Electric Imp
Electric Imp is a small card designed to internet connectivity to previously unconnected consumer electronics, it is made by a company of the same name based in Los Altos, California
The device allows manufacturers of the consumer devices to add WiFi networking and internet connectivity to previously unconnected electronic devices in the simplest way possible for them.
Its name is a tribute to the Interface Message Processor, a computer that in the early days of the internet performed a similar role but for general computers rather than consumer electronics.
History
Former iPhone engineering manager Hugo Fiennes, former Gmail designer Kevin Fox and long-time firmware engineer Peter Hartley co-founded the start-up
The starting point for the product was Fiennes' difficulty when he attempted to rig LED bathroom lights to respond to arbitrary inputs like Google’s share price. He quickly realized that many companies offered home automation systems based on a variety of radio standards, including Zigbee, but nearly all were single-vendor solutions rather than open platforms
Hugo Fiennes (CEO) is an Englishman who studied at the University of Warwick
Kevin Fox (Director of User Experience), previously webmastered for Levi Strauss, received a Bachelors in Cognitive Science at UC Berkeley
Peter Hartley (Software architect) studied at the University of Cambridge
Technical
Device
The removable version device itself is physically identical to an SD card, whilst it is not compatible with SD card, the form factor was chosen to leverage the existing SD card sockets and holders, a small Atmel cryptography chip is the only addition needed and is used to give the device a unique 72-bit ID.
At a software level the customers code is isolated from the hardware by a virtual machine to increase reliability.
As the device requires the configuration details of the wifi it is connect to, a novel way was invented, an application running on a smartphone flashes its screen to pass the data optically to the card in a method similar to a Timex Datalink Watch
The imp doesn't make direct contact to any other devices on the local network, instead making a connection to its server running on Amazon Web Services.
The device is programmed via a web portal using a GUI and the Squirrel programming language
The Imp uses a ARM Cortex-M3 processor
There are six pins available for application use and are software configurable as UARTs, I2C, SPI, analog in and out, PWMs, GPIO and 1-Wire (planned)
The code in the device will currently only run if the device has a wifi connection
The Internet connection is encrypted used TLS 1.0
Server
- PostgreSQL
- Node.js
- backbone.js
- C
Website
- HTML5
- jQuery
- backbone.js
- raphael.js
- socket.io