Blog

Phew! All of the pre orders are shipped now and at the moment we don’t have any open orders. At this point we have to thank the pre orders for there patience, unfortunately everything took a little bit longer as we had hoped. Nonetheless, we now have the majority of Bricks and Bricklets in stock in big quantaties. We also bought a surplus of the components that were hard to come by. In the future we will be able to reproduce stuff at short notice.

An exception are currently the LCD Bricklets, we have still difficulties with them. The LCD 20x4 Bricklets are currently sold out and we are not taking pre orders for them. We will activate pre orders as soon as we have a fixed date. We don’t want to move delivery dates again. There are however still some LCD 16x2 Bricklets in stock.

Mac OS X

There is more good news for the OS X users. Except for some small details we have the Brick Viewer and the Brick Daemon running on OS X. We will release the first versions very soon.

Chibi Extension

Unfortunately we found out that the configuration of the Chibi Extension was too complicated and too complex. For that reason we have restructured it a little bit.

If you had problems understanding the Chibi configuration you can update now, there is new documentation, a new Brick Viewer and a new Master Brick firmware available. The underlying API stayed the same, if you wrote a program to configure your Chibi Extension you don’t have to change anything.

New and improved hardware

Also worth mentioning here again may be our new products in the shop. There is now an Analog In and Analog Out Bricklet, a Step-Down Power Supply with 5V output (you can e.g. power a Raspberry Pi or Beagle Board with it), 1m and 2m Bricklet cables and a Starter Kit for Tinkerforge beginners.

Yesterday we were at the CeBIT, invited by the CHIP Magazine, to take part at the award ceremony of the CHIP AWARDS. Unexpectetly we were allowed to take the price for “Product of the Year 2012″ home! The Awardees of the “Product of the Year” category in 2011 and 2010 were the major players Lufthansa and Panasonic, now it is Tinkerforge :-).

A video of the award ceremony can be viewed on website of Chip (video is in english).

We are very happy about the award, even though we didn’t quite manage to smile on stage because of the tension. Many thanks to the jury and the CHIP team for the award!

Since we got requests to make the Chibi Extension already available (before the Master Bricks are in stock again), we just did that.

We also tried to make some maximum range measurements, it turns out the manufacturer specification of 2km is not exaggerated.

The first tests were done with the cheap small antenna. I did run around in the fields behind our office and annoyed Bastian by turning the volume of his PC up and down with a Linear Poti Bricklet. Even with the small antenna i couldn’t actually get out of range this way (as long as there was line of sight).

So, i drove of with my car to the next road that is visible out of our window, here we were actually out of range with the small antenna, but with the big external antenna we still had a connection!

We are not 100% sure what the exact distance is that we tested, but it is quite far away and definitely further than we expected. We will just leave the “up to 2km” in the documentation, since that seems to be reachable easily.

Indoors the range is as expected, one big wall with reinforced concrete is enough to interrupt the connection. As a rule of thumb you can probably say: If you have connection with WIFI from one point to another it should work with the Chibi Extension too, since Chibi should have a greater range than WIFI.

All of the parts that were missing to start the production did now arrive. Now we are ready for take off! Our products will now be assembled piece by piece, everything will be in stock again soon. We are currently assuming the following shipping dates:

Master Brick: March 7th, Bricklets: March 9th, other Bricks: March 13th

All of the pre orders will be shipped as soon as everything for the delivery is ready. Thank you for your patience.

There are new firmware versions (1.1.X) out for all Bricks and all Bricklets. All Bricks and Bricklets that we shipped after February 24th have the new firmwares already flashed. Bricks with old firmwares (1.0.X) are compatible to Bricklets with new firmwares. Bricks with new firmwares are not compatible to Bricklets with old firmwares. The Chibi extension will only be compatible to Bricks and Bricklets with the new firmwares. This means: If you already have Bricklets and you purchase new Bricks when they come out, you at least have to update all of your Bricklets.

The IMUs that are shipped already have the new firmware version and they also require the newest Brick Viewer version, which was last updated today! The older Brick Viewers unfortunately already have an IMU plugin that was used for an early IMU prototype, it will not work properly with the IMUs that were shipped in the last days.

The newest Brick Viewer and the newest firmwares can be downloaded here: https://www.tinkerforge.com/en/doc/Downloads.html

Why all the new firmwares?

One reason why it took us so long to finish the software for the Chibi Extension was a small design flaw in the handling of data. We had one main loop that triggered all of the processing tasks of the Bricks and of the Bricklet plugins every ms. These tasks would read out/calculate new data (e.g. reading out analog values and calculating human readable values) and send out a callback message if necessary (e.g. if a threshold was reached). This worked well with a USB connection.

Now, with a wireless connection like Chibi, things look different. Even if two stacks (connected over Chibi) are standing right next to each other interferences and the long latencies will cause delays in the sending of callbacks. This caused everything that depends on timings to not work properly, since the sending of the callbacks would slow down the whole calculation process. For example the acceleration and deceleration functionality of the Servo Brick was all of a sudden not smooth anymore or the averaging of analog sensors wouldn’t work properly.

A fix for this is quite easy. We now have two main loops, one for data calculation that always runs through in 1ms and one message loop, that sends out messages as fast as it can. This way there is as much data send out as possible and the timings for the calculations are always guaranteed to be correct. Unfortunately this meant that we needed to change the interface between Bricks and Bricklet plugins, resulting in the incompatabilities described above.