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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.

Availability

LCD 20x4, LCD 16x2, Humidity, Dual Relay, IO16 Bricklets and some Servo Bricks are in stock again as of now. All other Bricks will be available at the beginning of February, as stated before. Orders that we receive in the Christmas period will be shipped out on December 27.

Timeline

Since we got many questions concerning our next steps, here is a small overview: We have already ordered the new parts that are needed to produce new Bricks and we have spoken with a new circuit board assembler. In the future we will get our Modules ready-to-ship. This will simplify our shipping process greatly. We will also soon receive professionel shipping equipment, it will allow us to automatically insert tracking numbers and such into our shop system during the shipping process.

As the next step, directly after Christmas, we will improve the website. We got a lot of feedback concerning the website that we want to incorporate. The number one suggestion was to implement some sort of pre order in the shop. We got negative feedback about the forum. It seems the forum is not very well suited for our purpose. In response to this we are currently working on a Tinkerforge Community Portal. This will include a better forum, a wiki, possibilities to present your project and much more. We hope that the Community Portal can go online before New Year’s Eve.

Otherwise we will work on the anounced features and products, so they will be ready together with the new Bricks. The features and products include the Mac OS/iOS port, the wireless extension and the IMU Brick.

(Robot-)Construction kits and other relizations of your ideas will follow afterwards.

We wish you Happy Holidays!

Since there was demand for more smaller updates, we created a Twitter account: http://twitter.com/tinkerforge. We will also tweet there when modules are available again.

As you have probably already seen, some of our products are sold out. Now the Master Brick is gone too. Since we weren’t sure if there would be any interest at all, we didn’t produce huge quantities.

Availability

Master Bricks will likely be available in the end of January or early February again. The reason for that are the board-to-board connectors. They are especially produced for us and have a long lead time. The fact that Christmas and the new year is so near doesn’t help either. We did already order new ones and this time we ordered really big quantaties.

What the future holds

To see the whole thing in a positive light: We will be able to use the time until February to implement many of the anounced features and many of your suggestions. This includes The wireless extension, the IMU, the MacOS and iOS port and more. In addition, we now have a chance to make improvements in the hardware design or possibly apply bug fixes.

Orders

All of the modules that are sold be us, were made by a circuit board assembler without the THT components (THT components are pushed through the circuit board). Before we went online, we made a small portion of these ready to be send out (we thought it would be enough for at least a month). To give a small overview about what has to be done:

Our modules come in a panel (i.e. a bunch of them are beeing hold together by small bridges). They must be broken out and the sharp remains of the bridges are must be removed. After that we place the THT parts and the circuit boards get cleand and dried. Then we flash the UID and the firmware. Before the hardware is send out, we make a small test of the most important functions. The latter is unfortunately necessary since our circuit board assembler did not deliver 100% quality and we don’t want to ship broken or half functioning products.

Nevertheless, we have now mastered the process as described above and we can now definitely process the accumulated orders in the next days.

After the German news site golem wrote an article about us, we experienced an unexpected rush of visitors. We got more questions and orders than expected for the first months.

All the positive feedback was overwhelming.

On the downside, we are currently not able to handle all of the questions and orders as fast as we would want to. If you ordered something, please be a little bit patient. It will probably take us up to monday or tuesday to send out your order.

To clear up one misunderstanding that we have seen repeatedly: It is _not_ possible to upload C#, Java or Python code directly onto Bricks. With the Software that is currently available, it is only possible to control Bricks and Bricklets from a PC. An API on the Bricks (called “On Device Programming Interface” in the documentation) is scheduled for the distant future.