Tracking device. That's my guess.

Wired has leaked it

Will u please ship to EU since day 1?

B.S. Ears are primarily cartilage, I never liked it when mine was used to get my attention.

Probably not... but it will be CE approved. EU might take a little time to get sorted out.

Not long now!

It seems an announcement has been made.

I was guessing home automation, and I wasn't far off.

The wraps are off..

http://www.electricimp.com/

http://gizmodo.com/electric-imp/

http://techcrunch.com/2012/05/16/electric-imp/

It's a fabulous idea - the demos are very impressive. I'm already working on a couple of geek projects involving them. Hugo will hit the big time with this one (to make up for that silly phone thing he worked on).

Rob

Spectactular. Hits the same nerve as things like the Arduino, from the quick look at it, but even more awesome. Really interested in getting into this. Tweeted this to all my hacker/maker friends just now. Awesome.

Congrats to both Hugo and Peter for the announcement today, looks like this could be really useful and a lot of fun to tinker with.

So now we are just waiting for European availability.

....well, and US availability. Not until the end of June...

They will be CE approved from the start, but until we spin up some european servers, imps will be a little laggy in the EU

If they lag too badly my cats are going to bump their heads. Won't somebody please think of the kitties?

Rob

So how long before this becomes the unofficial imp BBS? Might actually become relevant again.

And how long before someone makes an imp-eg to control and possibly update their player?

Can't wait to replace the x10 I have with this stuff!!! Looks great!

Can already think of lots of uses, I hope it gets adopted and built into things quickly.

What is the prize for the first person to fit an imp into an empeg ???



Cheers

Cris

Wow! So excited about this. I love home automation, and nobody has even done lighting correctly yet. I really look forward to seeing what becomes of this.

Cheap, simple WiFi connectivity.. something I've been wanting for eons! Though not too sure about the monthly fee thing.

Cheers

Mmm.. USA-centric "sign up" page: doesn't accept postal codes from outside the USA.

Heh.. looks like I'll have to beg one of my pals who has an iPhone to let me use it for a few seconds to configure the EI cards for our Wifi!

Yeah... me, neither. Can we run these things without "the cloud"?

$25 per imp card plus the cost of imp-ized devices to hold them. I'm trying to comprehend the cost of doing every light switch in the house. It would get pricey. Consider what I've done now, the $40 "solar timer" switches I put into two sockets to control lights that I want to turn on automatically at night. What would an imp-ready light switch cost, such that I could program it to behave equivalently?

The other place in my house I'd really want an imp-ready thing would be my outdoor irrigation controller. When they installed it, I asked about a WiFi-ready model and the guy quoted me an astronomic price. No thanks. Vanilla model it is, for now.

Yeah, I'd imagine the price point would have to fall quite a bit for it to be cost-effective in light switch type applications. Seems like medium to large appliances and hobbyist projects would be the initial market.

I'd be interested to see what the tech inside the card looks like as compared to, say, the Eye-Fi, which seems to do the same basic thing (albeit for a different purpose.) The Eye-fi developers often mention limited hardware capability on the SD as a limiting factor in supporting new features.

I'd also echo the earlier comments about the questionable decision to assess a monthly fee. Why not just build the price into the cost of the device instead? As others alluded to, it would definitely be nice to see an option to allow people to run a server at home instead of requiring connectivity to a cloud service. Maybe those who had the knowledge to stand up their own server could use it without paying the subscription fee?

Hugo: how hard would it be to connect this thing to the ide bus on the empeg? They already make IDE to SD adapters (like this one). I'm assuming your card, while borrowing the form factor, is significantly different in the way it operates. Could one reasonably expect to use one of these to add wifi to the empeg?

The same doesn't really apply; Eye-Fi has a huge NAND chip in there that we don't have to fit in ours - our antenna is also waaaay bigger. The hardware is obviously limited, but not *that* limited.



It doesn't really work like that. One reason is because card firmware is not something users will always have access to - a washing machine vendor isn't likely to open their code and so it needs to stay private. If people ran their own servers then they'd need the entire code database for every vendor in order to make things work seamlessly.

Subscription is for up to 20 cards in our current model for the same price - it's not exactly bad value. It's possible we'll offer cards with included subscription, but they'd obviously be more expensive.

That wouldn't work I'm afraid. You *could* use an imp for a serial bridge, but maybe that's not really what you were looking for in terms of wifi performance

One per switch could get pricey, one per room on a new build is much more plausible though

I agree there are getting to be too many things with a small monthly fee.

Relatively speaking.



Fair enough. Maybe you could offer a less fully-featured server with more limited functionality (i.e. proprietary bits removed) for hobbyists to use, though?

Good to hear you're at least somewhat receptive to the idea of prepaid activation though. Seems like a win-win to me, you guys get cash up front and we don't have to worry about yet another subscription to manage.

I suppose the blog is the place to stay tuned for further announcements about manufacturers you're partnering with, etc.? Or is there some social media channel you're using that would be more up to date than that?

I'm interested to see where this will go, ie the uses people and manufactures will come up with for this low cost internet connectivity, and whether I'd find value in these products. I don't need a bird feeder that tweets, or a washing machine that turns on during lower rates - though I understand the appeal to some. But I know others can imagine more wilder and useful things that could be done, and I'm sure some of those might open my wallet.

In the mean time can I have some yummie imp cupcakes?

If you don't count X10 products (because they're crap), then it seems the price might match current home automation levels. A typical Z-Wave light switch costs $50, so if the switch its self costs around $25 plus the EI, that would be about equivalent. Plus, you'd get far more than just a solar timer if this behaves the way I would assume. You would be able to set dimming levels and scenes, and control them remotely instead of just by the time.

Plus, this cloud-based service has the potential to make the programming and control of a light system much easier. Z-Wave is great, but if I ever need to change anything it's a nightmare. I can't just sit at a computer and fiddle with things, it takes a great deal of time and annoyance. The one area where Z-Wave has an advantage is that instead of WiFi, it uses its own proprietary mesh network. It's annoying and means you can't join it to a normal computer network, but it does create a rock-solid network with no range problems. Still, I'd trade that for better control any day.

ps- I should note that I didn't buy my Z-Wave products at that $50 level. I swooped into Radio Shack during a fire sale and bought up the stock from several stores AND a ton of stuff from their website. It was still expensive as hell, but less than half what it would be otherwise

pps- just signed up for the newsletter. Mailchimp is great, BTW.