Teach the Teacher: Arduino Boot Camp

Congrats out to Grant, for bringing his "Ender's Wraith" to first place in the advanced mini-sumo category at last weekend's Seattle Robothon. We also picked up an award for "Most Unusual Robot" with our Turbot prototypes! Additional to that, a Solarbotics Sumovore ("Oops" by Kristina Miles) won the amateur mini-sumo category!

May long weekend is upon us up here in Canada, with Victoria Day being Monday. Ahhh, time to melt the igloo, unshovel the lawn mower and scrape away the ice so we can plant snow-peas! (Joke - it's actually quite nice here in Calgary right now...) Anyway, any orders received after 2pm today will not […]

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, […]

Rory Nugent (of Solar Xylophone fame) has posted his thesis presentation to the Interactive Telecommunications Program, which heavily features BEAM devices. By "building things with a sense of life", he's documenting what we've known for a good while - autonomous devices ("pets") offer unusual interesting relationships. Keep up the good work!