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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
Availability and next steps
The cards will be on sale to developers by the end of June for $25 each and Electric Imp will also supply development kits that include a socket, ID chip and power connection on a small board for about $10. While these are intended for consumer electronics developers Electric Imp is happy to sell them to students and non-professional developers. "Hobbyists can play with it and tell us what they think."
"We have worked with some lead partners for feedback. We are working with partners in Asia and the United States who make consumer devices."
Fiennes said that consumer products with Electric Imp slots would appear in time for the 2012 winter holiday present season. Electric Imp has volume manufacturing for the cards lined up in China, again making use of contacts and experience Fiennes developed designing highly compact smartphones for Apple. "I used to spend quite a lot of time in China," he said.
Click on image to enlarge.
The Basic development board for the Electric Imp with socket and 3-pin ID chip
Electric Imp was founded in May 2011 and now as seven employees. The company has just closed a $7.9 million first round of funding with Redpoint Ventures and Lowercase Capital, whose most well-known investments are Facebook and Twitter.
Related links and articles:
www.electricimp.com
News articles:
Libelium lists 50 Internet of Things applications
Neul launches 'white-space' smart metering in Cambridge
The intangible assets of the Internet of Things
Photos from the frontier: The Internet of Things
Engineers drive craze for MP3 audio players
The cards will be on sale to developers by the end of June for $25 each and Electric Imp will also supply development kits that include a socket, ID chip and power connection on a small board for about $10. While these are intended for consumer electronics developers Electric Imp is happy to sell them to students and non-professional developers. "Hobbyists can play with it and tell us what they think."
"We have worked with some lead partners for feedback. We are working with partners in Asia and the United States who make consumer devices."
Fiennes said that consumer products with Electric Imp slots would appear in time for the 2012 winter holiday present season. Electric Imp has volume manufacturing for the cards lined up in China, again making use of contacts and experience Fiennes developed designing highly compact smartphones for Apple. "I used to spend quite a lot of time in China," he said.
Click on image to enlarge.
The Basic development board for the Electric Imp with socket and 3-pin ID chip
Electric Imp was founded in May 2011 and now as seven employees. The company has just closed a $7.9 million first round of funding with Redpoint Ventures and Lowercase Capital, whose most well-known investments are Facebook and Twitter.
Related links and articles:
www.electricimp.com
News articles:
Libelium lists 50 Internet of Things applications
Neul launches 'white-space' smart metering in Cambridge
The intangible assets of the Internet of Things
Photos from the frontier: The Internet of Things
Engineers drive craze for MP3 audio players
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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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