We will be at the Calgary Comic Expo!

A decent website is a core of a web-centric store like ours. Back in the early days, I hand-coded HTML (yeah, go back to waybackmachine to admire that work), and what you got is what you got. Since then, we rebuilt Solarbotics.com through 3 more iterations of totally refactored hand-coded platforms, and then 2 aborted […]

That's it. We've had enough. The weather is just too darn nice outside. So nice, in fact, that we quit. That's right, when Monday rolls around no one is even going to bother coming into the office. You heard us - we'll be closed on Monday, August the 6th. Go ahead and email and leave […]

Yes, it's true. After years of working our fingers to the bone inserting jumper wires on breadboards to make unusually robust controllers for robots out of discrete & logic chip elements, Solarbotics has seen the light! We've put on our eye-patch, hoisted the jolly-roger, and swung along-side to board the HMS HVWTech.com ! That's right […]

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, […]