Xenna

I fully agree with the topic starter. Three quarters of the forum posts including some of the most valuable info is in the German section. (thankfully I can read German). I think you are seriously limiting your world wide appeal here. Surely all the German guys (and galz?) can read and write English? Compare this to another open hardware project that I've bought from: OpenPicus. An Italian made WIFI connected microcontroller. Ecellent product, like your bricks, but for a different application. Look at their community: http://community.openpicus.com/forum Now, please, imagine that 3/4 of their forum messages were in Italian. Would that product look as attractive to you? It sure wouldn't to me. Now, the English on their site isn't always the greatest quality, but at least it's understandable for Americans and Asians that speak English. Don't underestimate the importance of a forum. It's where us buyers look before buying a product to get a feel of the quality and the support of the product. Having all info in English is good for your international sales. And good sales are good for your current users because it keeps the product and support alive. So, in the end posting in English is good for your German speaking buyers as well. (IMHO Google Translate is a joke)

I just tried to install the brick daemon on my CentOS 5.8 system. Unfortunately I met with many problems. I can't find a gudev-python rpm for it (why does a daemon need a desktop library anyway?) I can't find an rpm for the libusb that is required, just something called 'libusb'. At least the python-twisted stuff is there (by default). When I try to run the daemon anyway I get: ./brickd_linux.py Traceback (most recent call last): File "./brickd_linux.py", line 30, in ? from usb_notifier import USBNotifier File "/usr/src/Tinkerforge-brickd-1836e39/src/brickd/usb_notifier.py", line 30 class USBNotifier(): ^ It would be nice if you could offer a little bit wider distribution support than just Debian. CentOS/RHEL/Fedora Core are widely used. Has anyone tackled this problem before?

I have three questions/suggestions: 1. You support quite a few languages, but unfortunately my favorites aren't there. Are you planning any support for Perl and PHP? Especially on the Linux platform there are lots of programmers using these two. PHP would be great for web integration. 2. I understand that the API's talk TCP to a brickd daemon. It's easy to do TCP connections in (almost?) any language, so if the brickd TCP protocol is documented we could use that instead of the API. (or write our own API) 3. There are standards for talking to hardware via the filesystem in Linux (/sys/class or /proc). Have you considered using these? That way controlling bricks and bricklets could be as easy as: echo 1 > /sys/class/bricklets/dualrelay1 echo "Hello world" > /sys/class/bricklets/lcd1/line1 Or reading as easy as: cat /sys/class/bricklets/analog1 It's not so easy to do events this way, but for simple polling or controlling this would do very nicely. You would immediately have added support to every language available on the Linux platform.

Agreed, if they had one available with a 6m range, I would have ordered one today. OTOH, something like this http://www.sparkfun.com/products/9495 (5v power, analog out) should be easy to use with an Analog In bricklet, shouldn't it?

Hi Borg, perhaps you missed my previous question, but it would be nice to have an answer to it. I also thought of a new one. - If I order a power supply now (they're out of stock) will I eventually get the new one with the 5v connector or will I have to solder it? - Will the power supply brick be able to function as a standalone 5v supply if there are no other bricks attached to it? TIA

The RS485-Extension would require the purchase of two extension bricks and an extra master brick ($$$). It would also make the two stacks higher. I'm guessing the OP would just like to be able to split the stacks to fit them in a tighter space.

That's great Borg! The Raspberry and the bricks seem to be a very good match. If I order a power supply now (they're out of stock) will I eventually get the new one with the 5v connector or will I have to solder it?

I'm thinking of doing the same thing if I can lay my hands on a raspberry and some bricks, but... If you connect the raspberry to a master brick via usb wouldn't you be powering the stack directly from the power supply as well as indirectly from the power supply to the raspberry to the master brick. Wouldn't that cause problems? Would a possible solution be to disconnect the power wire from the usb cable?