There are two other new videos, including the second half to the above video as well as a Wowee BIOBug experiment. Check ‘em out over at the Solarbotics YouTube Channel!

• Temperature Probe
• Phidgets Precision Temperature Sensor
• Sensirion Temp/Humidity Sensor
• Thermocouple Kit DS2760
• DS18B20+ Temperature Sensor
• TMP36 Temperature Sensor

And that pretty much rounds out all the temperature sensors we have planned to make available. Stay tuned - there are still plenty of other types of sensors we’ll be adding in the near future.

If you’ve been having a slow, boring weekend this might catch your interest: Dave just uploaded a fistful of  images for Mark Tilden’s Spider. Go to the Walkers/Snakes set to check it out!

Dig around the large image to see what cool stuff you can pick out. Gareth @ Make Magazine (where it was first posted last week) already found a “teacup Stirling Engine” at 10 o’clock (near the window sill, 1st picture)! Did you find his HAL9000 duplicate?

Next up - more sensors! Well, just two, actually:

• Parallax MLX90614 Infrared Module
• Parallax MLX90614 Infrared Thermometer Module

Yeah, it’s not much, but we’ll aim to get lots of new product up over this next week.

To round things out, we have two new videos up on YouTube. The first one features our first successful dry-run of the new pick and place machine:

And the second shows Jerome, our intern and all-around crazy-guy, doing some reorganizing in the lab:

It was probably pointless, but we did it just for fun.

• Humidity/Temperature Sensor
• DS1620+ Serial Digital Thermometer
• DS18B20+ Temperature Sensor
• Devantech TPA81 8×1 Thermopile
• LilyPad Temperature Sensor

Yeah, it’s a pretty bare category at the moment, but we’ll be adding to it over the next few weeks.

The other piece of news we have for you is that we’ve just completed and posted a new Instructable! This one is for a Solar-Powered Battle Symet - yeah, it’s like the other symet, except it’s turned up to eleven. This guy will go absolutely nuts once it’s discharged its power, spinning like crazy. Get two or more of them together and watch ‘em duke it out! Hey, look, we even made a movie for it! Oh, and here’s a parts bundle - it’s just like the other instructable (the Wannabe Miniball).

And that wraps things up - have a good weekend everyone!

Oh, and did we mention that we just took a picture of (almost) all the staff?

A great part of our line of business is that we have a bunch of customers that take our products and turn them into something really cool. This week we have no less than three cool projects we’d like to share with you:

• C Limber crafted this little model airplane actuator using a GM15.
• D Rainger put together this slick Solarroller, using a Solar Engine kit.
• T Özuygur made the Vacumminator - a really impressive home-made vacuum cleaner, using a pair of GMPW deals with GM3s and a BoArduino. Be sure to check out his work-in-progress post that shows off the internals.

…and that about wraps things up. Thanks to the above contributors for sharing their work. If you ever feel like showing off what you’re working on, don’t hesitate to let us know. Have a great weekend everyone!

Perhaps the biggest chunk of news, which has very little to do with us, is that SparkFun is still standing after their Free Day. We found it particularly fun to watch, and one of us got so far into it and answered the phone with “Hello, SparkFun”. True story. Anways, SparkFun posted a pretty nifty video they recorded during the day:

We did our part to contribute by sending a mourning/rest in peace flower bouquet for each of their poor, dead servers. Check out the 4:12 mark in the video.And in other news, our Twitter account just reached 300 followers. Be sure to check it out for the odd piece of news and random tidbits.

On a different note, we want to roll out some new artwork for the PumLantern. Instead of doing all the work ourselves, though, we want some input from you. What theme do you want to see on your lantern shells? Being the graphic designer dude, there are few things I need to keep in mind when designing new artwork:

• Detail: As impressive as our laser engraver is, it can only cut so small before destroying very fine segments. Additionally, we want the artwork to be somewhat sturdy, so we can’t have a whole bunch of itsy-bitsy elements that might break off.
• Stencil: We’re cutting shapes out of a single piece of material - there isn’t any glue or wire to keep pieces in their spot. All elements need to be attached to the wall of the lantern, and you can’t have any free-floating islands/shapes-within-shapes.
• Subject matter: We like to release our PumLantern designs through a creative commons license, and we don’t like being sued. All our designs have to be original (or build on other public domain designs), and cannot infringe on any copyrighted materials.

So what would you like to see on your lantern? Cute critters? Aliens? Electronic circuitry equations? Flaming tacos? If you want to share your ideas, feel free to give me a shout: chris [at] solarbotics [dot] com . Over the next few weels we’ll be sure to follow up the designs that are being frequently requested. But only if they can meet the above design requirements. Feel free to even draw up some rough concepts and send them over - just remember that the simple designs are generally better. Take a look at the existing PumLantern designs or the shell source files if you need something to reference to.