Recent News

Yes, I know what you’re thinking. “But you were just closed for, like, a bajillion days for Maker Faire!!” And yes, you’d be right. Except for the bajillion part - that’s just getting carried away.

Solarbotics (and HVW Tech) will be closed tomorrow (July 1st), and Friday (July 3rd). Standard rules apply - you can still place orders, send email, and leave phone messages while we’re closed. Shipping and correspondance will resume on Thursday and then again on Monday.

And what’s the reason for these crazy, crazy schedules? While Canada Day and the annual Cowboy Hick Fest make convenient excuses, the truth is that we’re taking this opportunity to do some major organizing and renovations around the office. We apologize for any immediate inconvenience, but these improvements will benefit everyone in the long run. Just you wait and see - once Monday rolls around, we’ll be a leaner, meaner Oscar Meyar Weiner robot sellin’ machine. In the mean time, we wish all our fellow Cunucks a Happy Canada Day and all our friendly neighbours to the south a fantastic July 4th.

The whole ‘duino thing is just so much to say, we’ve got to do it three times. Blame Jerome, our intern…

We’ve got Freeduino version 2.2 back from the assembly line today, and all tests out beeeautifully! New features include an SMD-mounted 16MHz crystal, better power-consumption circuit routing (for battery-operated projects), and “hacking pads” for using the FTDI “Bit-Bang” method of burning bootloaders (instructions in the manual).

It’s 100% Arduino-compatible, made in Canada, and back in stock!

Hi there forks! We hope everyone out there is enjoying their first week of summer. School is wrapping up, the sun is out, and WATCH OUT, A FREAK SNOW STORM! I kid, I kid. But this is Calgary, so you never know.

Over the course of the next summer months we’re aiming to roll out some additional features and content. While most of that is still in the works and I probably shouldn’t be talking about it too much, we have something small to show off. We often get requests from people asking about the best places to find websites devoted to BEAM, resources for DIY projects, or even interesting sites we stumble across in our voyages across the intertubes. And thus we present… Community Links! This new page can be found by clicking on the big ol’ “Resources” button at the top, and then “Community Links” link (…huh?) on the lower left-hand side.  It documents a handful of the neat web pages we frequently visit, as well as connections to our Twitter and YouTube accounts. We hope it’ll help you to discover something new and interesting.

But don’t fear, I wouldn’t leave you without showing some sort of product love and appreciation.  We’ve just marked down both the GM18 and GM19 gearmotors from $19.75 to $15.95. They’ll now save you $3.80, and are at the same price as all our other metal gearmotors too. That about wraps things up - have a great weekend!

Edit: Looks like we just got in a shipment of various PICAXE items. Most notably the Serial Download Cable is now available. Oh, and do you remember the PICAXE 28X1 and 40X1 ICs, and how they were discontinued and dead? Well, now they’re undead. Zombie microcontrollers, if you will. Don’t ask me how or why, but they’re back in stock and can be ordered any time.

Hi All.

We’ve been having such fun with the PumLantern shells, we thought we’d share the love. Download the zipfile with several file formats under “resources” for the K PL kit!

It’s released under the Creative-Commons Attribution Share-Alike 2.5 Canada license.

We use a laser to cut ours out, but there’s nothing saying a steady hand with an X-Acto blade wouldn’t do the same thing.

Let us know if you do anything with the design. We’d love to see what you come up with!