Blog

The PHP bindings are now ready to use!

• Download: https://www.tinkerforge.com/en/doc/Downloads.html#bindings-and-examples

• Installation instructions: https://www.tinkerforge.com/en/doc/Software/API_Bindings_PHP.html

• API: https://www.tinkerforge.com/en/doc/index.html#bricks

If you find bugs, please report them in the generator git: https://github.com/Tinkerforge/generators

The next bindings we are releasing will be Ruby bindings.

We now have documentation for the low level TCP/IP protocol that is used to communicate with the Brick Daemon. If you want to learn how it works you can use this as a starting point: https://www.tinkerforge.com/en/doc/Low_Level_Protocols/TCPIP.html

To allow a user configurable decay mode, we turned on synchronous rectification by default in the Stepper Brick firmware. With synchronous rectification enabled, efficiency is improved by replacing diodes with actively-controlled MOSFETS and mixed decay modes are made possible. Without synchronous rectification only fast decay can be used.

After we replaced a defective Stepper Brick of a customer and the replacement self-destructed too, we had to investigate. Turns out it is a bad idea to use synchronous rectification for big stepper motors with high inductance. We managed to reproducibly destroy Stepper Bricks with a 3A Nanotec stepper motor at speeds above 40000 steps/s while it works without problems when synchronous rectification is disabled.

Granted, the stepper motor we used there is a bit above the specification of the Stepper Brick.

To be on the safe side in the future we added a possibility to enable and disable the synchronous rectification and disabled it by default in the newest Stepper Brick firmware: http://download.tinkerforge.com/firmwares/bricks/stepper/.

If you have a stepper motor that is at the maximum of the Stepper Brick specification and you want to use it at high speeds, we highly recommend to keep synchronous rectification disabled.

Circuit boards and parts for the LCD 20x4 and Humidity Bricklet are now complete. The whole thing will go in production on friday. So far everything worked as planned. The number of preorders is so high currently that it will probably take up to wednesday until everything is shipped (May 1st is a holiday in Germany).

In the last weeks the complaints regarding our payment provider (Moneybookers) seemed to increase. Many credit card and ELV payments were not accepted without any reason and often the shopping cart was empty after the abortion. Even after a long back and forth with Moneybookers these problems couldn’t be fixed. Thus we decided to change the payment provider about a month ago.

All of the necessary verification processes are now completed and it is from now on possible to pay with credit card or with ELV (Germany only) over Heidelpay. In contrast to Moneybookers the whole payment process is now integrated in our shop. There are no popups any more, you don’t have to leave the shop for payment and the shopping cart will still be there if the payment failed!

Additionally to credit card and ELV it is still possible to pay via prepayment (europe only) and PayPal. Regular customers, universities and schools can still order on account. With Heidelpay it would also be possible to integrate the PayPal payment process into our shop (so you aren’t redirected to the PayPal site for payment). This would cost us a little bit more but if it is asked for we could activate that pretty fast now.

We did test the new system with some real orders and everything seemed to work fine. If you have any problems please contact info@tinkerforge.com so we can fix the issues!