Blog

We released a new version of the Master Brick last week, the first customers should have already received them! Because of all of the excitement in the last two weeks we forgot to officially introduce it :-).

The Master Brick 2.1 has several small improvements compared to the predecessor (Master Brick 2.0):

• Bugfix: You can now flash the Brick again with an Ethernet Extension present in the stack, this wasn’t possible in version 2.0.

• I2C Bus: I2C is used as a bus for communication between Bricks and Bricklets, e.g. to read out the EEPROMs of the Bricklets. The longer the bus is, the harder it is for us to ensure a stable communication between Bricks and Bricklets. With a Master 2.0 and four Bricklet connectors, the maximum bus length was 4x2m = 8m. To increase the electromagnetic immunity, we split the I2C bus into four different buses with an I2C hub.

• USB: The USB interface is now equipped with an ESD protection IC and an EMI filter.

Next year we want to update more of the existing Bricks/Bricklets and there will also be many new ones!

We wish all of you and your families a merry, quite and tinker-heavy Christmas!

Thank you for all of the orders! The announcement of the RED on last Friday and the articles from Golem and Heise (German) did lead to a rather large shipping backlog.

All currently open orders will be shipped this week. Generally we will be shipping up until December 23rd.

We did prepare very well this time, but could nevertheless not keep pace with the orders. Currently we are working at full speed to process the backlog. Thank you for your patience!

Since we frequently got this question: We will ship up until (including) December 23rd. So you do have some more time left to order if you want Bricks and Bricklets underneath your Christmas tree. If you order from outside of Germany, the only shipping option that can guarantee a shipment before Christmas is FedEx. Orders with DHL or Deutsche Post as shipping option may not arrive before Christmas.

One of our tasks is to flash the ordered SD cards. You can take a look at our flashing setup in the image above. It uses a USB 3.0 hubs with 10 USB 3.0 card-readers each. This setup is currently running around the clock.

HDMI cables and some of the cases will be delivered subsequently.

Edit: Miraculously, new plastic arrived already today. So there won’t be a shortage of cases!

In beforehand we did speculate about the composition of the orders. One question was, how many accessories will be bought together with the RED Brick on average. We did misjudge the amount of necessary HDMI cables. We estimated an order rate of 25%, but in reality about 85% of all RED Brick orders include an HDMI cable. We already ordered new HDMI cables, but our supplier also seems to have a backlog. We do have a similar problem with our cases. Our laser cutter, that is used to cut the cases, is also in continuous operation. Our former big stock of plastic is drawing to a close and new plastic will not arrive before Christmas. We likely won’t have enough plastic here to produce all of the necessary cases. So we have to deliver some of them subsequently.

Don’t panic if your package is missing an HDMI cable or a case, they will be delivered separately as soon as possible (see delivery note)!

It’s happening! After nearly a year of development and in sum over 7400 hours of work, we are able to release the RED Brick today! The last days were suspense-packed for us, since we had some small delays. The delays nearly put a release date before Christmas at risk. Up until yesterday we did not know exactly if we would be able to release the RED Brick on schedule. However, now the time has come, the RED Brick is available in our shop for 69.99€.

In the last few days we gave the RED Brick away to a small group of testers, they gave us lots of feedback and found many bugs. All of the bugs should be fixed in the current release version, some of the improvement suggestions will be added to the Software in the next few weeks. Please write us an email (info@tinkerforge.com) if you find more bugs or if you have other constructive feedback!

We look forward to your feedback!

Please note that the stack communication had to be changed for the RED Brick. To be compatible, all of the Brick firmwares need to have a version of at least 2.3.0. Otherwise they won’t be recognized in the stack.

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