Java8Laurence

Hi guys,

I also played with the idea of tracking electricity usage with a Line Bricklet. I bought the bricklet, hooked it up, and gazed at the nice pulse every time the wheel went round..

But if you have limited leisure time, there's also the YouLess (Google). I bought it, and 30 minutes later I had my solution.

This doesn't work for gas/water, so I'm still planning to spend the days getting those meters tracked with a Tinkerforge solution. But in the mean time, that YouLess solution is hitting a very sweet spot.

I fully understand that there may be a commercial reticence to open up the world of off-the-shelf I2C products by giving us either an explicit I2C Bricklet, or an API on the IO-4/16. But frankly, I don't think it would undermine your sales of existing bricklets.. the beauty of the Tinkerforge product range is its extreme simplicity for non-electronics geeks. Most of these guys don't even know what I2C is. So IMO, providing I2C support is not going to cause people to suddenly not buy the "ready-made" bricklets because they can see ways of achieving the same functionality using I2C components sourced elsewhere.

Personally, I would think a new I2C API on IO-4/16 would be super-cool, and would show that Tinkerforge's philosophy is to allow its clients to truly tinker with whatever is out there, without locking us in to your product catalog. I also think that for Industrial customers, real I2C support would be extremely attractive.

Finally, I don't think it would hurt your marketing efforts if you could showcase a TF-based project that exploits the Pixy (and other I2C components).

Thx for the clarification.

Thx for the link.. but I was actually hoping for an official TF reply (hint: borg?).

I suspected that i2c comms ought to be possible with the IO-4 and IO-16, but I'm hoping that the good people at Tinkerforge will help us a little bit by enhancing the bricklets to support "high-level" I2C instead of having to manage the SDA/SCL lines ourselves.

PS. If any TF employee reads this.. I also asked a few other API enhancement questions in earlier posts that none of you have (so far) answered.. hope you guys aren't seeing RED these days? 

Judging by the pictures of the recent blog post, the RED Brick can be plugged into a stack. May I ask what the (vertical stack) connectors are then used for? Will any program running on RED simply see the stack components on localhost (i.e. the connectors basically replace a USB cable going from RED to first master Brick)?

Thx for enlightening us..