Blog

First of all: Sorry for the long time we didn’t write anything.

Unfortunately the circuit board assembly hasn’t started yet. As you might imagine, we depend on electronic component suppliers for our production. One of these suppliers managed to change the shipping date every time the old shipping date was reached, for over a month. Fortunately we have a tracking number now and the parts will likely arrive on Monday. The production will then be started immediately! The production times I wrote about in the last blog post are still true.

We are terribly sorry about the long waiting times, we are very disappointed about that ourself.

IMU and Chibi

The IMU Brick and Chibi Extension implementation are both ready and tested now. The IMU Brick is available in the shop as of now! We will make the Chibi Extension available as soon as we have Master Bricks available again (Extensions are useless without Master Bricks).

When will the Bricks be available again?

Currently we expect to receive all of the remaining required parts for the Bricklets on February 9 and for the Bricks on February 13. The circuit board assembly of both will start immediately. It will take ca. one day per Brick and Bricklet, we will of course produce the products that are sold out first.

More options in the shop

As you might have already read in one of the older blog posts, we had quality problems with our last circuit board assembler. In addition he didn’t assemble the THT parts (the parts that are placed through holes). We had another, very unnecessary, quality problem with the USB cables. About 3-5% of them were broken. To resolve these problems we now bought new USB cables. These have significantly higher quality (with gold plated connectors and Ferrite Bead).

Since we didn’t want to raise prices significantly because of the more expensive circuit board assembly and USB cables, we found the following compromise: Accessories such as cables and mounting kits are now optional with all products (we got the feedback that most already have USB cables and don’t need the mounting kits anyway, so this change seems quite fair). Furthermore we reduced the prices for the mounting kits and the Bricklet cables (from 1.99€ to 0.99€ for the kits and from 0.99 to 0.49 for the smallest Bricklet cable).

Analog In, Analog Out, Chibi and IMU

In the last weeks we were also busy working on new products. The Voltage Bricklet will be removed from our product line, in return we will introduce two new Bricklets: The Analog In Bricklet and the Analog Out Bricklet. The former can read voltages from 0-45V with a resolution of 1mV. It has connections for 5V, 3.3V and ground. These will make it possible to directly connect and read out most analog sensors. The Analog Out Bricklet also has connections for 5V, 3.3V as well as ground and it can output voltages from 0-5V with a resolution of 1mV. Both Bricklets will be available with the new production.

One of the most most anticipated products is the Chibi Extension. The firmware and the API for it is now ready, only the documentation is missing. The IMU Brick is also nearly ready, missing is a GUI for the calibration and the examples for all of the programming languages. Both will be available together with the other Bricks, perhaps even some days earlier.

Resellers wanted

A site with the conditions and volume rates for resellers is now online. Even without being an official Tinkerforge reseller it is now possible to buy Bricks and Bricklets at volume rates in our shop for everyone!

We are proud to present Tinkerunity.org - The Tinkerforge Community.

The two most frequent complains about the homepage were: The behavior of the forum and the two different accounts for shop and community on the same site. To overcome these problems we have made a separate community page. We decided to not develop a single sign on for the the shop and a forum on tinkerforge.com because of security issues. A security hole in the forum should not be able to result in a loss of personal data entered in the shop system. Tinkerunity is hosted on a different server. This of course also helps to speed up both, the shop and the community site.

On Tinkerforge.com the shop, the official english documentation and our blog will remain. Tinkerunity will host the discussion forums and all other community created content. In the long run we would love to see translations of the most important parts of the documentation in different languages as well as lots of project ideas and presentations there.

We managed to import the old forum posts into the new forum. Unfortunately you will have to re-register on Tinkerunity, we were not able to import the accounts. Tinkerunity is a work in progress, there are probably many bugs. Please contact us with any problems you find.

Pre ordering of out-of-stock items is now possible. Please keep in mind that we won’t be able to ship new Bricks before the beginning of February.

Availability

LCD 20x4, LCD 16x2, Humidity, Dual Relay, IO16 Bricklets and some Servo Bricks are in stock again as of now. All other Bricks will be available at the beginning of February, as stated before. Orders that we receive in the Christmas period will be shipped out on December 27.

Timeline

Since we got many questions concerning our next steps, here is a small overview: We have already ordered the new parts that are needed to produce new Bricks and we have spoken with a new circuit board assembler. In the future we will get our Modules ready-to-ship. This will simplify our shipping process greatly. We will also soon receive professionel shipping equipment, it will allow us to automatically insert tracking numbers and such into our shop system during the shipping process.

As the next step, directly after Christmas, we will improve the website. We got a lot of feedback concerning the website that we want to incorporate. The number one suggestion was to implement some sort of pre order in the shop. We got negative feedback about the forum. It seems the forum is not very well suited for our purpose. In response to this we are currently working on a Tinkerforge Community Portal. This will include a better forum, a wiki, possibilities to present your project and much more. We hope that the Community Portal can go online before New Year’s Eve.

Otherwise we will work on the anounced features and products, so they will be ready together with the new Bricks. The features and products include the Mac OS/iOS port, the wireless extension and the IMU Brick.

(Robot-)Construction kits and other relizations of your ideas will follow afterwards.

We wish you Happy Holidays!