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MikeSmith2011
Very interesting. The real advantage will be to spread these things around. But ...
GREAT-Terry
Interesting stuff. Hope the price will be lowered once the acceptance level in ...
Former Apple, Google, Facebook engineers launch IoT startup
Peter Clarke
5/16/2012 12:57 PM EDT
LONDON – A year-old startup called Electric Imp Inc. has developed a Wi-Fi node in a memory card physical format that it hopes will become a standard technique for assigning IP addresses and linking to the Internet to establish a Wi-Fi-mediated Internet of Things (IoT).
Along with selling small cards initially priced at $25 per card, the startup will host data and offer browser-based services that will allow consumers and enterprises link and control their equipment via these IoT nodes.
Prior to cofounding Electric Imp (Sunnyvale, Calif.), CEO Hugo Fiennes managed Apple’s hardware team for the first four iPhones, then became its iPhone architect. He left Apple in May 2011 and worked briefly at Google before resuming his career as an entrepreneur. In the 1990s, he founded Empeg Ltd. to make in-car MP3 players (see Engineers drive craze for MP3 audio players). Empeg was sold to SonicBlue in November 2000.
Along with Fiennes, Electric Imp’s cofounders are Kevin Fox, director of user experience, and software architect Peter Hartley. Fox designed the Gmail Web interface for Google while Hartley worked with Fiennes at Empeg. Fox worked as a designer at Yahoo and Google and was a senior product designer at Facebook and principal user experience designer at Firefox browser developer Mozilla.
In a two-hour interview with EE Times via Skype, Fiennes laid out Electric Imp’s IoT product strategy.
From left to right: Electric Imp founders Peter Hartley, Hugo Fiennes (holding card) and Kevin Fox.
The starting point for Fiennes' IoT vision came when he attempted to rig 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. Moreover, most were expensive.
"There is a Wi-Fi-enabled set of scales for sending your weight back to a Web site so you can track progress," said Fiennes by way of example. "It costs $180."
Electic Imp's innovation combines standardization on Wi-Fi and on a physical format based on the SD memory card socket. But it also offers a system partition that helps reduce costs for product developers. The startup hopes this approach will enable a fast ramp of available IoT-enabled objects, Fiennes said.
"We've put it in a user-installable module. The user buys the card and just plugs it into any device that has a slot," Fiennes explained." All a developer needs to do is add a socket and a 3-pin Atmel ID chip to their product. That's 75 cents: 30 cents for the ID chip and 45 cents for the socket." This assumes the availability of 3.3 volts. "But given that most things you want to control from the Internet are electrical, we think that's reasonable," he said. If not, developers can include a battery.
Since the module can be installed by a user, developers won't have to worry about FCC and CE certification since Electric Imp’s cards have already been certified for both, Fiennes added.
However, product developers do need to determine what aspects of their "things" they want to link to the card socket. The most obvious is an on-off relay, but Electric Imp's 6-pin interface on its card supports a variety of control and data interfaces and is configurable. It allows pull-up, pulse-width modulation (PWM), I2C and SPI interfaces for sending commands along with data transmission and retrieval.
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daleste
5/16/2012 9:36 PM EDT
This is really great stuff! I would like to play with it. So many possibilities.
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Luis Sanchez
5/17/2012 1:09 AM EDT
I say the next with a certain negative feeling. I'm impressed with this approach. It's very smart but I think the idea could perhaps become so powerful that it would take away part of the fun of developing Internet enabled devices to many product vendors out there. This seems to be pushing for an industry standard. Smart indeed.
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chanj
5/17/2012 1:55 AM EDT
Impressive product. It will definitely shorten time to market of developing IP-enabled product. Price seems to be a bit too much. I am sure it will come down with volume.
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rick.merritt
5/17/2012 1:58 AM EDT
A handful of other startups have been pushing low cost Wi-Fi for IoT apps, one of them recently bought up by Microchip. But I don't think any have hit the consumer market so squarely as these guys.
I remember the CEO's earlier MP3 startup got a Page 1 story on EE Times back in the day.
Frankly I am not sure the CE world is quite ready for IoT yet. They may be 3-5 years ahead of their time--except for DIY engineers who I imagine will love this.
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I_B_GREEN
5/17/2012 11:21 AM EDT
how do you plan to mitigate the all ready installed wifi module in products when consumers buyt and plug into an existing laptop or tablet phone...
I would think a software install to switch all chosen applications to only run through the sd card when installed would be needed to stop issues with multiple nodes on one machine.
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peter.clarke
5/17/2012 11:32 AM EDT
My understanding is that all Electric Imp nodes will have a unique ID and a unique IP address so there should be no conflicts with Wi-Fi nodes in notebook and tablet computers and smartphones.
Instead of having a couple of Wi-Fi nodes hanging off your domestic router you will have a couple plus however many Electic Imp cards you buy and enable.
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I_B_GREEN
5/17/2012 11:23 AM EDT
Also can be made to do mesh type functions with other sd cards in other machines
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anomof
5/17/2012 4:29 PM EDT
So what's the cost per card for the server side of this model for the consumer?
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peter.clarke
5/18/2012 5:27 AM EDT
no cards are required on the server side....your cards ($25 each) just talk with the Electric Imp server over the cloud
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selinz
5/17/2012 5:14 PM EDT
Curious about competition. And I agree that it will be difficult to create a "gotta have this" frenzy without a strong application driving it.
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jonsmirl
5/17/2012 9:15 PM EDT
Check out their website. You have to program them in a language called Squirrel. Squirrel looks to be great for writing flashy demos. But we have a bunch of existing ARM code in C and its not going to get rewritten in Squirrel. Have to see if they allow C language access.
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peter.clarke
5/18/2012 5:31 AM EDT
That's not my understanding. THEY wrote the virtual machine and embedded OS using Squirrel.
I think users will have a browser-based interface to control and link nodes.
But by all means check out the Electric Imp website.
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jonsmirl
5/18/2012 10:00 AM EDT
I think it is this model...
They licensed an RTOS with wifi and run it on the nodes. They wrote a squirrel VM which runs on top of the RTOS. The nodes link back to their sever, no direct access to the nodes.
You go to their website to control the nodes. At their website you can upload code which gets compiled into byte code and downloaded into the nodes. You also have a UI for controlling the nodes.
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peter.clarke
5/18/2012 11:33 AM EDT
That sounds right...but Electic Imp are the people to ask
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NeznanovicN
5/18/2012 4:36 PM EDT
Twine on Kickstarter shares a lot of functionality with this gizmo.
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Bob Mac
5/19/2012 8:01 AM EDT
Does this device support IPv6
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t.alex
5/19/2012 11:00 PM EDT
Still confused about the use case. Does it have storage like a normal SD card?
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peter.clarke
5/21/2012 10:55 AM EDT
It is not a memory card.
There is memory on it but that is working memory i think rather than storage. Electric Imp would not say how much memory when I asked.
Enough to run the virtual machine I suppose. Peter Hartley is a meant to be a wizz at writing compact software.
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KB3001
5/20/2012 5:14 AM EDT
Very exciting product. The price is high in my opinion but hopefully it would come down substantially with high volumes.
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Charles.Desassure
5/21/2012 2:37 AM EDT
This is great news. Look forward to working with this.
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agk
5/21/2012 9:54 AM EDT
A product with open source platform. Many new software programs can be written to use this from laptops,mobile phones and tablets. There is a big market available and soon we can expect lower priced similar items from other sources.To beat them price it competitively.
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t.alex
5/21/2012 10:19 AM EDT
The logo looks evil :)
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KB3001
5/21/2012 10:42 AM EDT
Napster-esque :-)
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Dr DSP
5/21/2012 11:04 AM EDT
It would be great to have a reader try this out and report back what they find out. Any takers?
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spiralbrain
5/22/2012 6:15 AM EDT
Hasn't this been done before? I wonder if its the same as Eye-Fi
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peter.clarke
5/22/2012 6:36 AM EDT
@spiralbrain
From what I can see at www.eye-fi.com this is not the same. Mainly because Electric Imp is NOT being offered as a memory card. Whether it could be is another matter. Electric Imp has not revealed how much memory is on their card.
So in one sense Eye-Fi is superior.
However, Eye-Fi appears limited to digital photograph uploads, while Electric Imp is an enabler of a broad range of networked things.
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t.alex
5/27/2012 12:00 AM EDT
eye-fi seems to be selling to end consumers while this Imp card is not.
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ukzw
5/25/2012 11:11 AM EDT
very good stuff but too expensive for consumer products. It mentioned passive infrared sensor (PIR), which is what I am working on. A PIR is priced $10, how can I afford put a $25 card in it?
By looking at the picture of the card, I guess the BOM should be just a few dollars, whay they charge $25?
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GREAT-Terry
5/29/2012 11:34 AM EDT
Interesting stuff. Hope the price will be lowered once the acceptance level in the field becomes higher.
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MikeSmith2011
5/29/2012 5:25 PM EDT
Very interesting. The real advantage will be to spread these things around. But this is where the price is too high. $25 would limit its use to appliances that cost a whole lot more. The electric socket example though cute is a non-started. I doublt anyone would see the value of a ~$25 socket. I don't see the price coming down a whole lot as they have to pay for the margins of the silicon vendors.
Reminds me of Cypress PSoC chips which have all of this functionality in a single chip and costs a whole lot less.
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