Blog

TL;DR:

We have new enclosures and mounting plates:

• Rail Mounting Case,

• Big Tinkerforge Workbench (34x20cm),

• Mounting Plate 22x22 (12x12cm),
• Mounting Plate 22x22 (12x12cm) with cable lead-through,
• Mounting Plate 46x22 (24x12cm) and
• Mounting Plate 46x22 (24x12cm) with cable lead-through.

Rail Mounting Case

To use Tinkerforge on a DIN rail you can use the Rail Mounting Kit. This has been available for a while, but it can only mount one stack of Bricks.

Our new Rail Mounting Case has enough space for lots of different Bricks and Bricklets. Fully equipped it has enough space for 8 Industrial Bricklets and additionally up to 4 4x4cm modules (Bricks / Master Extension / Step-Down Power Suply). Additionally the new enclosure has a top lid that can be opened. If closed it protects the Bricks and Bricklets against dust and accidental contact of the electronics.

The enclosure is highly customizable. The side walls are compatible to each other and they can be put into different places. Because of this you can mount Bricks and Bricklets freely and the enclosure can easily be customized for your individuel project.

The second floor of the enclosure has a mounting plate that can mount any Bricklet. It is for example possible to mount an OLED display including a push button. As an example you could show status information about your control cabinet on the display and use the button to switch between different measured values.

Tinkerforge Workbench with 34x20cm

The Tinkerforge Workbench is perfect for everybody that wants to experiment with Tinkerforge components and wants to present the project in a tidy way. The Tinkerforge Workbench is also the best-selling product that we produce with our laser cutter. Since we often got inquiries about a bigger version, we want to offer one now.

Alongside the old Workbench with a size of 20x14cm we will now have an additional Workbench with a size of 34x20cm. It can be used to mount a huge assortment of different Bricks and Bricklets.

Four new Mounting Plates: 12x12cm and 24x12cm each with and without cable lead-through

For many years have been selling a Mounting Plate with a size of 12x6cm. The plate has a 5mm pitch pattern of 3mm holes. We would like to add four additional new Mounting Plates with different sizes.

The new Mounting Plates are:

• Mounting Plate 22x22 (12x12cm),
• Mounting Plate 22x22 (12x12cm) with cable lead-through,
• Mounting Plate 46x22 (24x12cm) and
• Mounting Plate 46x22 (24x12cm) with cable lead-through.

A cable lead-through in the Mounting Plate was often wished for. With the new bigger sized Mounting Plates there is now enough space to add it. The cable lead-through is big enough to fit one of our 8-pole connectors of the Industrial Bricklets (which means that it is also big enough for a USB cable or Bricklet cable).

Update: You don't have to worry about delivery delays anymore. Our laser cutter will be fully functional again starting from 25th of July.

Unfortunately we had a small accident. Our laser cutter caught fire. Don't worry: Nobody got hurt and the company building is still standing!

It is not yet clear if it is a total write-off or if it is economically justifiable to send the laser cutter back to the manufacturer for repair. Nevertheless both option (new laser cutter or repair) will take several weeks.

We use the laser cutter for the kits (brackets for the Weather Station, Server Room Monitoring kit, Blinkenlights etc), for all of our enclosures and the mounting plates. We don't have a big stock of these parts. They are mostly made just in time when they are ordered.

If you order a kit that includes laster-cut parts we will still ship the parts of the kits that are available and ship the unavailable plastic parts in a second delivery when they are available again.

We don't know the exact time it will take to get everything running again, but even in the best case there will be a significant delay.

We apologize for any inconvenience!

The S3Racing team of the University of Siegen is a member of the Formula Student. They are developing an electric racing car that, among other things, uses a Tinkerforge IMU Brick 2.0 in the control system. The student team is using the IMU to measure the roll, pitch any yaw angle that occur during the drive around the track in curves and during acceleration/deceleration. The gathered data is used to control the parameters of the four wheel drive for an optimal force distribution. The IMU Brick is used integrated in the car with a Step-Down Power Supply and an Ethernet Master Extension.

The 25 students of the Speeding Scientist Siegen e.V. build up and optimize a car every year for challanges all over the world. They are able to directly apply the theory learned in the lectures and gain valuable real-world experience. Besides the engineers, the team also has financing and marketing students to help with there respective expertise.

The new racing car is a pure electric racer made with carbon with the name "Marlene McFly". Marlene has a top speed of 135 km/h and passes the 100 km/h mark after less than 3 seconds. It is not a toy, it is a real racing car! Because to the really light chassis, which weights only 16,3 kg, the car has a total weight of only 195 kg. The two electric motors have a total power of 80 KW (109 PS). This equates to a ratio of 1,7 kg/hp (by comparision: The Formula-E racing cars have a power-weight ratio of 2,9 kg/hp).

The Formula Student was founded in 1981 by the Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) in the USA. By now the Formula Student is an international competition with teams Europe and Asia. The "Formula Student Germany" exists since 2006 and they race each year at the Hockenheimring. The cars are developed with rigorous technical and financial restrictions. The goal of the competition is to give the students all over the world the possibility to apply the theory learned in lectures and to compare their approach to the different solutions of the other teams.

In the last blog entry we already introduced some of our new Bricklets. These new Bricklets were new version replacements for pre-existing Bricklets. Today we want to introduce four brand-new Bricklets: The Industrial Dual Relay Bricklet, Sound Pressure Level Bricklet, Industrial Counter Bricklet as well as the Particulate Matter Bricklet are now available in our shop and documentation.

Industrial Dual Relay Bricklet: With the Industrial Dual Relay Bricklet our product line is extended by a new Industrial Bricklet. It replaces the old Dual Relay Bricklet. The Industrial Dual Relay Bricklet has two relays with three terminals each (single-pole double-throw). It can switch loads up 240VAC/10A as well as 30VDC/7A. In comparission to the predecessor the Bricklet now has the pluggable terminal block that all of the Industrial Bricklets have. Since the Bricklet is often used together with other Industrial Bricklets, this gives better compatibility. A Dual Relay Bricklet in the "industrial form factor" was one of the most common feature requests that we got!

Sound Pressure Level Bricklet: The Sound Intensity Bricklet is replaced by the Sound Pressure Level Bricklet. The Sound Pressure Level Bricklet can measure sound pressure level in dB(A/B/C/D/Z) and ITU-R 468. It iuses a frequency range of 40Hz to 40960Hz and it can measure sound level from 30dB to 120dB. Additionally the Sound Pressure Level Bricklet can measure the spectrum. The specification is comparable to a 200€ sound level meter.

Particulate Matter Bricklet: Many of our customers tried to measure particulates with the Dust Detector Bricklet, but it was not meant to be used for this application. With the Particulate Matter Bricklet we now have a Bricklet that can measure actual particulate matter concentration in the categories PM1.0, PM2.0 and PM10 as well as the number of particles in 100ml of air with the sizes between 0.3µm up to 10µm.

Industrial Counter Bricklet: The Industrial Counter Bricklet is a frequency counter with 4 galvanically isolated channels. With the integrated edge counter you can measure duty cycle, period and frequencies from 0.03Hz up to 4MHz per channel. Since the direction of the counter is configurable and the Bricklet has a time resolution of up to 10.4ns, it can be used to read any sensors that have any kind of edge count or frequency output.

We got a big delivery of new Bricklets! Since we got 15 different new Bricklets at once, we will split the blog entry in two parts.

Some of the new Bricklets got an upgrade with the addition of "2.0" to the name, they will replace the predecessor. Additionally we also have four completely new Bricklets, they will increase the possible applications of the building block system. We will introduce the new Bricklets in the next blog entry.

All of the new Bricklets have the new 7 pole connector. You can find more information about the new connector here. The folloging Bricklets now have a co-processor instead of the EEPROM and are in our shop as of now:

• Load Cell Bricklet 2.0
• PTC Bricklet 2.0
• Voltage/Current Bricklet 2.0
• Real-Time Clock Bricklet 2.0
• Thermocouple Bricklet 2.0

The following Bricklets got the 2.0-upgrade with additional useful improvements:

CAN Bricklet 2.0: The CAN Bricklet 2.0 now has a co-processor and thus more RAM. Because of that the Bricklet is more powerful and it can handle a high volume of data in longer bursts then the predecessor.

RS232 Bricklet 2.0: The RS232 Bricklet 2.0 also has more RAM compared to the predecessor. Because of the bigger buffer the handling of data can be significantly simplified. The Bricklet has the new streaming API, it works exactl the same way as it does with the RS485 Bricklet. The new streaming API was explained in detail here.

LED Strip Bricklet 2.0: Beside many small changes the new LED Strip Bricklet 2.0 has two significant improvments. It is now possible to control up to 2048 RGB or 1536 RGBW LEDs. The Bricklet can therefore control 6x as many LEDs as the old LED Strip Bricklet. Previously we had the constraint that with full usage of a LED Strip Bricklet it was not possible to use the other ports of the Brick. With the new LED Strip Bricklet 2.0 this is not the case anymore. You can control of the available LEDs and at the same time use the other free Bricklet ports without any negative effects.

Industrial Digital In 4 Bricklet 2.0, IO-4 Bricklet 2.0 und Industrial Quad Relay Bricklet 2.0: The new Bricklets with digital in-/outputs got an improved API. The API now uses bool-arrays instead of bit masks. This was sugested to us astoundingly frequent. Particularly users that use high-level languages that normally don't use bit masks (LabVIEW, Matlab, Visual Basic .NET) had often problems with them. On the protocol level the arrays are still transferred as bit masks, so there is not loss in performance.

Tomorrow we will introduce the Industrial Dual Relay Bricklet, Sound Pressure Level Bricklet, Particulate Matter Bricklet and Industrial Counter Bricklet in detail.