Pushpin Update

This is a message that does not announce Halloween a stat holiday at Solarbotics - but enhances the Halloween spirit by bringing you a fancy porch or window decoration idea. We call it the   Pum-kin-Lantern! Here's an easy recipe: take the guts of Pum Lantern, place it in a mixing bowl with some pumpkins, add […]

Our K HP HexPummer has always been a good, steady kit, but once we got our laser-cutter, we started experimenting... and was it ever neat to tuck one of these into a faux Japanese-style lantern! After upgrading two of the four LEDs with super-crazy-mega-bright LEDs, this solar-powered night-activated light show is quite a cool decoration, […]

These are thermal, not Infrared cameras, returning temperature data in a tight and tidy bundle that can be plugged into Android, IOS, and other USB devices (like Raspberry-Pi SBCs!). What use is it? Here's what we've done with it over the last month: And it's small. The basic unit starts at just over $220, and […]

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, […]