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Tinkerforge is official supporter of Speeding Scientist Siegen e.V.

S3Racing-headerThe 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.

S3Racing-cover
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.

S3Racing-marlene

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).

S3Racing-Formula-student
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.

15 new Bricklets, Part 2 - From Industrial Counter to Sound Pressure Level Bricklet

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.

15 new Bricklets, Part 1 - From C for CAN 2.0 to V for Voltage/Current Brickelt 2.0

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:

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.

Tinkerforge and GDPR

As you have probably already heard, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) will become enforcable on May 25th 2018. The GDPR is EU regulation for better data protection and pivacy of individuals in the EU.

In this blog post we would like to inform you how the GDPR rules are implemented at Tinkerforge:

We took a detailed look at all of the data that we are gathering in the light of GDPR. The only relevant part in our company that we found was our Matomo (formerly Piwik) installation. It did set a cookie that you could opt-out on our privacy notice site. Since this needs to be opt-in with GDPR now we just removed the cookies from our Matomo setup. This does not change a whole lot, since we already did honor the "do-not-track" request that browsers set nowadays, in which case Matomo didn't set a cookie anyway.

Our Matomo installation will now collect anonymized data that can not be correlated to an user account, IP address or similar. The collected data includes

  • sites visited,
  • visiting time,
  • country of origin,
  • browser
  • and similar.

The data is used to

  • find dead links (404),
  • find sites that talk about Tinkerforge,
  • determine server workload through visitor numbers/load times,
  • determine effectiveness of advertising/articles
  • and similar.

The data is not

  • correlated with shop accounts in any way or form,
  • used to track recurring visitors
  • or used to make a permanent profile of users.

This complies with the requirements of the GDPR.

Additionally we operate a shop. If you create an account in our shop we save the address information as well as the orders. This data is (obviously) necessary to run an online shop and it is unavoidable that we save the data. If you want your shop user account deleted (according to the "right to be forgotten"), write us an email. We can execute a SQL query that removes all of your data from our shop system. What will stay is an archived printed copy as well as an archived digital copy of the invoice that you received with your order. We are legally required to keep them (Aufbewahrungspflicht). If you want to see what data we have, you can log into your account and go to the "My Account" page. The address book and order information that you can see there represents all of the data we have.

If you don't have a shop account and you put products in your shopping cart, the shop sets a cookie with an ID of the content of the cart. If you (for example) open the shop in a new tab, the shopping cart content will persist. The only thing tied to this ID is the shopping cart content, no personal information can be obtained from that or correlated to it. The documentation may set one additional cookie if you explicitely choose a language that does not match your browser language, so on the next visit you will automatically be redirected to the correct language page. Again, this does not contain any or could be linked to your personal information.

Generally speaking, we are in the business of designing, manufacturing and selling hardware. We only collect personal information that is absolutely necessary. Thus the new GDPR rules do not affect us greatly.

Instagram

We now have an instagram account: https://www.instagram.com/tinkerforge.

We get asked to give out more information about new Bricks/Bricklets, new production runs and similar all the time. With instagram we hope to be able to do lots of small and fast updates and also show some more details of our development process with photos of development/testing setups and similar.