robotics applications, but there's a lot of people using them for other electronics purposes. Now you can get them reliably, and in quantity, […]