Electric Imp Can Make Your Dumb Device Smart

Being internet ready is a necessity if not a big selling point for hardware vendors.  Many manufacturers haven’t got the resources to redevelop their devices that need internet connectivity.  Therefore, they struggle to take advantage of the “Internet of Things” market.  Electric Imp has come up with a solution with their Imp card; looks like an SD Card, but is much more powerful.

To transform these “dumb devices” hardware vendors are required to adopt their device platform by start adding Imp-compatible slots.  By just adding a slot for the Imp card the device will get Wi-Fi compatibility plus other third party applications will be able to communicate with it.

The Electric Imp connectivity platform can take many devices into the IoT age.  The Electric Imp provides the tools to easily integrate other wireless communication protocol into a internet-connected device, including Bluetooth and Near Field Communication (NFC).

“The flexibility of our platform enables manufacturers to combine Wi-Fi with other wireless communication protocols, providing a best of both worlds connectivity solution”, said Tom Byrne Hardware Engineer at Electric Imp.

The full Electric Imp platform is an end to end solution with hardware, OS, software, APIs, cloud services, security and management tools, which dramatically decreasing development cost and time to market for device manufacturers.

Imp-enabled devices can be controlled either from a web browser or on a smartphone, either through Electric Imp’s own applications or through third-party apps that are developed to take advantage of the new platform.

The impOS runs applications within a virtual machine, which means code running on any imp device can be seamlessly moved to other devices in the imp family. As with all imps, every device in the field is paired with a pico server in the cloud where heavy processing and cloud I/O can be implemented and effortlessly scaled, eliminating the need to add increased cost, complexity, and power consumption to the device itself.

Home appliance manufacturers can take advantage of the Imp platform to make their appliance apart of the connected home.