Blog

The S3Racing team of the University of Siegen is a member of the Formula Student. They are developing an electric racing car that, among other things, uses a Tinkerforge IMU Brick 2.0 in the control system. The student team is using the IMU to measure the roll, pitch any yaw angle that occur during the drive around the track in curves and during acceleration/deceleration. The gathered data is used to control the parameters of the four wheel drive for an optimal force distribution. The IMU Brick is used integrated in the car with a Step-Down Power Supply and an Ethernet Master Extension.

The 25 students of the Speeding Scientist Siegen e.V. build up and optimize a car every year for challanges all over the world. They are able to directly apply the theory learned in the lectures and gain valuable real-world experience. Besides the engineers, the team also has financing and marketing students to help with there respective expertise.

The new racing car is a pure electric racer made with carbon with the name "Marlene McFly". Marlene has a top speed of 135 km/h and passes the 100 km/h mark after less than 3 seconds. It is not a toy, it is a real racing car! Because to the really light chassis, which weights only 16,3 kg, the car has a total weight of only 195 kg. The two electric motors have a total power of 80 KW (109 PS). This equates to a ratio of 1,7 kg/hp (by comparision: The Formula-E racing cars have a power-weight ratio of 2,9 kg/hp).

The Formula Student was founded in 1981 by the Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) in the USA. By now the Formula Student is an international competition with teams Europe and Asia. The "Formula Student Germany" exists since 2006 and they race each year at the Hockenheimring. The cars are developed with rigorous technical and financial restrictions. The goal of the competition is to give the students all over the world the possibility to apply the theory learned in lectures and to compare their approach to the different solutions of the other teams.

In the last blog entry we already introduced some of our new Bricklets. These new Bricklets were new version replacements for pre-existing Bricklets. Today we want to introduce four brand-new Bricklets: The Industrial Dual Relay Bricklet, Sound Pressure Level Bricklet, Industrial Counter Bricklet as well as the Particulate Matter Bricklet are now available in our shop and documentation.

Industrial Dual Relay Bricklet: With the Industrial Dual Relay Bricklet our product line is extended by a new Industrial Bricklet. It replaces the old Dual Relay Bricklet. The Industrial Dual Relay Bricklet has two relays with three terminals each (single-pole double-throw). It can switch loads up 240VAC/10A as well as 30VDC/7A. In comparission to the predecessor the Bricklet now has the pluggable terminal block that all of the Industrial Bricklets have. Since the Bricklet is often used together with other Industrial Bricklets, this gives better compatibility. A Dual Relay Bricklet in the "industrial form factor" was one of the most common feature requests that we got!

Sound Pressure Level Bricklet: The Sound Intensity Bricklet is replaced by the Sound Pressure Level Bricklet. The Sound Pressure Level Bricklet can measure sound pressure level in dB(A/B/C/D/Z) and ITU-R 468. It iuses a frequency range of 40Hz to 40960Hz and it can measure sound level from 30dB to 120dB. Additionally the Sound Pressure Level Bricklet can measure the spectrum. The specification is comparable to a 200€ sound level meter.

Particulate Matter Bricklet: Many of our customers tried to measure particulates with the Dust Detector Bricklet, but it was not meant to be used for this application. With the Particulate Matter Bricklet we now have a Bricklet that can measure actual particulate matter concentration in the categories PM1.0, PM2.0 and PM10 as well as the number of particles in 100ml of air with the sizes between 0.3µm up to 10µm.

Industrial Counter Bricklet: The Industrial Counter Bricklet is a frequency counter with 4 galvanically isolated channels. With the integrated edge counter you can measure duty cycle, period and frequencies from 0.03Hz up to 4MHz per channel. Since the direction of the counter is configurable and the Bricklet has a time resolution of up to 10.4ns, it can be used to read any sensors that have any kind of edge count or frequency output.

We got a big delivery of new Bricklets! Since we got 15 different new Bricklets at once, we will split the blog entry in two parts.

Some of the new Bricklets got an upgrade with the addition of "2.0" to the name, they will replace the predecessor. Additionally we also have four completely new Bricklets, they will increase the possible applications of the building block system. We will introduce the new Bricklets in the next blog entry.

All of the new Bricklets have the new 7 pole connector. You can find more information about the new connector here. The folloging Bricklets now have a co-processor instead of the EEPROM and are in our shop as of now:

• Load Cell Bricklet 2.0
• PTC Bricklet 2.0
• Voltage/Current Bricklet 2.0
• Real-Time Clock Bricklet 2.0
• Thermocouple Bricklet 2.0

The following Bricklets got the 2.0-upgrade with additional useful improvements:

CAN Bricklet 2.0: The CAN Bricklet 2.0 now has a co-processor and thus more RAM. Because of that the Bricklet is more powerful and it can handle a high volume of data in longer bursts then the predecessor.

RS232 Bricklet 2.0: The RS232 Bricklet 2.0 also has more RAM compared to the predecessor. Because of the bigger buffer the handling of data can be significantly simplified. The Bricklet has the new streaming API, it works exactl the same way as it does with the RS485 Bricklet. The new streaming API was explained in detail here.

LED Strip Bricklet 2.0: Beside many small changes the new LED Strip Bricklet 2.0 has two significant improvments. It is now possible to control up to 2048 RGB or 1536 RGBW LEDs. The Bricklet can therefore control 6x as many LEDs as the old LED Strip Bricklet. Previously we had the constraint that with full usage of a LED Strip Bricklet it was not possible to use the other ports of the Brick. With the new LED Strip Bricklet 2.0 this is not the case anymore. You can control of the available LEDs and at the same time use the other free Bricklet ports without any negative effects.

Industrial Digital In 4 Bricklet 2.0, IO-4 Bricklet 2.0 und Industrial Quad Relay Bricklet 2.0: The new Bricklets with digital in-/outputs got an improved API. The API now uses bool-arrays instead of bit masks. This was sugested to us astoundingly frequent. Particularly users that use high-level languages that normally don't use bit masks (LabVIEW, Matlab, Visual Basic .NET) had often problems with them. On the protocol level the arrays are still transferred as bit masks, so there is not loss in performance.

Tomorrow we will introduce the Industrial Dual Relay Bricklet, Sound Pressure Level Bricklet, Particulate Matter Bricklet and Industrial Counter Bricklet in detail.

It is time again to introduce new Bricklets! Since yesterday we got eight new Bricklets in our shop. Some of them are improved versions of existing Bricklets, but we also released some completely new developed Bricklets.

The following Bricklets are new in our product range:

• Remote Switch 2.0
• Motion Detector 2.0
• Analog In 3.0
• NFC
• Temperature IR 2.0
• Rotary Encoder 2.0
• Solid State 2.0
• Outdoor Weather

To be able to introduce all eight new Bricklets in detail we will start with four in this blog entry and introduce the next four in a second part. In the first part we will introduce Remote Switch 2.0, Motion Detector 2.0, Analog In 3.0 and NFC Bricklet. The second part will deal with Temperature IR 2.0, Rotary Encoder 2.0, Solid State Relay 2.0 and the new Outdoor Weather Bricklet.

As we already wrote, the new Bricklets will replace the old counterparts. All of the new Bricklets have a co-processor and thus a 7-pole connector, as we already announced in the Outlook for 2017.

Since we have some of the predecessors still in stock, we will sell them off with a discount of 30%. Of course only as long the the stocks last!

Remote Switch Bricklet 2.0

The Remote Switch Bricklet 2.0 will replace the old Remote Switch Bricklet. The new Bricklet has all of the features that the old Bricklet has. You can still use it for home automation and it come with a 433MHz radio module including a corresponding SMA antenna. You can use the Bricklet together with the standard (PT2262 or HX2262) remote mains switches, as the predecessor. Additionally the new Remote Switch Bricklet 2.0 can now also receive data from a remote!

Motion Detector Bricklet 2.0

The Motion Detector Bricklet will be replaced by the Motion Detector Bricklet 2.0. The new Bricklet has many improvements. We don't use a ready-made module anymore, instead we developed our own PIR solution. The Bricklet is more compact and it has a detection angle of 120°, compared to 100° of the old Bricklet. The PIR sensitivity of the new bricklet can be controlled via API. So you can change the detection range depending on your application. A special gimmick of the Bricklet is the blue backlight. The backlight is dimmable and can be controlled via the API (for example during a motion detection). Since the backlight consists of three individually dimmable LEDs, you can also use it to show small animations!

Backlight in action:

Analog In Bricklet 3.0

The Analog In Bricklet 3.0 replaces the Analog In Bricklet 2.0. The specification is comparable to the predecessor, but it has the advantage that the analogue signal is measured directly on the Bricklet, it is not transferred through the Bricklet cable anymore. The voltage measurement is done on the Bricklet by the processor and the measurement is transferred digitally. Additionally the API more averaging possibilities.

NFC Bricklet

The successor of the NFC/RFID Bricklet has the name NFC Bricklet. For the old Bricklet we put "RFID" in the name, since technically the 13.56MHz NFC frequency is part of RFID. Unfortunately some customers falsely believed that the Bricklet is also compatible to the 125-134kHz RFID frequency. To make sure that there can't be any confusion we just removed "RFID" from the name. Because of that the Bricklet does not need the "2.0" at the end.

Like the old Bricklet, the new Bricklet can read and write NFC Forum Type 1 and 2 as well as Mifare Classic tags. Additionally it supports NFC Forum Type 3 and 4 including the necessary encryption. It also supports NFC P2P as well as card emulation. The API now has support for reading and writing NDEF directly. In sum the new features are a huge improvement and it is easier to use too.

While i am writing this blog entry we have already sold 41 of the new NFC Bricklets (they are available in the shop since yesterday) although there has not yet been any announcement. So this Bricklet obviously attracts a large interest! We are very sorry for the long waiting time. The transition from the old NFC/RFID Bricklet to the new Bricklet unfortunatly took way longer then we expected.