Dear Backers,

We have some fantastic news—we’re shipping the WunderBar this week!

Below you can see a copy of the newsletter that we sent out yesterday that includes:

1. A Note From Our Founders
2. Shipping Information
3. Some Info About Our Apps
4. Upcoming Events

Please note that we will not be updating our Dragon Innovation page from now on. To stay in touch with us in future, please regularly check our blog to keep in touch with our news. You can can also add us on Twitter and Facebook to see what we are up to.

Feel free to share your WunderBar projects, news and feedback with the WunderBar community by using the hashtag #wunderhack. We're really excited to see what you plan to do with your WunderBar!

A Note From Our Founders

It’s a big week here at relayr.

We are about to start shipping the WunderBars!

For the past few months, we have been working almost around the clock to get the WunderBar as perfect as it can possibly be and we are off to a roaring start. From crowdfunding success to shipping in 6 months—it’s been a rollercoaster experience, through hardware, firmware and software. There is still lots to do, but we wanted to get the first versions out to you as soon as possible.

Just a few WunderBar boxes, hot off the press and ready to receive the boards

We’ve been thrilled about creating the WunderBar. We believe that it is the most powerful, easy to use and affordable tool for app developers to bridge the divide between hardware and software and create incredible new connected devices with sensors, Bluetooth and WiFi.

So, now that we’ve released the first version of our app developer starter kit for the Internet of Things, what are we most excited about?

You.

We can’t wait to see what fantastic new projects will be created by you in the WunderBar community. Seeing how many people will discover how to develop for hardware using the WunderBar and getting to experience all of your projects—the fun ones, the zany ones and the really, really useful ones—is what most excites us. Here just a glimpse of some of the ideas you have been sharing with us:

Just a fraction of the growing list of ideas you have been sharing with us

The reason that we developed the WunderBar was to help all of you creative, original and daring app developers to break out of the digital and into the physical world simply, quickly and effectively.

We can’t wait to see what you do.

Jackson, Paul, Harald

and the relayr Team

________________________________________

Shipping Information

After we have shipped out the WunderBars to our crowdfunding backers, we will begin to send out our pre-order deliveries through Conrad—our exclusive partner in distributing the WunderBar—followed by it going on general sale.

Our current shipping dates are:

First: Crowdfunding backers, shipped between 29 August - 3 September.

Second: Pre-orders, shipped between 15 - 19 September

Third: Distributors, shipped after 30 September

________________________________________

Some Info About Our Apps

Our first Android Onboarding App is in the Google Play store ready for you to download. Please pick it up, play with it and let us know what you think. As much feedback as you have, the better! We need your help to make it as good as it can possibly be.

To all of our iPhone and iOS users—the iOS app is currently awaiting approval. The App Store can be  little slow at times, but we do hope to have it available for everyone within the next 2-3 weeks, which should be just in time for our pre-order deliveries.

Here is a sneak peak of our iOS Onboarding App!

 How hot are you? Jackson is 29.39 degrees hot!

AND FINALLY, PLEASE NOTE: The Sensor Modules will also be offering Beacon functionalities and Direct BLE connection to your phone in the next few weeks, so stay tuned!

________________________________________

Upcoming Events

Come meet the team and see the WunderBar in action at the following events.

WunderBar & Friends Hack Day

When: Friday, September 12

Where: Rainmaking Loft, Charlottenstraße 2, 10969 Berlin

Interested in participating? Just reply to this email.

WunderBar Hackathon

When: Friday & Saturday, September 26-27

Where: Betahaus, Prinzessinnenstraße 19-20, 10969 Berlin

Interested in participating? Apply here.

Elektor Academy - WunderBar, the Chocolatey IoT Tool for App Development

When: Thursday, September 18, 4-5pm CET

Where: Online

Sign up here: www.element14.com/community/events/4131

________________________________________

And A Final Last Thank You!

Thanks to all of you who supported us through the journey and made this possible. Please let us know in our forum if you have any questions or feedback. We'd love to hear from you.

Dear Backers,

We have been quite proud of being on schedule, unlike most hardware crowdfunded projects, we screamed it on all rooftops in events and meetings. And everyone who did something similar before told us that we will deliver after the promised date. Well guess what, they were right.

They all said “Hardware is hard”. At first, we didn’t believe it. We now find ourselves saying it too. There is a reddit subreddit on the “hardness” of hardware. Now, a lot of this “hardness” is over exaggerated, but hardware does bring some special challenges like ...

Our Freescale Tower development kits,

Since then, the team has been putting in late nights and weekends to try and make up for the deficit. We’ve made up for a lot of lost time, but not enough.

Now June is upon us and the boards and firmware are ready, but the initial four week delay caused a domino effect delaying the integration time with the Apps and the Platform. We have hit a few more issues during the integration phase:

• Getting the Gainspan 1500M Wifi Module to request and store TLS certificates was a lot harder to work with than expected.

• Not to mention that simply sourcing the Gainspan module was a lot more time consuming than originally planned, and inventory is much harder to come by than originally expected.

• BLE long writes was not available in the current version of Nordic’s SoftDevice, forcing us to rework message hierarchies.

• As Daniel previously blogged: we had to correct some of the original PCB layout to keep the Ground plane at enough distance from the BLE Antenna not to interfere with the RF signal.
  
• On the server side - building fault tolerant Redis clusters is also tougher than expected.
  

• Apple has implemented a proprietary and narrow focussed implementation of password secured bonding on BLE - which has caused us to rework our encryption process. On Android it just works.

It appears that the worst issues are resolved.

So to ensure the best possible experience for you, our backers and users, we need to extend the shipping dates as follows:

• Estimated Shipping to Early-Bird Beta Backers: July 24, 2014
• Estimated Shipping to Backers: August 24, 2014

We know some of you may have projects already planned. If so, please let us know, and we will do everything we can to help you.

Thank you all for your continued support, interest, feedback, and enthusiasm. Please reach out to us with any comments, questions or criticisms! And we hope you will share any ideas or thoughts on our forum.relayr.io.

Thanks!

Jackson, Paul, and the relayr team!

Thanks to you, our backers, the WunderBar is becoming a reality! Conrad Electronic has taken over professional manufacturing and distribution. The very first production run is scheduled to be finished and ready to ship in July (still working on exact date). Until then, we are interested to learn more about you, so we will be sending out a survey next week to improve the WunderBar experience. For now, read on about the PCB Design Update and Maker Faire Bay Area!

1. WunderBar PCB Design Update v3.1

After receiving revision #3 of the WunderBar prototype, we started testing the different modules. Those tests included some initial noise level measurements, using the microphone module, and exploring the Bluetooth LE practical range in our office.

Test #1: Noise level measurements

For the microphone module, as you might note on the schematic below, we haven't pre-defined the value of two resistors: R59 and R61.

Why? Because we can retrieve the microphone's typical sensitivity from the device datasheet (Knowles SPU0410HR5H). We can determine the peak output voltage (in mV) to sound pressure (Pa) ratio, and then calculate the needed voltage gain (Av) in the amplifier stage previous to the LTC1966 (RMS-to-DC converter).

What we didn't know in advance was the maximum sound pressure that the microphone could sense in different use case scenarios.

Test #2: Bluetooth LE connection range

We programmed a test firmware into the Sensor Modules and a Central Role Application into the nRF51 BLE chip, present in the MasterModule.

At the beginning the connection looked stable, but when we broke apart the Sensor Modules from the Master Module, the connection started to fail at less than one meter in distance. The RSSI (received power) that we were getting into the Master Module nRF51 was in the order of -90 dBm when in the previous prototypes the typical RSSI for 1 meter was in the order of -50 dBm. So something was wrong.

We found the bug after a quick visual check on the antenna-balun circuit of the BLE section.

Read more about the Design update

2. From Berlin to The Maker Center of the Universe

What an experience… from Berlin to The Maker Center of the Universe, and this only barely out of our crowdfunding diapers! Inspiring, humbling, and yes, WunderBar!

We were honored to be invited by ARM, to show on their booth at the Bay Area Maker Faire 2014. We thought long and hard about the time and effort needed, even though we only had v3 of our prototypes finished, only two short months since the Dragon Innovation crowdfunding.

We felt a lot like the new super-excited youngest kid on the block, surrounded by the likes of the famous Makey-Makey, Little Bits, SeeedStudio, 3DRobotics, and many many more. It was like finally being in that amazing place you have seen and read online so much about, only it was much, much better. True story.

So thanks to all our visitors, our backers, to all the people who signed up with cool ideas for using the WunderBar, to ARM and Freescale, to Phil, Simon, Dominic, Sandra, John, and all, for giving us spaces at their booths for showing off our young product, and to our neighbors for their veteran advice about how to handle all the input and excitement. We will definitely be back next year, with our next growth spurt.

A WunderBar for the top 5 ideas at Maker Faire! All entries are in and the team has voted. Want to see more of Maker Faire? Check out the Maker Faire Bay Area album.

To all our Backers, Supporters, Mentors, Investors, and our amazing Team,

We are super proud and humbled, to be invited by ARM to showcase on their stand at MakerFaire 2014!

Thanks to all of you, to help get us where we are today, we can now send Jackson, Paul and Daniel to San Mateo, California to take part in the biggest MakerFaire on the planet to represent relayr. 

We could not have done it without you! Thanks for your support to help make the Internet of Things more open, easier, safer and more accessible to any developer.

We will be showcasing some brand new demos and also, hot out of the oven, the newest WunderBar test version 3, as well as the newest 3D printed casings, and the prototype packaging for the WunderBar designed by mikroE! 

We would love to see you, our Backers and Pre-orderers in person! 

We will have a couple of t-shirts, stickers, and real chocolate sensors to give away to Backers and fans. And we would love to answer your questions. 

So come by the San Mateo Event Center to say hi! And if you cannot make it, be sure to follow us on Facebook or visit our blog for regular updates.

the relayr team

Dear friends and supporters,

The relayr team is as active as quicksilver to deliver your favourite chocolate bars within the promised time. Here is a bit of news for you:

We left hub:raum and our friends at the Telekom accelerator program for another super cool space in the heart of Berlin: the Rainmaking Loft. Good vibes, nice people, many interesting startups, a great espresso machine and funny meeting rooms named after famous Berliner Clubs.

Our manufacturing partner MikroElektronika received the v3 PCBs, stencils and components last week and the latest iteration of Wunderbars is being assembled as these lines are being written. We are hoping for this prototype to be the last before production.

The engineering team is making very good progress on the device integration layer; the first version of the user dashboard is also finished (see screenshots below). Additionally, the registration service for users, apps and devices is almost finished!

On the events front, we are almost everywhere this week: Jackson is presenting the WunderBar at Mobile Monday in Dusseldorf on May 5th, David will be at the relayr stand at the NEXT Berlin in Berlin on May 6th, Paul will be a panel speaker at Berlin API days on the same day, Amin will introduce the WunderBar to android developers at DroidCon on May 8th in Berlin and visiting the Maker Lounge at re:publica14 to hack some cheap smartphones with makers from other continents. Last but not least, expect to see us at the ARM booth in MakerFaire Bay Area on May 17th and 18th with several super cool projects.

You may also have noticed that we shared the latest iteration of our chocolate casing on Thingiverse for you guys to download, print and remix to suit your projects. We will be delighted to see how you modify and hack it; please don't hesitate to share your creations with us.

That's all for this time, expect many things out of beta in the next update, and a presentation of our growing team.

Don't forget to spread the word on Facebook, Twitter, and share your feedback with us in the comments on our blog.

Keep it awesome, till next time!

Amin and the relayr team

Greetings WunderBar Enthusiasts and Supporters!

We just came back from a really eye-opening trip to Belgrade, where we visited the team who will be producing the WunderBar. 

We thought you might like a sneak peak behind the doors of the brand new, 3000+ sq.m, high-tech facility of MikroE, our manufacturing partner.

(From left to right: Srdjan, Jackson, Paul, Neb, Novak, Shawn, Dusan, Aleks, Daniel). 

Starting the day, planning outside the cafeteria with fresh-squeezed orange juice. Daniel, Paul and Jackson went down to Belgrade to see the machines first-hand, and to meet the experienced people in person who will be responsible for actually assembling and testing every single WunderBar. From finalizing the design, to assembling the boards, to creating the packaging and shipping worldwide to all of you! They already ship to 138 countries around the world.

We went down there to see the facility with our own eyes, and we were deeply impressed with their skills, their knowledge, their technology and their sense of design and user experience. They care as much about the WunderBar as we do! Oh, and the food, the wine, the music was memorable! As we go forward from here, Neb, Dusan, Srdjan, Aleks, and the whole MikroE team will be helping us document every phase of the process as we get closer to shipping the first batch.

Below some snapshots and video of our visit:

Daniel, Paul and Jackson standing in front of the big product wall showing just a small selection of the boards produced by Neb and his team.

Impressively clean room where the wave soldering, washing and drying the boards takes place. The two guys in the back are manually putting some jumpers, if needed, on boards afterwards.

Daniel closely inspecting the ERSA ETS250 wave soldering machine.

The thousands and thousands of printed materials for the extensive family of Click Boards. WOW! We have begun discussing how we can easily connect these to the WunderBar.

A walk through the very clean, brand new production room with some of the most modern, high-tech facilities on the market. The space we are walking through will be occupied by a super fast double-headed Europlacer IIneo machine, which will be building the WunderBar! 

Don’t miss this impressive video of one of the older placer machines. This old guy is being replaced by much faster machines doing the work in a fraction of the time, seconds.

Aspirations and inspirations of Tesla.

Paul and Srdjan getting deep with the engineers.

The teams together doing some late evening, after-hours, brainstorming around production and packaging.

Jackson lost to Neb in a quick 5 point game in the company recreational room.

As previously announced, the public has chosen a sound/noise sensor as the 6th sensor, and now, we have more exciting news to share with you!

The latest revision of the WunderBar has been finalized (v3) and is ready to be sent to the manufacturer.

Major changes in this next iteration: 

1. In the Master Module, we added a 32 kHz xtal in order to maintain a RTC when the module is battery powered. 

2. We also swapped NXP for the more capable Freescale CPU.

Here are some of the revised specs in more detail:

• Up to 120 MHz ARM® Cortex®-M4 core with DSP instructions.
• 1 MB of program flash memory and 250 KB of SRAM
• Flexible low-power modes with power and clock gating for optimal peripheral activity and recovery times.
• 1.71-3.6V operating voltage for extended battery life
• Full-speed USB w/OTG controller
• AES, SHA-256 encryption engine, and a 128-bits UUID (Unique Identifier Number)
• 121-pin BGA package (8x8 mm)

3. For the new Environmental Noise Level Sensor, recently chosen by the community, we have integrated a tiny SPU0410HR5H analog microphone from Knowles.

Please visit our blog at blog.relayr.io for a more detailed description on the revisions made.

Global Internet of Things Day, online!

On April 9th, the 4th annual Global Internet of Things Day event will be held. Paul Hopton, chief engineer of relayr, will be one of the speakers at IoT Live. 

IoT Day is an invitation to all that are interested in the Internet of Things to join a meetup, host a hackathon or just discuss IoT with friends over some coffee. 

Go to iotday.org or the IoT Day Google website for more information. 

Bring things to life! 

relayr team

Yes, the public has spoken! Over 20 ideas were contributed to our forum. The top three chosen sensors are noise, moisture and smoke. The winning sensor is... a Noise/Sound Sensor!

We love the idea of a noise/sound sensor as it is affordable, small and environmental. It can be used to measure ambient noise levels, which gives us many options. For example, to create an intruder alarm, stereo volume, baby-alarm, angry-daughter/son detection and even to tackle the issue of noise pollution to improve quality of life.

Image source: http://www.presseagentur.com/infineon/detail.php?pr_id=1130&lang=en

Nowadays, it is possible to integrate highly sensitive microphones and their associated circuitry into tiny surface-mount devices (SMD). Thanks to MEMS (micro-electro-mechanical) technology, a variation of standard CMOS technologies used to build digital ICs.

The working principle of a MEMS microphone is similar to their big counterparts, the electret microphone, and basically, it is an acoustic transducer converting mechanical energy (air pressure variations) into an electrical signal. A thin movable and conductive plate or membrane (see the image below) acts as the diaphragm, and bends by the sound waves (air pressure variations) passing through the acoustic holes. This membrane acts as a plate of a capacitor, while a holed rigid and fixed plate acts as the other plate of the capacitor.

Image source: http://www.eeherald.com/section/design-guide/mems-microphone.html

Therefore, the variable air pressure (sound) causes a variation in the distance between the two plates, causing a shift in the capacitance of the transducer. By applying an electrical voltage between the plates, it is possible to detect changes in the transducer voltage. These variations are directly proportional to the audio signal. 

In addition to the MEMS transceiver, these microphones integrate an ASIC (Application-Specific Integrated Circuit) die which function is to convert the variations of the capacitance of the transducer into an useful signal. 

Image source: http://www.electronicproducts.com/Packaging_and_Hardware/Device_Packaging/MEMS_packaging_booms.aspx

There are 2 different types of MEMS microphones, depending on the output they generate: analog or digital. Analog microphones integrate a pre-amplifier circuit in their ASIC die, while digital microphones add an A/D converter to the preamplifier in order to convert the analog signal into a PDM (Pulse Density Modulation) digital signal.

MEMS microphones are present in such applications as cell phones, noise-cancelling headphones and digital cameras. Now, we have decided to use them as the base to build an environmental noise sensor for the sixth WunderBar sensor board.

An environmental noise sensor can detect and measure the level of noise in different scenarios, converting the sound detected by the microphone into a dBA (A-weighted decibels) output, which is a logarithmic scale used to represent environmental noise measurements. Additionally, the sensor can provide a peak (maximum) noise value measured over a period of time, providing a measure of noise pollution. Also, the measured noise level can be used in conjunction with a variable threshold level in order to detect changes in the environmental noise applicable to different scenarios and create an anti theft alarm for instance.

The past couple of weeks have been very busy and exciting for us here on the Relayr team - We are now 119% funded! Thanks to all of you for bringing Wunderbar - and the Internet of Things - to life. And still 6 days to go!!

As part of that success, we're very pleased to announce our partnership with Conrad Electronic. Conrad is committed to work in partnership with the relayr team, using Wunderbar to further stimulate education, developers, makers, creative ideas, and new applications. Harald Zapp, our founder and CEO says, "We feel extremely fortunate to have Conrad Electronic supporting our efforts for Open Source IoT software and hardware, to lower the barriers for developers to create new applications and appliances easily for the Internet of Things. Ultimately this will help bring new fun and useful mobile Apps and devices for the Internet of Things to the world much sooner." 

You can read a little bit more about Conrad Electronic here.

Now we want to hear from you! Check out The Great Sensor Debate on our forum and tell us what you think. What would you like to see for stretch goals? Email or tweet your ideas to @relayr_cloud!

Thank you,

The Relayr Team

As you can see, we jumped from 40% to over 100% today! We’re incredibly thrilled to announce that we reached our funding goal through a large order. We’ll be able to provide more details within the next two weeks. We’re all excited over here that WunderBar is a go! Thank you for being a part of this journey. But the funding continues to realize the Internet of Things, for 19 more days!

Now we can think about possible stretch goals! We are interested in hearing from you, our backers! What else would you like to see as part of the Wunderbar?

Thank you for your continued support. With all of your help, we’re getting closer to our goal. Please continue to help us spread our mission by sharing the WunderBar with your friends, coworkers, and family!

Are you interested in seeing the WunderBar in action? Well, you’re in luck! In the video below, our very own Paul can walk you through the Light sensor application.

If you’re like us, you’re probably curious about the code behind the WunderBar. We wanted to release the code of the demo to let you peep under the hood. The code here is however only demo code, so is ugly in a couple of places. The relative complexity of managing the Bluetooth LE Devices is exposed here, but will be later wrapped into the relayr SDK.

Visit relayr’s GitHub to see the code behind the Light demo.

We’re hard at work developing more demos for the WunderBar. Let us know what you’d like to see in the discussion section!

Thanks for all your support! We're really excited to see the Internet of Things come to life. We still need your help - Help us spread the word by sharing this Thunderclap.

This wouldn't be possible without you - Thank you, and stay tuned for more updates!

Greetings all supporters and visitors!

Two BIG Announcements!

First: THANK YOU ALL!

After only 7 days, we have 145 backers and hit 30% funding, despite the long weekend in the US.

And we have our first University backer! The University of Amsterdam’s Department of System & Network Engineering ordered 20 WunderBars and captured the “IoT University Package”. Thanks for that! If you are a university of similar such institution, let us know directly and we can discuss what is possible!

We are overwhelmed with all the support from our backers, from our mentors, and friends and family! Also, thanks for all your questions...sorry for any delays here. BTW: you can always post your questions openly to our forum: forum.relayr.de

But we still have 70% to go, so your continued support would be really important to help get the word out to your networks, and share across all social media or otherwise. Much appreciated.

Second: Now Even Wunderbarer!

Grove Connector + The WunderBar = Bridge to Arduino

We said we wanted to crowdsource the two open WunderBar BLE modules. Much of your feedback pointed to extending the possibilities of the WunderBar as an even more powerful starter-kit, also one that would easily bridge software developers, who are also more curious about hardware, to other communities like Arduino. So we spoke to the guys at Seeed Studio (no, not our Berlin friends from the band Seeed) who developed the Grove Family of peripheral sensors and actuators. They love the WunderBar and so we thought it would be really great to add their little connector on the back of one of our WunderBar chocolate BLE modules, to make it, well, even wunderbarer.

By adding the grove connector we can turn the fifth module into a grove "twig". This means you will be able to build Grove powered Arduino projects that not only incorporate Bluetooth LE, but gives you chocolatey access to the other WunderBar sensor modules.

Here is what Grove can do.