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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! :)

Today we want to introduce the Energy Monitor Bricklet and its features in detail.

We will start with the technical specification. The Bricklet can measure the following values:

• Voltage (V): Voltage RMS with a resolution of 10mV
• Current (A): Current RMS with a resolution of 10mA
• Energy (Wh): Energy (integrated over time) with a resolution of 10mWh
• Real Power (W): Real Power with a resolution of 10mW
• Apparent Power (VA): Apparent Power with a resolution of 10mVA
• Reactive Power (VAR): Reactive Power with a resolution of 10mVAR
• Power Factor: Power Factor with a resolution of 1/1000
• Frequency (Hz): AC Frequency of the mains voltage with a resolution of 1/100 Hz
• Waveform Voltage (V): Waveform of the AC Voltage RMS with a resolution of 100mV
• Waveform Current (A):  Waveform of the AC Current RMS with a resolution of 10mV

The waveform is returned as 768 data points. These points correspond to about 3 full sine waves at 50Hz. The Bricklet updates the measured frequency every 6 seconds. All other values are integrated over 10 zero-crossings of the voltage sine wave. With a standard AC mains voltage frequency of 50Hz this results in a 5 measurements per second.

To do these measurements the Energy Monitor Bricklet uses two different transformers:

• AC/AC voltage transformer (230V/9V): This voltage transformer can be plugged into a power outlet (wall socket). It has an input voltage of 230V AC and generates an output voltage of 9V AC. The output voltage is safe and can be measured by the ADC on the Bricklet. All other properties of the voltage sine wave remain the same and can be analyzed accordingly.
• 5A:1V and 30A:1V current transformer clamp (hinged): These current transformers can measure the current that goes through a wire contact-free by transforming it into a voltage (the ratio is 5A/30A to 1V). The output voltage is again safe and can be measured by the ADC on the Bricklet.

With both transformers together it is possible to measure the AC voltage and the AC current in a time curve waveform. These measurements in turn can be used to calculate all of the data described above. All of this is possible while there is no live mains voltage anywhere on the Bricklet. The Bricklet can be touched without any problems at any time.

The following video shows a test of the Energy Monitor Bricklet together with four different loads (fan, heater, LED and energy saving light bulb):