Solarbotics Closed for Heritage Day

Kurt Moore of the Los Alamos National Laboratories has been busy using BEAM technology to bring technology training to the local schools in the Jemez Valley. Here's what one class did!

Solarbotics and the Useless Box have been mentioned in the Wall Street Journal article "Looking for Something Useful to Do With Your Time? Don't Try This"! It is dedicated to the historical overview of the uselessness starting with its invention in the 1950s to nowadays. The useless box can take many guises, names and materials […]

We like to have some play time at Solarbotics, and the "Bare Bones Photovore" is the results of one of these play sessions. It's a very simple (amongst the simplest, we'll hazard to say) light-seeking solar-powered robot, and find it easy to build using the Bicore Experimenter's PCB.

This mini-sumo design by Jeremy Bloyd-Peshkin features our wheels, and one of our favourite building materials, Sintra. We can't laser-cut sintra (PVC=bad stuff when burned), but milling it works well, as this builder shows. The asymmetric motor layout works, as proven by this contest-winning design (scroll to the bottom of the page).