Blog

After a long development phase we can finally release the new Silent Stepper Brick.

So far only the Stepper Brick was able to controller stepper motors. With the Silent Stepper Brick we offer an alternative to control these motors. Compared to the Stepper Brick, it has a mode to drive stepper motors completely noiseless and it can use a step-resolution as small as 1/256-step.

The Silent Stepper Brick has 3 modes.

• Stealth Mode: Completely noiseless
• Coolstep Mode: Energy optimized
• Classic Mode: Maximized torque

In Stealth Mode the stepper motor is driven nearly noiseless with as little vibrations as possible. The mode is usable for low to medium velocities. In Coolstep Mode the power consumption is automatically reduced during low load times. This ensures that as little heat as necessary is generated. If the maximum torque of a stepper motor is needed, you can switch to classic mode. Classic Mode is very similar to the way the Stepper Brick controls stepper motors.

For these three modes velocity thresholds can be defined. When one of these threshold is reached the Brick changes from one mode into another. Typically this is used to be noiseless in standstill or for low velocities (stealth mode) and to have the maximum torque for high velocity applications (classic mode).

Another feature is Stallguard. It can be used to measure current motor load and for stall detection. In Coolstep Mode this is used automatically to adjust the motor current to the load.

With a small step size like 1/256-step you can drive a stepper motor extremely smooth and precise. If you want to reach high speeds, like 10000 full-steps per second, a step-size of 1/256 would result in a velocity of 2,560,000 steps per second. It is not possible to precisely trigger steps with a frequency that high. We limit the steps to a maximum of 65535 steps per second. However, you can enable step-interpolation. With step-interpolation enabled, you can drive a motor with 10000 full-steps per second and the driver will internally drive every step with 1/256 sub steps, which is the equivalent to the full 2,560,000 1/256-steps.

The Silent Stepper Brick is now available in our shop for 59.99€ including VAT.

We also made a small noise comparison video:

tl;dr: Since mid March we are shipping the Mounting Kits with new plastic washers. They allow for an easier an sturdier mounting of stacks.

In the past it wasn't possible to mount a stack with tightly screwed spacers. The distance between Bricks is approximately 12.3-12.4mm, while the spacers have a length of 12mm. It would have been possible for us to order spaces with the exact length, but during testing we found out that the distance between Bricks can vary slightly (+-0.1mm). We think this is the case since that the board-to-board connector are never soldered on completely the same way. During soldering they may "float on the tin" with slightly different heights.

To remedy this problem, we got custom plastic washers made for us. They have the exact height that is needed for the average distance and they can be easily squished together by 0.05mm during the mounting. This way we can compensate for the tolerances (this was not possible with the metal washers). Additionally the new washers are non-conductive. 

We advice to put the new washers at the top side of the Bricks during mounting, see below.

Currently you can see the Tinkerforge building blocks at Didacta in Stuttgart at the booth of the Rink GmbH. They make trollies that are used by schools and universities to store class sets of notebooks or tablets. At the trade fair they are showing the new "IT experience box". This trolley has different hardware compenents and tools for projects in the IT area. The new trollies contain Raspberry Pis, mini displays and Tinkerforge building blocks. The content of the trolley can be used to do different experiments. Each experiment has a labled plastic plate with the necessary components, instructions and example source code. The trolly also comes with all of the necessary power supplies.

The booth is in Hall 4.F14 and can still be visited until Saturday.

With firmware version 2.1.0 the WIFI Extension 2.0 now supports Mesh Networking.

With Mesh Networking enabled you can have a whole bunch of stacks with WIFI Extension 2.0 and only one of them has to be reachable by a WIFI router.

The WIFI Extensions can arbitrarily move in and out of range of each other, the mesh will always be maintained automatically.

The configuration is very easy. You just have to put the extensions into Mesh Mode and configure a group prefix/id and a mesh gateway ip/port per mesh.

Please note, the following software versions are necessary for the new mesh features:

• WIFI Extension 2.0 version 2.1.0,
• Master Brick version 2.4.2,
• Brick Daemon version 2.3.0 and
• Brick Viewer version 2.3.7.

tl;dr: There will be a change of servers on Thursday January 12th 2017 starting at 08:00 Uhr. Please be ready for a downtime of up to 8-10 hours.

After we already wrote about changes in our system of building blocks yesterday, we want to introduce our new homepage today:

From a user perspective the content of the site does not change a lot. The frontpage as well as the explanation sites for new customers have been redesigned and improved. All of the other content stays essentially the same.

Surprisingly ~30% of our visitors come to our site via a smart phone or tablet. This is especially surprising since our products are normally used/programmed with a normal desktop PC. To deal with this fact the new homepage, particularity the shop and documentation, will now have a better usability for mobile devices.

From a technical perspective the new site has big changes. We will use a completely new CMS. This will make creation of new content and blog entries considerably easier for us. Furthermore, the domain “tinkerforge.com” will relocate to a new server. We will then have a physical separation between tinkerforge.com, mailserver, brickv.com/iot-remote.com and tinkerunity.org. If the visitor numbers increase further in the future, it will be easy to move parts of the new site or single databases to new servers.

To do the server and software switch we have to migrate our complete user database (this took about 4 hours in tests). Additionally we will have to change the DNS entry for tinkerforge.com to a new IP. Until this is known by all nameservers it will take some more time (~6 hours). Our mailserver will keep the old IP and it should be reachable for the whole time.

The server switch will be on Thursday January 12th 2017 starting at 08:00 Uhr. Please be ready for a downtime of up to 8-10 hours.