Blog

The Ruby bindings are now ready to use!

• Download: https://www.tinkerforge.com/en/doc/Downloads.html#bindings-and-examples

• Installation instructions: https://www.tinkerforge.com/en/doc/Software/API_Bindings_Ruby.html

• API: https://www.tinkerforge.com/en/doc/index.html#bricks

If you find bugs, please report them in the generator git: https://github.com/Tinkerforge/generators

The next bindings we are releasing will probably be Delphi bindings.

As of now we are shipping all Packages inside of Germany with DHL Premium. We were able to negotiate a price with DHL that is below the shipping cost from before (shipment with registered mail): The shipping cost is now 4.10€ instead of 4.25€ inside of Germany.

Since we don’t have high enough shipment quantities outside of Germany currently, we are shipping with the non-discounted DHL Premium prices outside of Germany. Especially outside of the EU this can be quite expensive (20-45€), so we offer shipping with registered mail there additionally.

It should be mentioned that DHL Premium shipments (compared to registered mails) are insured and have full worldwide tracking!

Furthermore we removed the free shipping starting from 65€. Now Customers with smaller orders don’t have to pay for the shipment of customers with big orders. Our experience has shown that big orderes are often so big, that the shipping cost itself wouldn’t really matter anyway.

The PHP bindings are now ready to use!

• Download: https://www.tinkerforge.com/en/doc/Downloads.html#bindings-and-examples

• Installation instructions: https://www.tinkerforge.com/en/doc/Software/API_Bindings_PHP.html

• API: https://www.tinkerforge.com/en/doc/index.html#bricks

If you find bugs, please report them in the generator git: https://github.com/Tinkerforge/generators

The next bindings we are releasing will be Ruby bindings.

We now have documentation for the low level TCP/IP protocol that is used to communicate with the Brick Daemon. If you want to learn how it works you can use this as a starting point: https://www.tinkerforge.com/en/doc/Low_Level_Protocols/TCPIP.html

To allow a user configurable decay mode, we turned on synchronous rectification by default in the Stepper Brick firmware. With synchronous rectification enabled, efficiency is improved by replacing diodes with actively-controlled MOSFETS and mixed decay modes are made possible. Without synchronous rectification only fast decay can be used.

After we replaced a defective Stepper Brick of a customer and the replacement self-destructed too, we had to investigate. Turns out it is a bad idea to use synchronous rectification for big stepper motors with high inductance. We managed to reproducibly destroy Stepper Bricks with a 3A Nanotec stepper motor at speeds above 40000 steps/s while it works without problems when synchronous rectification is disabled.

Granted, the stepper motor we used there is a bit above the specification of the Stepper Brick.

To be on the safe side in the future we added a possibility to enable and disable the synchronous rectification and disabled it by default in the newest Stepper Brick firmware: http://download.tinkerforge.com/firmwares/bricks/stepper/.

If you have a stepper motor that is at the maximum of the Stepper Brick specification and you want to use it at high speeds, we highly recommend to keep synchronous rectification disabled.