Blog

Status report, changes in the shop, new products and resellers

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!

New forum and wiki online

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.