"We are go-ing on a sum-mer holiday...

As I imagine most of you out there have heard by now, there's a pretty serious vulnerability in the OpenSSL that was announced on April 7th called CVE-2014-0160, better known as Heartbleed. For those of you wondering what the heck this "Heartbleed" thing is, awhile back OpenSSL added a "heartbeat" feature which allowed servers and […]

Solarbotics is helping out local fashion designers prepare their e-wearables for the Calgary MakeFashion. This time, Tony Grimes dropped in to experiment with his fiber-optic cloth from SensingTex as an illuminating surface, but the included 5mm LED was not dazzling enough. Time to hack in our 3W RGB Star Controller! The plan was to shift […]

Last summer during a Solarbotics Robotics for Educators session, one of the teachers noted something about many of the mainstream robotics and electronics learning platforms commonly used in classrooms. He said that those platforms suffered from the Black Box Effect. This effect was where the “black boxes,” the controllers, were plugged into the computer and […]

Hellooooo! I love getting new gearmotors to test. I get to break them apart, poke them, submit them to torture test - it's all great fun. My latest victim of inspection is our new GM17 HE Offset gearmotor. It uses a very power efficient 300-form factor motor to drive the 228:1 gearbox. It isn't a […]