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Tinkerforge products are available for about one year now. After the expansion of the product catalogue our next step will be to find resellers to get a bigger market presence.

Nearly directly after our start in december 2011 we had regular inquiries regarding reselling our products. At the time we had too much stuff going on at the same time and we couldn’t take proper care of the requests. Also it was often not possible for us to meet the requirements like discount, packaging or handling of returns.

With Trenz Electronic GmbH we have attracted our first reseller.Trenz Electronic was founded as a engineering company in 1992 with a focus on FPGA hardware designs. Since 2001 they have their own webshop and sell different FPGA and development boards as well as different electronic parts.

Since they develop their own hardware there is a lot of electronic experience in this company, such that questions can be answered without our help or Tinkerunity. One additional nice aspect is that Trenz Electronic also develops open source electronics, so they know what they are doing.

All Tinkerforge products will be available in Trenz Electronic’s webshop at beginning of January 2013. We are looking forward to a good cooperation!

The new hardware version of the LCD20x4 Bricklet is now available.

The new version comes with one more button and with solder points that can be used to solder on external buttons.

We just introduced a 10% discount on everything, it will continue until December 31st. Happy Christmas shopping!

The Industrial Digital In, Digital Out and Quad Relay Bricklets are now available!

All of the Industrial Bricklets are galvanically isolated. They are perfectly suited for interfacing with industrial controllers, such as PLC’s or frequency converters or to interface other 12V/24V hardware.

The Industrial Bricklets are also the first Bricklets that allow software grouping. This feature makes it possible to group up to four Industrial Bricklets together. Without grouping it would be necessary to do multiple function calls to read or set a state of a group, so the state of the group would not be read or set simultaneously. With grouping this is now possible.

Master Brick 2.0

Edit: Since there have been some questions about this: The Master Brick 2.0 and the shielded cables are completely compatible to the old Master and the other Bricks, Bricklets and cables.

From now on the new Master Brick 2.0 is available in our shop! Every order that is shipped after November 26th and contains a Master Brick will have version 2.0.

We are unexpectedly already out of the old Master Bricks and version 2.0 can be shipped earliest on November 29th, so there will unfortunately be a short delay in the shipments.

Master Brick 2.0 can be seen as a rugged version of the older versions. The new features include:

• Protection against 8kV ESD discharge on all 40 pins of the 4 Bricklet ports.

• Bigger over voltage protection diodes.

• More efficient input diode, thus smaller voltage drop and more voltage for 5V Bricklets (e.g. IO16 and Analog Out).

• 3.3V rail inside stack now protected against short circuits.

• Automatic analog-to-digital converter calibration (in hardware). This allows for a more precise read out of analog Bricklets.

• Fixed voltage regulator instead of switching regulator for generation of 3.3V.

• Bigger component packages (0603 instead of 0402).

These changes increase the production cost, but we decided to keep the old 29.99€ price point. Since the price is the same, the new Master Brick 2.0 will completely replace the old Master Brick version.

Below you can see a selection of the Master Brick evolution that we had so far:

From left to right:

1. Very first prototype, size 2.5x2.5cm, uses 8bit microcontroller. This is from late 2008!

2. First prototype with a cortex-m3 microcontroller. It looks already pretty similar to the Master Brick 1.0. The Bricklet connectors on this are absolutely tiny and impossible to use :). There are 5 different versions of this, with different board-to-board connectors.

3. First prototype of Master Brick 1.0

4. Master Brick 1.0

5. Master Brick 1.1

6. First prototype of Master Brick 2.0

7. Master Brick 2.0

Shielded Bricklet cables

We now also offer something that has been asked for many times: Shielded Bricklet cables.

The shielded Bricklet cables reduce EMI/RFI interference and are more robust towards external EMI/RFI interference. The rubber jacket of the shielded Bricklet cables also protects against mechanical stress.

The acutal shield of the cable is properly connected to ground on only one side of the cable: