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From July 1st, 2020 the VAT will be reduced from 19% to 16% in Germany. We will not increase the net price in our shop, so all products will become 3% cheaper (for customers that have to pay German VAT).

Here are the most important questions and answers:

Question: What happens to orders that are made after July 1st 2020?
Answer: These orders are charged directly with 16% VAT.

Question: What happens to orders that are ordered and paid before July 1st, 2020 but not delivered yet?
Answer: The shipping date is the date that counts for the VAT calculation. We will refund 3% after shipping in this case.

Question: I am expecting a subsequent delivery (backorder) that has not yet been sent. The order was placed before July 1st, 2020. What happens here?
Answer: As mentioned in the last answer, the shipping date counts, so the reduced VAT will be applied. Therefore, for backorders that are deliver after June 30th 2020, we will refund 3% of the value of the backorder

If you have any further questions, please feel free to send a message to info@tinkerforge.com.

A few months ago we released the new HAT Brick and HAT Zero Brick. Until now we didn't have any solution to mount the HAT (Zero) Brick together with a Raspberry Pi and some Bricklets on a DIN rail. To remedy this we made two new rail mounting kits.

With the Horizontal Rail Mounting Kit the Bricks/Bricklets can be mounted on the top.

The Vertical Rail Mounting Kit is perfect for a space saving installation. Because of the vertical orientation you can use both sides of the moutning plate.

The kits consist of a laser cuttet mounting plate and 3D printed feet that can be clamped on the rail.

We have two new Wi-Fi/Bluetooth sticks for the RED Brick. They will replace the old Wi-Fi stick, which is not manufactured anymore.

While searching for a replacement we tried to implement most of the improvement suggestions we got for the old Wi-Fi stick. There are now two variants:

• Wi-Fi/Bluetooth USB Adapter with External Antenna
• Wi-Fi/Bluetooth USB Adapter with Internal Antenna

Both support the Wi-Fi standards a/b/g/n/ac and both also support Bluetooth!

Full driver support for Wi-Fi and Bluetooth (including WPA, Access Point mode, etc) is included in all RED Brick images >= 1.15.

The Wi-Fi interface can be configured through Brick Viewer as before, Bluetooth is available through hcitools/bluez:

The RASPPISHOP is the newest reseller of the Tinkerforge building blocks and an approved reseller for the Raspberry Pi. The founder of the Shop is a maker and launched the site in 2013. It is now one of the best known shops for Raspberry Pi equipment in Germany. Additionally to the range of boards, enclosures and many accessories for Raspberry Pi, they also offer products for your smart home.

On Monday the 28th of October we will introduce a new ERP system at Tinkerforge. Since it will replace parts of email notifications, billing and shipping that we currently do through our shop system, the shop will go offline at about 10:00 MESZ on 28th of October. We expect the migration to take 24 hours at the very most.

From a customer perspective the invoices, packing slip and order confirmation emails will look a bit differently after the migration, everything else should stay the same. The shop frontend also stays the same.

Internally we are currently using a whole bunch of island applications for the shop, for stock keeping, for shipping and packing, for calender functionality etc. This has worked very well for the first ~7 years of the company, but it is starting to fall apart now. Especially the ever increasing number of products, sourcing of the parts for the products and managing of the production as well as custom products for industrial customers is getting increasingly hard.

Thus our mix of the magento shop, spreadsheets, custom applications and hundreds of small Python scripts will be replaced by a proper ERP system on Monday.

Wish us luck! :)