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To induce a little bit more traffic to our brand spanking new homepage, we arranged an Easter Discount of 10%! It is valid until April 1st.

As you may have noticed, we have a new homepage ;-).

There are two main goals the new site has:

1. The whole concept of Tinkerforge should be easier to grasp for someone that visits the site for the very first time and has no idea what it is about.

2. The website should be easier to index by search engines.

To achieve the first goal, we added the “What is Tinkerforge?” site, as well as sites for specific groups of customers (tinkerers, educaters and professionals).

The old site was hard to index for search engines, since each site was available in two languages but only had one url (language was set by cookie). This means that google likely never saw the german version of the documentation and so on.

On the new homepage the language is encoded in the url. This also has the advantage, that every site can now be linked language specific.

If you find any dead links or bugs in the new css or similar, please notify us (info@tinkerforge.com). Especially all of the old links that exist in the wild should redirect to the correct new pages.

The Visual Basic .NET bindings are now ready to use!

Since version 2.0.0 the C# bindings are Common Language Specification compliant. This allows to use them with all CLI/.NET compatible languages. For Visual Basic .NET we provide dedicated example code and documentation to demonstrate this.

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

• Installation: https://www.tinkerforge.com/en/doc/Software/API_Bindings_VBNET.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

Bindings, Brick Viewer, Brick Daemon and Firmwares/Plugins that support the new protocol are now available!

What is Protocol 2.0?

Protocol 2.0 is a new reworking of the communication between Bricks/Bricklets and the Brick Daemon. The old protocol hat lots of legacy issues, e.g. it was not suited to handle a connection loss while communicating over WiFi. There are also improvements in the enumeration process and there are many new settings that can be played around with.

Help for the migration of an existing project to the new protocol is available in the documentation. The conversion can be done in a few minutes, after the bindings and firmwares are updated to the newest versions.

Brick Daemon in C

The new Brick Daemon in rewritten in C. As a result it should be way more efficient on embedded systems such as the Raspberry Pi and use less resources.

Edit 1: Shipment date for the Master Bricks is week 3.

Edit 2: Master Bricks, Barometer Bricklets and WIFI Extensions are available again. Open orders and subsequent deliveries with these products were packaged today (January 16th) and will be shipped out tomorrow. Sorry for the waiting time!

Ooops, although we increased the stock of Master Bricks before Christmas, they are out of stock as of today. The 10% discount together with Christmas and the article on the German news site Golem produced an unexpected rush on our products.

Unfortunately our circuit board assembler has a vacation close-down in the first week of the new year. This means that we will only be able to ship out new Master Bricks in mid Januar.

We will, if not otherwise requested, ship partial deliveries of all available ordered products. If someone wants to use the last discount day, it is still possible to order Master Bricks and receive the discount.

At this point already: Sorry for the long waiting time!

We will update this blog entry as soon as we have a precise shipping date,