A new synthetos.com: faster, cleaner, and built to last
If synthetos.com feels different, it is. We rebuilt the site from the ground up. It now loads in a fraction of the time, every TinyG and gShield page has been rewritten, and more than a decade of forum history is still where you left it.
Why we rebuilt it
The old site ran on a WordPress install that had been around since 2011, on shared hosting, with a bbPress forum, a pile of plugins and a database nobody wanted to touch. It was slow and hard to keep up to date, and every plugin update was another chance for something to break. Rather than keep patching it, we archived everything and moved to something with far fewer moving parts.
Before
- Your browserEvery page built on request
- Shared web hostApache, PHP, WordPress, bbPress and plugins
- MySQL databasePages, forum posts, 3,000 accounts (most of them spam sign-ups)
Now
- Your browserServed from the nearest Cloudflare data center
- Pre-built pagesPlain HTML and one stylesheet, built from a Git repository
- A small WorkerOld-URL redirects and the spam-protected contact form; nothing else runs on the server
Four times faster
We measured the old and new homepages with Google's Lighthouse in its mobile test, which simulates a mid-range phone on a slow connection. The new homepage loads less than a quarter of the data and shows its main content about four times sooner.
Lighthouse performance score (higher is better)
Main content visible (lower is better)
Page weight (lower is better)
Files downloaded (lower is better)
The forum archive stays where it was
The forum has been the best TinyG documentation we have, written by the people who actually built machines with it. We kept all of it: 1,197 topics and 5,860 replies from 2011 to 2025, at their original addresses, so the links in old posts, wikis and search results still work. We removed the handful of spam posts and double-posts and left everything else as written. Member profiles and email addresses are not published.
The archive is read-only. New questions go to Synthetos Community on GitHub Discussions, and every archive page has an Ask a new question button that takes you there.
What else changed
- Rewritten product pages for TinyG, gShield and g2core, with prices and stock pulled straight from our store, plus a side-by-side comparison.
- A docs hub at /docs that points to the right wiki page for your board and firmware.
- A contact form that reaches us without putting an email address on the page for spammers to harvest.
- Dark mode, if that's how you like your data sheets.
- Old links keep working. Hundreds of old WordPress, wiki and forum URLs redirect to their new homes.
What's next
The new site gives us room to build things the old one never could:
- A live community forum on synthetos.com, backed by GitHub Discussions, with the same layout as the archive.
- Browser-based tools for TinyG and g2core: configuration, wiring diagrams and firmware updates. These control real machines, so we're designing them safety-first and will share more when they're ready.
- New TinyG firmware. A long-overdue bug hunt has fixed 126 bugs in the TinyG firmware, many of them safety-related. More on that in our next post.
If something is broken, missing or hard to find, tell us. We read everything.