Yumpin' Yimminy - No SolarSpeeders?!?

Here's a little makeover of an inexpensive aftermarket car seat heating pad that stopped working. Designed to activate and warm up when sat upon, the electronics face a fair amount of abuse: since the seat is a soft frame, the wires inside constantly move and flex with the body. They are also subject to harsh […]

We love SparkFun. Great group of people. Excellent products. It's just that they're... well... twisted and cruel. You see their RoboJoust event? We didn't take them serious when they said it was to be performed 4' off a concrete floor. But here's the proof. They're actually building the table that high off the ground. Next […]

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, […]

A little while ago we received an email from an observant Mr. Pavel Ryabinkov, the site-admin of www.myROBOT.ru, who was asking us to relay a question to Mark Tilden: Could you answer, can it be considered the official date of birth BEAM-robotics November 10, 1989?I was basing this question on the message Brian O. Bush: […]