News Archives - July, 2010

So apparently Monday here in Albertaland is “Heritage Day”. Which, quite frankly, sounds rather uninspiring. Don’t get me wrong - any excuse for a statutory holiday is a good one. But the name seems rather vague and underwhelming. And thus I began my quest to find the true meaning of Heritage Day. So as any good Citizen of the Internets would do, I typed “define: heritage” into my trusty Google toolbar, and hit enter. Lo and behold, the first result was from princeton.edu, which I promptly skipped over due to incredible overtones of BORING. Ah, but the second definition is what I was after. As Wikipedia describes, The Heritage was “a one-off European Tour men’s professional golf 72-hole tournament contested in 2004 on the Duke’s Course at Woburn Golf and Country Club near Milton Keynes, England. The event was sponsored by the International Management Group and offered a prize fund of €2,000,000.” So I thought to myself, “Really? A Canadian province celebrating the 6-year anniversary of a golf tournament in England?” But then I realized that €2,000,000 is quite a bit of money (probably). All those zeros sure look mighty impressive. That, and members of management groups tend to be the ones that decide on important issues such as stat holidays. So stand tall fellow citizens of Alberta. On Monday, August the 2nd we will reflect on the passing of The Heritage.

What does this mean to the people of the rest of the world who don’t celebrate The Heritage, probably because they’re not so big on golf and/or many Euros? It means that Solarbotics and HVW Tech will be closed on Monday, August the 2nd. Usual rules apply - submit orders, email, and leave phone messages to your heart’s content. We’ll be back up and running on Tuesday, processing your orders and replying to any correspondence we’ve received.

“But wait,” you say, “I just happen to like golf/Euros/The Heritage, and/or I wish I could join in on the festivities!” Well, it just so happens that Santa Claus Henrik Stenson (who won The Heritage) left a present under the tree tee. We’ve just added an imperial boatload-worth (a totally legitimate form of measurement) of books to our lineup. No, we’re serious. We added so many books that we had to take our single Books category and break it down into no less than six different sub-sections. So, like, if par for a book category was 8 subcategories, then we’d have an eagle (two under par), which sounds pretty impressive. If we had seven, it’d be a birdie, which sounds far too lame. Nine categories and it’d be a bogey. Which, if you think of bogeys as unidentified enemy combatants (”Bogey on your six! Go evasive!!”), it’s pretty awesome and action-packed. Unlike golf.

*cough*

So go on over and check out all them literatures. And while you’re at it, there are some new sales going down at HVWTech.com, including lots of Phidgets inventory on for 10-20% off. Remember - if you put in an order both on Solarbotics and HVWTech, let us know (email, phone, or leave a comment when submitting your order) and we’ll merge the two together and adjust your shipping costs.

And without further delay, we wish all y’all a great The Heritage weekend. We’ve reached the cut-off deadline for applicants to review free BeetleBots, and I’ll be be sending out emails to those that wrote in early next week.

Fun fact: As I type this out, I’m doing so not while sitting at my desk, but sitting on it. I highly recommend you try it. Probably not very ergonomic, but hey. When the boss temporarily commandeers your chair, you gotta make do with what you got.

So this week we have a few small tidbits. To kick things off, our sister site HVWtech.com is throwin’ a bit of a mid-summer shindig. A handful of items will be on sale  each week from a different brand, but quantities are limited so you better check it out quick. There has also been a decent fistful of new items added, including some SparkFun and Gravitron stock. Head on over to check it out.

Have you heard of the Most Useless Machine? Well, apparently Stephen Colbert has (hey look, a link for Canadians, too! Dear Comedy Central, making your websites region-specific is stupid). And if you want to make your own such device, we suggest checking out this fantastic tutorial over at MakeProjects. As it turns out, we carry almost all of the items you’ll need, such as:

• GM2 Gearmotor
• GMW Gearmotor Wheel
• GMB28 Motor Bracket
• BHoldAAx4 Battery Holder
• SPDT Snap Lever Switch

You’ll still need to get a hold of the box, wire, and DPDT switch, but we should have enough for you to assemble most of the electronic guts for building something… Useless, apparently.

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You know who we like? Our distributors. They’re like our top secret super agents that infiltrate foreign lands with their cool business to publicly sell our kits and components. So we’d like to introduce and brand new feature for our news posts - Meet a Distributor!First up are our pals at Pitsco, who focus on Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math. They handle all sorts of neat stuff, mainly geared towards schools and education. The best part is that their online store is totally open to everyone. Here’s how they describe their company:

In 1971, three teachers started a company with two simple goals. The first was to provide their colleagues much-needed innovative products for teaching technology education concepts. The second was to deliver on the promise of great customer service.

For almost 40 years, their once part-time endeavor has expanded beyond technology education to also cover science, math, and engineering and now serves millions of teachers and students with thousands of innovative, hands-on products and industry-leading customer service. Thousands of activities and projects covering CO2 dragsters, aerospace, sustainable energy, structures, engineering, and more are available. Each activity provides students a motivating, hands-on experience and helps teachers ensure student success in today’s standards-based classrooms.

They’ve certainly been around for a long time and have an impressive track record. These guys operate right out of Pittsburg, so if you live in the area and need some Solarbotics goods (or any of the other great stuff they carry), give Pitsco a call or check out their site.

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Well folks, that about wraps things up. Remember, if you want to review a BeetleBot you better get an email in to chris [at] solarbotics [dot] com really soon. We’ll be selecting and emailing the lucky participants at the end of next week.I’m on a horse.Er, desk.

Whelp, it’s just been one of those weeks.  When the Calgary Stampede gets into full swing, things get a bit crazy. Fireworks, pancake breakfasts and BBQ lunches, cowboy hats, questionable choice in music (”We got both kinds - country AND western!”), and all-around crazy people. So it’s fairly safe to say that we don’t have any groundbreaking news for you this week. That isn’t  Stampede-related, at least. What we do have, though, is a fistfull of odds and ends. Check it oot:

• Do you run a website? Do you like robots? No way, US TOO! Now here’s the really tough question: Do you like free robots? Here’s the scoop - we want to send out some of our Beetlebots for people to build and review. To apply all you need to do is contact chris [at] solarbotics [dot] com detailing why you should get a ‘bot to review. There’s one qualifying requirement - you need to send your email from the address of the website you’re representing, or provide some other form of reasonable/sufficient proof. We can’t just give free robots our to everyone, you know. As much as we wish we could. It’d make the world a much better (and robotier) place.
• Don wrote in and showed off his Delux Reverse Geocache, which we think is nothing short of incredibly awesome. Why share this on Solarbotics? He writes, “Your yellow Sintra is a near-perfect match of the yellow tint of a yellow Pelican case!”Originally, the Sintra is intended for making signs, but we find it a useful material for forming robot bases/chasis. Using it for geocaching is definitely a new one to add to the list, but great nonetheless.
• Our new laser is up and running like a hedgehog on a motorcycle (…wait, what?). All themes and colours for our PumLantern are now available, and we blew half of Friday engraving random stuff for the staff while we huddled around the machine chanting, “Ooooohhhhh, ahhhhhhh…” If that sounds creepy, well, that’s because it was. The laser brings out strange emotions.
• Creativity is a nasty thing. As we all know, the Mona Lisa was supposed to be a sfumato-filled landscape, until Da Vinci had some “inspiration” and ruined it all by putting some lady in the middle of it. So it happens with some of our staff - we asked Landen and Patrick to peel the sticky paper backing off of the ARDX bases, which they interpreted as “build a free-standing sculpture of a man with a war hammer“. The called him Helgar. I personally think he has a passing resemblance to a certain bear holding a shark.
• We’ve just passed the 300 mark for fans on Facebook. If you guys we all Spartan warriors, we’d totally be able to take on the million-soldier Persian army. But there ain’t no Persian army, so… WATCH OUT SPARKFUN! WE’RE COMING FOR YOU!
  /kidding (SparkFun, baby, we were only kiddin’. You know we loves you, right?)
• It might be worth while to keep tabs on our Flickr stream - Dave’s been updating it with a bunch of odds and ends, including a new Ardweeny add-on and video of some fire in our band-new laser. Don’t worry, it’s pretty small this time.

Aaaaand that about sums it all up. We’re particularly excited about sending those Beetlebots out for review, so regardless of the size of your site or audience give us a shout. It certainly can’t hurt, and you could land yourself a brand-spankin’-new robot, free of charge. That’s it - take care, y’all. (Yikes, looks like the Stampede is even getting to yours-truly…)

You will not believe what happened today.

Our boss showed up to work today wearing a red shirt with beige pants. BEIGE PANTS!

Also, he just so happens to be leaning on the brand-new laser that was delivered not 20mins ago.  It’s a 60W Eplilog Helix (which you may have figured out for yourself), and comes with 33% more buttons, blue-painted bits, and watts than our old (and crispy) 40W model. And as we all know, more buttons = more awesome.

This would be the part where we say, “Now witness the firepower of this fully armed and operational battle station!” But first we need to finish the renovations and have a place to plug it in (along with the neglected Pick-n-Place machines also in the photo).

Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to go crack a whip over those slackers building the clean room. It’s a laser, people. A LAAAZOR. Priorities don’t get much more important than that.