Blog

There are new firmware versions (1.1.X) out for all Bricks and all Bricklets. All Bricks and Bricklets that we shipped after February 24th have the new firmwares already flashed. Bricks with old firmwares (1.0.X) are compatible to Bricklets with new firmwares. Bricks with new firmwares are not compatible to Bricklets with old firmwares. The Chibi extension will only be compatible to Bricks and Bricklets with the new firmwares. This means: If you already have Bricklets and you purchase new Bricks when they come out, you at least have to update all of your Bricklets.

The IMUs that are shipped already have the new firmware version and they also require the newest Brick Viewer version, which was last updated today! The older Brick Viewers unfortunately already have an IMU plugin that was used for an early IMU prototype, it will not work properly with the IMUs that were shipped in the last days.

The newest Brick Viewer and the newest firmwares can be downloaded here: https://www.tinkerforge.com/en/doc/Downloads.html

Why all the new firmwares?

One reason why it took us so long to finish the software for the Chibi Extension was a small design flaw in the handling of data. We had one main loop that triggered all of the processing tasks of the Bricks and of the Bricklet plugins every ms. These tasks would read out/calculate new data (e.g. reading out analog values and calculating human readable values) and send out a callback message if necessary (e.g. if a threshold was reached). This worked well with a USB connection.

Now, with a wireless connection like Chibi, things look different. Even if two stacks (connected over Chibi) are standing right next to each other interferences and the long latencies will cause delays in the sending of callbacks. This caused everything that depends on timings to not work properly, since the sending of the callbacks would slow down the whole calculation process. For example the acceleration and deceleration functionality of the Servo Brick was all of a sudden not smooth anymore or the averaging of analog sensors wouldn’t work properly.

A fix for this is quite easy. We now have two main loops, one for data calculation that always runs through in 1ms and one message loop, that sends out messages as fast as it can. This way there is as much data send out as possible and the timings for the calculations are always guaranteed to be correct. Unfortunately this meant that we needed to change the interface between Bricks and Bricklet plugins, resulting in the incompatabilities described above.

First of all: Sorry for the long time we didn’t write anything.

Unfortunately the circuit board assembly hasn’t started yet. As you might imagine, we depend on electronic component suppliers for our production. One of these suppliers managed to change the shipping date every time the old shipping date was reached, for over a month. Fortunately we have a tracking number now and the parts will likely arrive on Monday. The production will then be started immediately! The production times I wrote about in the last blog post are still true.

We are terribly sorry about the long waiting times, we are very disappointed about that ourself.

IMU and Chibi

The IMU Brick and Chibi Extension implementation are both ready and tested now. The IMU Brick is available in the shop as of now! We will make the Chibi Extension available as soon as we have Master Bricks available again (Extensions are useless without Master Bricks).

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!

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.

Pre ordering of out-of-stock items is now possible. Please keep in mind that we won’t be able to ship new Bricks before the beginning of February.