News Archives

Well, we have some good news and some bad news. First, the good. We’ve been keeping incredibly busy working on bringing in some new products. The bad news… We’ve been incredibly busy. So busy on new products (and a few big projects), in fact, that we don’t really have anything ready to show you (yet). If the good news didn’t interest you at all, try this: pies exist and they are delicious. This always has been and always will be good news. You can’t debate the glory of fruit-filled pastries. And if the bad news didn’t interest you either, just know that, unfortunately, scientists have not yet found develop rocket shoes. Bummer.

But that’s all okay, because we still have three things to show you today. Starting off with Mark - a pal, conspirator, and compadre of Solarbotics and generally all-around okay dude - who has been conducting some experiments with the BrutusBot (which he helped develop). He’s mounted a camera to it that records footage, which when watched makes the BrutusBot seem like some kinda… Alien stalker thing, creeping through your house like it’s in a terrible sci-fi horror movie. Check out the action:

It certainly shows how flexible the platform is, to be able to accommodate this kind of an application. Mark also recorded another similar video, but one that takes place in Calgary’s Aerospace Museum with the Brutus creeping around underneath and near some of the aircraft.Well, that’s one YouTube video… Why not another? Back in October we showed off YouTube user pateycanada’s project Robbe. He based it on a the Sumovore, and developing his own shields/brainboards to get the features he wanted. He just released another video where he goes into detail on the setup and behaviour, complete with a lot footage of the cute lil’ guy in action:

And our last item for today… Remember when we said that there weren’t any new products to show off? Well, that was kinda mostly true. We certainly have a (single) new option to show off for a product. Yana, our fantastical graphic designer, has whipped up a slick new dragon theme for the PumLantern to celebrate Chinese New Year. It’s available in all our standard lantern colours, and looks particularly good in, well, any of them.

So that pretty much wraps things up for another week. You can expect another (hopefully moreso) positively riveting newspost from us after another seven rotations of the Earth…

Well, it’s been a riveting week. We did all sorts of exciting things, like definitely not riding a pallet jack down a flight of stairs and off a totally awesome jump. Nope, didn’t happen at all. And just like how our tech’s face didn’t connect with the ground after the jump he didn’t take, we thought it’d be a good idea to celebrate this not-event with some new connector-type-stuff. And a motor. Because everyone loves motors.

	Mabuchi RF500TB Mabuchi Motor - $4.95 A very efficient, powerful, slow pancake motor. Mabuchi makes some of the best volume-manufactured motors in the world. They’re usually a premium over “clone” motors, but for good reason.
	2.1mm DC Power Plug Short - $1.75 This is a standard DC-style female plug, that comes as the connector itself plus a screw-on plastic casing.
	Telecom & Ethernet 4P-4C Clear Male Plug - $0.31 USD / $0.33 CAD This is the standard connection type that’s used for hooking up those wired telephone handsets that you barely see around any more. It has four pins, gold connections, and a clear housing. Exciting stuff.
	3-Pin Jumper Wire - F/F, 35cm - $1.95 USD / $2.05 CAD Each cable is 35cm (about 13.75″) long, and features a 3-pin JST Re connector at each end. They’re fairly standard units, often used on 0.1″ breakaway headers.
	1-Pin Jumper Wire - F/F, 16cm, Bundle of 10 - $3.95 USD / $4.15 CAD These jumpers come in packs of 10, and measure 155mm (6.1″) with a female connector at each end. They’re really helpful for jumping all kinds of things, such as going from board to board or whatever else you have in mind.
	Sharp Sensor Cable (20cm) - $1.95 USD / $2.05 CAD It can be a bit of a pain to get in there and solder up connections for a Sharp sensor, so we’ve brought in these 3-pin, 20cm (7.87″) cables to make life easier. This makes for a convenient connection to standard 0.1″ 3-pin headers, such as those used for servos.

Look at all them connector things. The only challenge now is to find enough things for us to plug into other things. Just like how we definitely don’t need to plug in the watermelon launcher to remotely fire when someone hits the doorbell. Nope, that won’t freak out the delivery people at all…

We’re a Canadian Company, but the impact of the over-zealously worded American Legislation H.R.3261 “Stop Online Piracy Act” and S.968 “PROTECT IP” will affect foreign Internet sites.

Being a central backbone to the Internet, the USA has an uncomfortably large influence on the rest of the English-speaking web, and so it’s of our Canadian interest to add our voice to the protest. As a company that has shared our resources even before the advent of the Open-Hardware movement, being able to openly link and share without threat of unreasonable retribution will be chilling.

Especially citizens of the United States, please follow the  suggestions listed by the instigators of today’s voluntary Internet website blackout, Reddit. Educate yourself about SOPA with the always-informative TED Talks. Take Action.

Well, it certainly has been a busy week! Particularly for our pals over at SparkFun, who just wrapped up their third annual Free Day. This is quickly becoming a favourite spectator sport around the office, as every year we tune in to watch the available money evaporate and/or their website/servers die a horrible, horrible death. As in years past, we sent along a lil’ SB lovin’ for the hardworking SparkFun crew. This time around it was some complimentary ice cream to help cool down after a long day (some of us thought we should order a few sledgehammers instead, so the SF team could dispense some Solarbotics-style troubleshooting for whatever IT problems popped up). You can see SparkFun’s appreciation for our delicious treat written on the inside of a box in the photo to the left.

In other news, Jetty over at Thingiverse just released a super awesome project called the ArdJet Programmer. He’s made (in his words) “a cheap, easy to build ISP (In System Programmer) which you can use to write the bootloader to an Extruder or Arduino Mega or any other Arduino board with an ICSP connection.” Our favourite part, of course, is that uses an Ardweeny for some of the guts. Regardless, it’s a very nice build and he’s done an excellent job with the resources and instructions. He’s done a great job at keeping the size compact, using space very efficiently.



New Products

We won’t lie. This week’s collection of new products isn’t the most inspiring or exciting. But that’s okay, because we’ve included a button and a switch. And everyone loves buttons and switches.

	Infrared Sensor Jumper Wire - 3-Pin JST - $1.50 USD / $1.58 CAD Three pin JST connector with red, black, and yellow colored wire. 5 inches of wire length, perfect for interfacing SHARP analog Infrared sensors to your project.
	SPST - 6.2mm Momentary Tactile Pushbutton - $0.70 These 4-pin momentary-contact SPST (Single Pole, Single-throw) switches are great for sending reset signals.
	ARDX Arduino Mega Base Kit - $6.95 Usually when you see Mega and Bass in the same sentence it’s not usually about Open source microcontroller platforms, but in this case it is! Well that’s kind of a stretch cause we’re really talking about the Arduino Mega Base Kit which allows you to attach your rogue Arduino Mega (or compatible board) to a ARDX experimenter’s platform.
	ARDX Acrylic Base Kit - $6.95 Wrangle in your loose Arduino - you don’t want them going rogue, so tie it down to an ARDX experimenter’s platform!
	CR2032 3V Lithium Coincell Battery - $1.95 USD / $2.05 CAD This is a VERY common regulated 12 VDC 2000mA output power supply used for many common gadgets.
	CR2025/CR2032 Coincell Battery Holder - $0.49 USD / $0.52 CAD Here’s a coin cell holder for mounting the most common types of coin cell batteries: CR2032 and CR2025. You could try other batteries but we’re guessing you won’t have much luck with ‘AA’s.
	SPDT Momentary Toggle Switch - $3.25 CAD / $3.45 CAD Check this action out - It’s a panel mount toggle switch, Yay! This switch is unique in it’s operation as it has a spring inside that automatically returns the switch to the center-OFF position.
	5mm Water-Clear Phototransistor - $0.45 This 5mm Water-clear Phototransistor will pick up visible and infrared light and conduct current. When light reaches this high sensitive/fast response time component it’s much like current reaching the base of a transistor which allows current to flow from collector to emitter.

Yup. Look at all them mighty fine lookin’ button and switches. Both of ‘em. We’ll leave you to bask in their warmth and glow until next week.

Well, we’ve found the ringleaders in this little impromptu telecommunications insurrection and took them out back, where we switched from our standard ‘beat with a metaphorical hammer’ to ‘beat with an real hammer’. Which worked so well, actually, that our phones are now back up and behaving themselves. We can now take calls without any problems. Those poor phones thought that they could beat us… WHO’S TALKING NOW, HUH? Here’s a hint: we are.

…on the phone.




We don’t know about you, but we’re ushering in the New Year with a BANG. That’s the sound our metaphorical sledgehammer of rage made while we beat the snot out of our internal server this week, after it refused to come into 2012 in an operational status. Fortunately, our crack IT squad has patched up a solution and our office operations are back up. Our phones are still being rather… difficult, though, but we hope to get those co-operating shortly. We apologize for the hassle, and we’ll post an update when they’re back online.

Last week we mentioned a certain CNC woodburning device made from the LMR-SH kit. It looks like it’s entered in a contest over at Buildlounge, and we encourage everyone to go and cast a vote for it. The polls will close pretty soon, so go and show some support for lighting things on fire making cool solar-based contraptions.

In other news, some of our pals from the local Protospace have recently worked on a neat-o project that used an Ardweeny for brains. They designed a really cool ornament for the top of a Christmas tree in Calgary’s East Village, based around the idea of a Tesseract/Hypercube built with Acrylic rods and lit by LEDs. The result is pretty stunning. Go check out this post for some more pictures and some details on the build. Unfortunately, all good things come to an end, and the tree and decorations will be taken down this week. Still, we want to congratulate the team behind this project on a job very well done.


And now, as is the tradition with these news posts…

New Products!

	Wireless Proto Shield - $21.85 USD / $22.95 This proto shield comes with a socket for wireless modules, such as the Digi XBee, and a built in regulator and a big ol’ prototyping area.
	Wireless SD Shield - $29.15 USD / $30.60 CAD This Arduino shield rocks a socket for wireless modules, such as Digi Xbee, so that you can float your bits and bytes of data through air with the greatest of ease.
	Kingston 2GB Micro SD TF Memory Card (with SD Adapter) - $9.50 What good is an SD shield without an SD? A 2GB microSD Card is surprisingly hard to find these days as SDHC has taken over, but here’s a card that is compatible with all our microSD products. It also comes with an SD adapter for easy use in other applications.
	ProtoSnap - LilyPad E-Sewing Kit - $19.95 The ProtoSnap series is a new way to prototype your projects without a breadboard. This box of goodies comes with a bobbin of conductive thread, needles, a battery and a sewable slide switch, battery holder, push button, and LEDs to jump start you into E-textile circuits!
	12 VDC 2A Switching Power Supply AC Adapter - $13.50 This is a VERY common regulated 12 VDC 2000mA output power supply used for many common gadgets.
	Graphic LCD Serial Backpack - $19.95 This is the serial backpack (not to be confused with a serial handbag) for graphic LCDs, providing a simple serial interface to a full range of controls.
	Graphic LCD 160×128 Huge - $49.95 Compact and cost effective display module, with an embedded GOLDELOX-GFX2 graphics processor that delivers ’stand-alone’ functionality to any project. Powerful graphics, text, image, animation and countless more features are built inside the GOLDELOX-GFX2 chip.

And that pretty much covers what’s been going on this week. We’re desperately hoping that the technical problems we’ve been facing so far isn’t an indication for how the rest of the year will unfold, because that would really suck. Now if you’ll excuse us, we need to get back to beat-the-server-with-a-metaphorical-sledgehammer duty.

But before we disappear, we just wanted to take this one quick opportunity to express our gratitude to our purchaser, Chuck, who will be starting at a new job this week. And even though we also want to beat that company with a metaphorical sledgehammer for stealin’ him away, we want to say that it’s been a pleasure and that we wish him all the best.

Remember that time we said we were going to close for vacation, but our website and phones would stay on duty to take your messages? Well, it looks like the phones are revolting, and demanding time off immediately. Right now we’re having issues with our office system, and we’re unable to take calls. Please shoot us an email in the mean time, and we’ll try to get back to you as soon as we can. We hope to have our phones back online shortly. Sorry for the inconvenience!

Well, it’s the end of the year apparently. 2011 has kinda withered up and died like some kinda… Food thing that tends to dry up if you leave it out for too long. Like jerky. Or raisins. Mm, especially raisins when they’re in oatmeal cookies (shh, don’t tell the boss. Anything but a strict chocolate + oatmeal combination around these parts is pure blashpemy). Anyways, just so y’all know, we’ll be closed on December 30th and January 2nd to do some year-end shinanigans. Business resumes as usual on the 3rd.

But that’s all kinda boring. So let’s show you something kinda neat. Youtube user SSublett1 took a Let’s Make Robots Start Here bundle and turned it into something really freaking awesome. He made a CNC wood burner that HARNESSES THE POWER OF THE SUN to, uh, burn wood. It’s like a home-made laser engraver, but the power source is a giant flaming ball of gas in space. Check out the video:

If you think this is as nifty as we do, head on over to Buildlounge and cast a vote for this project, so that its creator can get a chance winning a laser cutter.

And just because we can, here’s a SECOND project video! Of a jumping/gliding robot! It doesn’t use any of our parts or anything, but it’s just so darn cool, we have to show it off.

Ok, and our last item of business is… An item of business. It looks like we’re on the market for a new purchaser. Here are some of the tasks you’ll need to cover:

• Watch stock levels (physical and in Quickbooks, because bits can’t always be trusted over bytes), and reorder necessary inventory
• Receive shipments
• Help watch for new product introductions by new & existing suppliers
• Order R&D stuff requested by the lab
• Generate sales reports
• Help generate Build-of-Material (BOM) lists for new products
• Develop relationships with supplier reps (some domestic, some very international!)

If you’re based in Calgary and feel like buyin’ cool robot parts and working with a fistfull of geeks, drop us a line or give us a call (403 232 6268).

…aaaand that’s it for the rest of us for the rest of the year. We hope that everyone’s 2012 is much better than their 2011. Happy holidays, seasons greetings, happy new year, autonomous robots and spicy tacos, from the team here at Solarbotics.

This may come as a bit of a shock to you, but the hands that package your orders actually belong to humans. Sure, we may be a robot company, but robo-hands just aren’t quite up to spec for what we need to do. So for the moment we’re staffed by a contingent of mortals, and as us mortals tend to do, we want to spend the holidays with our families and take it easy. So we’ll be closed for the following days:

Monday, December 26th
Tuesday, December 27th
Friday, December 30th
Monday, January 2nd

Also note that the order cutoff time for same-day shipping this Friday (the 23rd) will be at noon MST.

Standard procedure applies - because our website,  answering machines, and email address have no family or emotions, we’re telling them to suck it up and work through the break. You can still place orders and leave messages, and we’ll resume operations as normal when we’re not closed.

That being said… We hope that all of you will have a fantastic winter holiday. We could write some mushy-gushy happy feel-good stuff, but let’s face it. If you’re at all like us, you’ve probably stopped reading by  this point and are already daydreaming about turkey stuffed with candy canes, precariously balanced at the top of a decorated tree. “Carving the turkey” immediately goes from “boring tradition” to “hilarious and exciting spectator sport”. Especially if you use a snow shovel.

Anyways, from all of the team here at Solarbotics, we’re so proud to have served you over the last year, and wish you all the best in 2012.

Ok, we won’t lie - we have a lot of content to show you today, so we’re going to jump right in, starting with…

Shipping Cutoff Dates

It’s getting down to the wire if you want to get a few last-minute gifts for Christmas. Here are our cutoff dates for submitting an order and still receiving in before the 25th:

Courier (Purolator/UPS Standard): United States & Canada: Dec. 14-20 Western Europe & United Kingdom: Dec. 20 Eastern Europe, Africa, Middle East: Dec. 14-20 South and Central Americal: Dec. 19 South Asia: Dec. 16 Far East: Dece. 19 Australia: Dec. 20

Standard Mail (Xpresspost/Priority): Canada: December 21 United States: December 16 Courier (Purolator/UPS Next Day): United States & Canada: December 22

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Office Projects

Mister Bitey, Resistor Cutter Extraordinaire!
Have you ever had to cut lots of components off of reels? No? Well aren’t you just lucky. For those of us who aren’t so fortunate, our resident IT guy took it upon himself to build something to help speed up the process. Mister Bitey is a ribbon component cutting robot based on Oomlout’s RECO (Resistor Cutting Robot). You can read more about it here.

Autonomous Brutusbot Code
The BrutusBot has been out for a few weeks now, and the R&D team just can’t stop playing & experimenting. They’ve come up with a code example that works with the Brutusbot and the Brutusbot Electronics Bundle that we featured last week that allows your bot to wander autonomously using the IR distance sensor. Use it, tweak it, modify it. Just don’t turn it into a bloodthirsty AI. That might get… Messy. You can find this code here.

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New & Featured Products

	The Sumovore is a wildly popular and successful mini-sumo. What it needs, obviously, is to be turned into the most extravagant Arduino shield, ever. We’ve come up with this handy Sumovore Arduino Adapter Board that will let you interface your Arduino right into this sumo’s body (it’s even compatible with the PICAXE-28X2 Shield Base). This makes it the first full kit solution for building an Arduino-powered sumo. Plug it in, load up some delicious open-source code, and start pushin’ people around. We’ve put together this handy Arduino Sumovore Bundle so that you can get the whole shebang (Sumo, Arduino and the Adapter) together and save 10% ($13.95) over buying everything separately.
	Rainbow Herbie the Mousebot - $39.95 Without any microcontrollers or programming, you can build this fast, light-chasing (such as a flashlight), obstacle avoiding robot. Great for beginners, and comes in red, blue, white, black, pink and now in new funky rainbow colours.
	Christmas PumLantern - $29.95 We’ve whipped a fresh new holiday theme for our PumLantern kit. You can get your holiday blinky fix in black, red, blue or green. Already own a PumLantern and just want a new shell? This is what you’ll need.
	Tiny Lantern - $2.75 What happens when you cross an LED, a coin cell battery, and a little bit of laser-cut acrylic? Our new Tiny Lantern. It stands about 2″, technically qualifying for the ‘adorable’ category of small electronic lanterns. A simple and fun decoration.
	PICAXE PWM-IC - $2.66 USD / $2.95 CAD The PICAXE PWM-IC is a special 8 pin chip designed to drive a L293D motor driver chip to add speed control without any extra output pins needed from your microcontroller.
	PICAXE-28X2 Shield Base (Kit) - $17.56 USD / $18.50 CAD The PICAXE-28X2 shield base has been designed to be compatible with almost all ’shield modules’ as used with the Arduino system. This a very affordable project board for PICAXE development!
	Serial Miniature LCD Module 1.44″ - $31.95 USD / $33.55 CAD Compact and cost effective display module, with an embedded GOLDELOX-GFX2 graphics processor that delivers ’stand-alone’ functionality to any project. Powerful graphics, text, image, animation and countless more features are built inside the GOLDELOX-GFX2 chip.
	Arduino Cookbook by Michael Margolis - $44.99 This is like a bible for the Arduino, covering the programming language, problems, interacting via remote control, working with libraries… This book has taken some of the most useful information available and put it all into one place. But it doesn’t tell you how to actually cook an Arduino. Open Source Techno Soup may sound like it would be delicious, but it’s not.
	GM15a - 25:1 Planetary Gear Pager Motor “D” Shaft - $19.00 You might be familiar with our standard GM15 - a really tiny powerhouse (just under 6mm (0.235″) in diameter) that produces a whopping 35.28gm*cm (0.49in*oz) of torque at stall. This new unit is pretty much the same, except with a ‘D’ shaped output shaft that’ll make it a lot easier to use with your project.

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Well, that’s probably enough for one more week. Remember, it’s still not too late to get your order in, but you’ll want to place it soon. We’ll do the best we can to get your shipment out as soon as we can, but mail carriers are getting pretty darn busy.