Latest News

April Ninja Kits delayed (again)

Short version:

Bad news for the April Ninja kit batch. Its been delayed again. We now expect them to ship on 21 May. We have upgraded shipping to USPS Priority for the US and DHL Express for Europe which are both relatively reliable 5 days services. People in other countries will get a discount coupon if we can’t find a reasonable shipping option.

Long version:

You would think that things would be getting smooth by our fourth batch! Unfortunately not so much. A lot of the responsibility falls to us, assuming that delivery times would be similar to previous batches (not so much). This pushed back assembly into a national holiday week, and finally to make matters worse the temperature/humidity sensors failed QA on mass.

We were aiming to ship on 14 April, however it will now be around 21 May. We are paying for faster shipping for the US and Europe so with luck the kits will still arrive by the end of May only slightly later than they would have with standard shipping.

For future Ninjas outside Europe and the US we are investigating better options, if we can’t find a reasonable shipping option we’ll send you a discount coupon instead along with our apologies.

You will receive an email once your order has been dispatched with a Tracking and or delivery receipt number.

Please accept our deepest apologies. We understand that you may want to cancel your order, if so please contact help@ninjablocks.com by the 10th of May.

Apologies again,

Team Ninja.

New Rules Features are Live!

G'day All

Just wanted to announce that we've drastically improved the rules engine, including many new features and performance/reliability fixes. In no particular order:

Short Codes

1. {{DATE_UTC}}
2. {{TIME_UTC}}
3. {{DATE_TIME_UTC}}
4. {{GUID.deviceData}} ie {{1012BBxxxxx_0_0_31.deviceData}} (You can get guid from the info box in the device's widget)
   
5. {{GUID.deviceName}}
6. {{GUID.subDeviceName}}, ie if you have a motion sensor on the RF widget called 'motion' it will put 'motion' in.
7. Note: the webhook shortcodes need to be put in the dashboard. This is slated to be fixed.

Delay widget 'for at least'

This makes the delay smarter, and will only continue after the delay if that amount of time has passed. This is useful for 'If motion, turn on my lights, delay at least 30 seconds, and turn them off'. Thus constant motion will not result in constantly turning the lights off and on.

Rewrite of the time precondition

Timezone support, daily schedules and custom periods!

Enable/disable a rule from within a rule

You'll see a 'Toggle rule' action now. This means you can now 'arm' a rule with a button, for example. I'm excited to see what people use this for.

State device

You enable this from the settings tab in 'Services' tab. You will get a new widget where you can add custom states. You can make rules 'if state X' then send 'state Y'. The state device is D = 244. You only need to send the data once and we'll action it if its in a rule precondition no matter how long ago it was sent. This opens up some interesting opportunities, but proceed with caution! We'll be writing up some HOWTOs on this shortly.

Other fixes

The March Batch Shipped

A quick update for people not watching the forums to let you know that the March batch left Shenzhen last week. We've heard of a few being successfully delivered in Germany and China already...

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Turn Your Raspberry Pi into a Ninja Block!

Hey guys,

Exciting news! Now transforming your Raspberry Pi into a Ninja Block is easier than ever. You can either download our custom image or simply run a script! For more information, please visit our tutorial.

Cheers,
Nick

Shipping of the new Ninja Block has begun!

Hi guys,

We’re happy to announce that we’ve begun shipping the new Ninja Block!

If you have ordered the new Ninja Block you will receive a shipping confirmation email over the next few days (if you haven’t already received one).

Whilst you’re waiting for your new Ninja Block, be sure to join our forums!

Thanks for all your patience!

Cheers,

The Ninja Blocks Team

New Ninja Block Shipping Update

Hi Guys,

When we started taking orders for the new Ninja Block we stated a shipping date of “late December”. We did so because we were waiting on just one part and we were confident that we’d surely ship in late December. Maybe too confident, as it stands only the very first couple of orders will ship in December (i.e. Monday).
Our manufacturer has assured us that every single order will be dispatched by January 15.

We will shortly be taking orders for additional accessories, including an EU power socket.
As a thank you for your patience, we will send people on our mailing list a coupon code.

In the mean time we’ll get back to packing kits as quickly as possible!

Cheers,

Marcus

A Very Ninja Christmas

If you happened to be playing with the rules engine recently you would have noticed some small, but important, little extras. Namely delay and toggle. These little boxes let you accomplish a few more useful things (like turning the light off a few minutes after motion turned it on) or use that handy little button we sent you to toggle a hard to reach appliance.

Anyway, this afternoon we got a little carried away in an empty room and this is the result.

Happy holidays everyone.

Love,
Team Ninja