Electric Imp Blog

Electric Imp Monkeys Around Before Maker Faire

Hey everyone, it’s Electric Imp Community Manager Matt with a friendly reminder that Electric Imp is attending the Bay Area Maker Faire on May 18th and 19th. We can’t wait, so we built something to help count down the days for us.

Before turning our attentions to Maker Faire, we decided to warm up with an internal hackathon, the second we’ve held this year. #ImpHack was a bustle of activity fueled by pizza, coffee, and sheer determination. Most of us happily hacked away from about 10 a.m. to 10 p.m., although there were some dedicated stragglers far later into the night.

Everyone managed to get their prototypes up and running, and that was super cool. But what was equally exciting was getting a chance to see most everyone working slightly outside their comfort zone. With a bit of help, I was able to prototype an aesthetically questionable motor board; Tom, our communications guy, took up a soldering iron for the first time and successfully, if not exactly elegantly, soldered surface mount boards; and a handful of other impsters enthusiastically dove into building prototype devices, or assisted with the creation of other projects.

So what all did we build? All sorts of amazing and fun things (hint: there may have been a somewhat unhinged ch’imp named Charley involved), but we’re only going to be able to give you some teasers for now. Some projects were scientific (a rig for range testing various access points with the imp), some were practical (an automated system for watering tomatoes), and others just plain goofy (the, uh, aforementioned ch’imp).

If you want the full experience and a chance to see the devices in action, feel free to drop by our booth at Maker Faire. But fear not - if you can’t attend Maker Faire we’ll be blogging about some of the projects in the near future.

Back to Maker Faire… if you haven’t heard of Maker Faire, you’ll definitely want to go take a look. It’s referred to as the, “Greatest show (and tell) on Earth - a family-friendly festival on invention, creativity and resourcefulness, and a celebration of the Maker movement.” Sounds about right to us. If you’re into all-things making and inventing, it’s definitely the place to be.

This year you can find us at booth 524 in the Expo Hall. We’ll be showing off some of the cool and clever gadgets we’ve built, plus our new IDE and agent beta (you can even sign up for the beta at our booth). We’ll even have some developer kits for you to play around with and pick our brains about.

If you’re planning to attend Maker Faire, drop by and say hello. We’re always excited for a chance to chat with fellow makers and connect with our community in person. Bring along something you’ve built with the imp and we’ll give you a free - and super stylish - Electric Imp t-shirt!

In the meantime, if you’re interested in learning more about how Electric Imp empowers inventors and makers, check out the case study.

One more thing: Stay tuned for a fun contest we’ll be announcing soon. We won’t leave you hanging for too long, so keep an eye on this space!

Hope to see you at Maker Faire!

Happy Coding,
Matt Haines
Developer Relations Evangelist

Makers, Start Your Inventions!

Hey there, Kevin here. As always, things are buzzing at Electric Imp so let’s get right to it!

Bring On Maker Faire

It’s hard to believe it’s been a whole year since the imp made its first public appearance, but apparently it has, and Electric Imp is excitedly looking forward to once again participating in the Bay Area Maker Faire on the weekend of May 18th and 19th in San Mateo, California. Most of the imp team will be there so swing by our booth and say hello if you attend that weekend. We would love to meet you!

Live from New York!

Hugo, Brandon, Tom and I recently traveled to New York to meet up with our good friends at Quirky and participate in the first ever Wink: Instantly Connected product evaluation. Quirky and GE are partnering to crowdsource the development of a new line of Internet-enabled consumer products, and we were there to judge which ones get made. Electric Imp will serve as the connectivity backbone of any device created through the Wink: Instantly Connected initiative. A selection of the products will be available in stores by the 2013 holiday season.

On the evaluation panel, Hugo and I joined Quirky’s Ben Kaufman, GE’s Brad Irvine, Bill Kernick and Linda Boff, as well as Josh Rubin from CoolHunting and Undercurrent’s Aaron Dignan.

Two-plus hours and a lot of fun and lively discussion later, we crowned 17 new Quirky inventors and greenlit an eclectic assortment of product submissions ranging from a combination pollen counter and air purifier to an app-enabled baby formula maker and floor mat alarm clock.

Don’t forget: if you’re building something cool with the imp you should think about submitting it for consideration in the next Wink: Instantly Connected product evaluation on May 21st.

While at Quirky HQ, we also spent time with Ben and members of this team to iterate on ideas around the Electric Imp platform and how device inventors can utilize it to the fullest.

We’ll continue to keep you updated on all the great things that come out of our collaboration with Quirky.

The Imps Continue to Multiply

The Electric Imp team keeps growing, and you can learn a little about our newest team members below. As always, if you’re interested in impifying your life and joining us on our journey, take a look at the various open roles. We look forward to hearing from you!

Matt Haines, Developer Relations Manager, comes to Electric Imp from the wintery reaches of Canada. Matt had been playing with the Electric Imp for a couple of months, and was a big cheerleader of ours when he visited our website to get some help. On the homepage he saw the promo that said, “You Should Work Here” and thought, “Yes, I should!” - so here he is.

Before arriving at Electric Imp, Matt was a project manager at iQmetrix and president of the CrashBang Labs’ board, a makerspace he helped found in his hometown Regina, Saskatchewan. He typically spends his free time teaching people how to make LEDs blink, playing with new web technologies, and climbing on rocks and other things.

Matt is still formulating what his “ideal” imp-enabled device would be, but he feels it should help people communicate - and it should be pretty. That or an Internet-connected espresso machine. That would be nice too.

Andrew Houghton, Software Engineer, joins the Electric Imp revolution from Beats Music, where he was CTO. Andrew has also held roles as Director of Engineering, Senior Engineer, and Platform Architect. Surprisingly, he was an English major at Carnegie Mellon but gives the school high praise for turning out English majors who can code.

Andrew sees Electric Imp as a chance to play with cool toys at the center of an amazingly inspirational and creative space. Whatever form it takes, he is confident that the Internet of Things is going to be huge, and is excited to help scale and support it with a great team.

Oliver Hutaff, CFO, brings 17 years of corporate and operational financial management to Electric Imp. Most recently, Oliver was CFO at Roku, Inc. He was honored as 2012 CFO of the year by the San Jose/Silicon Valley Business Journal.

In joining Electric Imp, Oliver saw a great opportunity to work with an extremely talented team who have built an amazing product that has the potential to make the lives of people easier on a global scale.

The first product that Oliver would like to see imp-enabled is one for his parents. Both of his parents have a very hard time hearing, so Oliver would welcome a device that enables him to turn on a bright flashing light in their house to alert them that he’s telephoning.

Aron Steg, Developer Operations Manager, owned a small business for 15 years in Australia focusing on mobile messaging and commerce. While consulting on a hardware project he needed a connectivity solution and nothing came close to Electric Imp. He couldn’t buy the company so he joined it.

At Electric Imp, Aron is happily working on the Budweiser Red Lights, writing firmware and server software for customers and reference designs, and testing the limits of the technology.

And that’s a wrap!

We’ve got plenty of news in store for the next few months, and we’re incredibly excited to see as many Bay Area peeps as possible at Maker Faire. We’ll be sharing more about our Maker Faire plans and booth location in the next week or so, and the best way to get the very latest info is to follow us on Twitter.

Buzz Shoots, Scores with Electric Imp

Some of us at Electric Imp are die hard hockey fans. We love the intensity and fast pace of the game, but our busy schedules and the places we live don’t allow us to get as close to the action as we would like. Thankfully, there is now a novel way to follow our favorite cities and keep track of all the goal scoring action in real time.

In summer 2012, Australia-based creative product agency, Buzz Products, chose the Electric Imp platform to create an Internet-connected product for Budweiser Canada – the Budweiser Red Lights. Buzz was engaged by Budweiser and their creative agency, Anomaly, to develop a product that would elevate the hockey goal scoring experience - an authentic-looking goal light similar to the iconic lights found in many hockey arenas throughout Canada and the U.S.

The Budweiser Red Lights were required to flash and sound in real time to alert fans each time their favorite hockey city scored, with the ability to receive data for thousands of goals simultaneously across Canada.

Buzz had considered a variety of WiFi and Bluetooth-oriented options to solve the challenge of connectivity for the Budweiser Red Lights. Ultimately, Electric Imp’s uniquely innovative hardware, software and cloud-based platform was deemed the most suitable end-to-end solution. Electric Imp possessed the ability to scale across thousands of devices and provide a solid infrastructure for the hardware and software technology Buzz created for the light.

While the Budweiser Red Lights are currently only available to residents of Canada, Buzz and Electric Imp have assisted Budweiser Canada and Anomaly in revolutionizing the way our friends to the North celebrate game time, giving them a little piece of the in-arena game action wherever they install their Budweiser Red Lights.

To learn more about why Buzz decided Electric Imp was the right solution for their needs, check out the case study.

Watch Wink Product Evaluations Via Live Stream Today at 4 pm PDT!

Tune in live this afternoon at 4 pm PDT (7 pm EDT) as Quirky and GE kick off product evaluations for the Wink: Instantly Connected initiative, announced by Quirky last week. A panel led by Quirky CEO Ben Kaufman, and including GE’s Linda Boff and Brad Irvine, Electric Imp co-founders Hugo Fiennes and Kevin Fox, Aaron Dignan from Undercurrent and Josh Rubin from Cool Hunting, will evaluate and choose the first inventions for a new line of app-enabled products that will be available in stores by the 2013 holiday season.

You can review more than 90 product concepts under consideration by visiting the Quirky blog, and watch the evaluations as they unfold on Quirky Live tonight!

Electric Imp and Quirky – Bringing Great Product Ideas to Life

Bringing your connected device from concept to market just got a whole lot easier - and coding skill or a soldering iron is not required! Today, Electric Imp is happy to announce a new collaboration with Quirky, the company that makes invention accessible by bringing new consumer product ideas to market through its unique online collaborative platform.

Last Wednesday, Quirky and GE unveiled a groundbreaking partnership to develop a new line of Internet-enabled consumer products. Creative people around the world are invited to participate in the development of these new products on quirky.com/GE and encouraged to join in and influence the creation of the products. The new line of products will be co-branded Wink: Instantly Connected and available in stores by the 2013 holiday season. Electric Imp will serve as the connectivity backbone of any device created through this initiative.

Electric Imp is looking forward to working with Quirky and GE to provide connectivity for the next wave of consumer devices so they can collaborate with each other and popular Internet services to become truly intelligent and integrated with our lives. The Imp platform, which encompasses everything from our friendly and seamless BlinkUp configuration to WiFi and cloud services, is a natural fit for innovative vendors, allowing them to concentrate their efforts on what makes their products special, rather than what makes them connected.

Kevin Fox, an Electric Imp co-founder and director of user experience, and I are excited to be part of the program’s evaluation process that determines which devices are ultimately put into production.

“This is one of the most exciting new categories in consumer products and what it’s missing is simplicity for the average consumer,” says Ben Kaufman, founder and CEO of Quirky. “Electric Imp is going to be key in developing technology that allows the world to invent devices that are instantly connected right out of the box, and we are really thrilled to be partnering with them.”

Electric Imp believes ideas should not be limited by technology. Our unique platform easily moves hardware into the cloud, enhancing the innovative mechanics of your product with those that can come through the cutting edge connections the device has to Internet services and other connected devices. The Imp platform connects easily to any service that has a Web API, such as text messaging and email services, data websites, and even customized services.

For example, you could synchronize sprinklers to a weather website to ensure a lawn or garden is no longer watered if the forecast calls for rain later in the day. You could also start conversations between users and their homes by developing products that send a mobile alert to the user or service department when a device isn’t working properly. Conversely, a user can use a mobile app to turn on a device or check in on its status.

Moreover, the problem you are trying to solve might be best approached by the way your device interacts with other products, and how their relationships can change and improve over time. The act of powering down a work computer at the end of the day could turn on a home heating system so the homeowner arrives to a warm house, for instance.

Ultimately, there are boundless ways in which devices can be intelligently connected and empowered. So think big! Electric Imp’s platform gives you and your idea the flexibility to determine what devices to connect, as well as the ways in which you combine them, to suit your particular needs for practically any situation.

We encourage you to submit your concepts and join us on the journey from ideation to launch. Submissions are free, but you’ll need to get cracking on your ideas quickly since the product evaluation process begins Wednesday, April 17.

Want to participate but don’t have a product idea or problem to solve? Not to worry. You can still help determine which Wink: Instantly Connected products are made by being an influencer. Whether you submit an idea or provide feedback along the way, you still have the opportunity to get a share of the profit if the product is created.

Stay tuned for more updates to see which products come to life from this innovative program. One of them might just be yours!

Hugo Fiennes
CEO and co-founder

We’re Springing Forward and Growing Fast

Hello again. We’ve been incredibly busy little imps around here, so it’s time to catch you up on what’s been happening lately in Electric Imp Land.

The Imp Team Expands

Spring is here and, like the world around us, Electric Imp is sprouting and growing fast. We have welcomed a number of super talented people to our team recently, and you can meet the newest team members at the bottom of this update.

We have many more open roles at Electric Imp so check ‘em out and let us know if you would like to be a part of our mischievous culture.

Devs Rule!

In February, we held our first-ever internal hackathon - an all night affair (well, for a few of us who managed to hold out that long) that resulted in some fun and very cool imp-enabled devices. Kevin made an imp-powered glove that literally puts global control at your fingertips. Brandon constructed an in-desk mounted wireless printer for anything from to-do lists and receipts to physical tweets or a live stock ticker. Everyone worked on something, and we’ll be sharing little videos of the results soon. To get a taste, check out Tom Buttner’s commuting traffic light:

And creativity abounds! Amazing imp-enabled devices have also been springing up like, uh, little imps, in ever growing numbers from lots of clever folks in dev community. We’re truly impressed with all the great devices we’re seeing so far, so take a look when you get a chance.

Lose Your Keys Now. Ask Us How.

Just in case you missed it, we recently announced that Apigy chose Electric Imp to provide easy set up and Internet connectivity to Lockitron, a smartphone controlled door lock and control device for the home. We’re particularly excited about this integration because it is a great example of how Electric Imp empowers product developers and manufacturers to quickly and reliably bring their Internet-connected ideas to market.

Hannah Boards Are Back!

In addition to making the imp, our hardware team is always busy creating reference designs for imp-powered devices. Because these reference designs are open source we invite manufacturers to use them as a base for their own designs, or to produce them as-is if they like. Sparkfun’s Electric Imp Breakout Board is a revision to our original April prototyping board, and we’re very happy to announce that SmartMaker has used the open source reference designs we provide (including Altium and Gerber files) to build a new production run of our Hannah ‘kitchen sink’ hobbyist board.

Stuffed to the gills with sensors and controls, Hannah is perfect for the developer or hobbyist who cares more about coding than soldering, and wants to get their device up and running as quickly as possible. Hannahs are available for pre-order now at the SmartMaker web store.

Meet Us at Cal and Stanford This Week!

We’re excited to be showcased at a couple Bay Area meetups this week, each of which will give folks an opportunity for some hands-on time with the imp. Both events are free and open to the public, so swing by and say hello to the Electric Imp team. We’d love to meet you.

On Tuesday, April 9, join us at the Electric Imp Workshop, sponsored by the UC Berkeley community group Hackers at Berkeley, and build an imp device. The event takes place at Cal’s Wozniak Lounge in Soda Hall, starting at 7 p.m.

We’ll also be at Stanford University’s Cool Product Expo, held on campus at the Arrillaga Alumni Center from 12 - 6 p.m. Wednesday, April 10.

New Electric Imp Team Members

Over the past several months we’ve added a bunch of new people to the team. Here are their stories:

Bill Podrasky, EVP, Global Sales and Business Development, is a 20 year veteran of business development and sales, with a particular expertise in successfully managing early stage companies as they grow. His vision, a common one around here, is for Electric Imp to become the connectivity standard for the Internet of Things. Bill’s hope and dream is to see water meters “impified,” so that consumers and businesses can be alerted to potential wasteful use or leakage. Water is our most valuable resource.

Peter Keyashian, Director of Sales, spent the last eight years working with a variety of tech companies to integrate new technologies into their products, which was great preparation for his role of fostering adoption of the imp in the broader marketplace. He saw the chance to join Electric Imp as a rare opportunity “to be part of a team that is bound to impact the world in such an amazing way.” Peter’s ideal impified product would sync the schedule of an autonomous vacuum to the seasonal shedding of his dog Bosco as the weather warms up, then send him reports about how much fur it has collected at the end of each cleaning session.

Mayumi Matsuno, Product Management, Product Marketing and Communications, is a former Googler and Mozillian, whose passion is bringing products to life and into the hands of users. She’s really interested to see how her interest in biomimicry could be coupled with Electric Imp, perhaps chameleon meets LED lights meets electric imp. That we can’t wait to see! At our recent hack-a-thon, Mayumi “rode on the coattails” of colleague Tom Buttner’s freeway traffic monitoring light and got her first experience in the lab with the soldering station, and now she’s hooked.

Rich Schiavi, Software Engineer, has a software career spanning two decades at Silicon Valley pioneers Sun Microsystems and Yahoo!, as well as Rocket Network and Beats By Dre. Rich’s desire to work at Electric Imp was fueled by “its winning combination of an incredible founding team, staff, and the opportunity to help pioneer a world-changing product in an emerging space.” His ideal application for the imp would span across the wide range of devices that can help us save and use water and electricity resources more efficiently throughout the world.

David Dunn, Software Engineer, has been deeply involved in software as an academic researcher throughout his career. In addition to his role at Electric Imp, he is currently a mentor in TDD and other software best practices, something he hopes to continue as we grow the team in Cambridge. He was excited to join Electric Imp because of the company’s vision, smart team members, and the opportunity to contribute to the most cutting edge developments in the Internet of Things. At Electric Imp’s recent hackathon, David creatively engineered the first audio playback out of an imp by posting a .wav file to an agent, streaming it to the imp, and using the fixed frequency DAC to drive a mono output jack to a PC speaker. Unfortunately, he missed the chance to make Rick Astley’s infamous song “Never Gonna Give You Up” the first audio an imp ever played, but he’s in meme therapy now.

Tom Buttner, Systems Engineer, started building and programming embedded devices with the C8051 microprocessor while attending Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. He got the bug, moved West, and joined Electric Imp after spending a year building diagnostic software for Cisco security appliances. When Tom discovered the imp, he was astonished that there was such an easy way to build devices, much less connected ones, and couldn’t wait to get his hands on as many as possible. Tom is looking forward to his soon-to-be imp-enabled vegetable garden being able to call him up and ask for a drink or some more sun.

So that’s it for now, but stay tuned for our next update. And don’t forget to mark your calendars for Maker Faire Bay Area, May 18 - 19. We hope to see you there!

Lockitron and the Imp: Unlocking Doors to Mobile Connectivity

I don’t like keys. They catch, scrape, they’re the bane of mobile phone screens, and are generally just a pain to carry around. So I do what I can to keep them off my increasingly misnamed keychain, and I’m not alone. It used to be that most folks had at least three keys: work, car, and home. Nowadays more and more people use wireless badges at work and keyless entry and ignition systems in their car, but the house key is unditchable.

I’m proud to say that Electric Imp is hastening the demise of the ‘third key’ by providing Internet connectivity to Apigy’s Lockitron, a smartphone controlled door lock and control device for the home, and one of the first consumer devices to rely on our technology. Today, they’re announcing on their blog that they’ve picked Electric Imp to make their consumer experience as seamless as can be.

With connectivity provided by Electric Imp’s groundbreaking wireless hardware and cloud service, Lockitron can send notifications and be controlled by Internet-connected devices, and can be linked to a variety of other services for additional functionality. Electric Imp’s unique technology enables Lockitron to send notifications when a door is opened or closed, be locked or unlocked remotely, and enables you to provide access to people you trust no matter where on the planet you are. And with Lockitron’s API you can further customize security for you and your home’s needs.

Excited as several of us at Electric Imp are to lose our house keys, we also love how Apigy brought the Lockitron to life. Last October, Apigy raised more than $2 million in Lockitron pre-orders via a completely home-grown crowdfunding campaign.

As the Lockitron design came together, Apigy found themselves looking for a WiFi solution that would allow them to concentrate on the functionality their users wanted and not on the complexity of building a network device - and they found exactly what they were looking for with Electric Imp.

“When we were selecting which WiFi module we wanted to use in Lockitron, we tested a number of parts and found that the total product Electric Imp offered went far beyond silicon,” says Cameron Robertson, Apigy co-founder. “We strive for simplicity in every aspect of Lockitron, and Electric Imp’s BlinkUp takes a notoriously difficult WiFi enrollment process and turns it into something simple and delightful. Electric Imp was incredibly straightforward to integrate, and we didn’t need to worry about buying expensive toolkits to write our firmware.”

Empowering product developers and manufacturers of any size to quickly and reliably bring their Internet-connected dreams to market is what Electric Imp does best. We get more excited with every new vendor and product announcement, and look forward to sharing them with you.

So go pre-order your Lockitron today and say goodbye to another key. Your phone, and your friends, will thank you for it.

Kevin Fox
Co-Founder and Director of User Experience

Things are really heating up at Electric Imp. Follow us on Twitter, Facebook, or Google+ to stay up-to-date on product and company announcements, or subscribe to our newsletter. And did we mention we’re hiring?

Autumn Update

We had a busy summer and so did many of the developers in our Early Access Developer Program.  The program was a success, although we were only able to get through a third of our mailing list.  We received invaluable feedback and suggestions from the developer community and now it’s time to open up the developer program to everyone.  

Imp cards now available

SparkFun Electronics is the first vendor to offer imp cards for sale to anyone, no invitation code required.  They are also manufacturing and selling two prototyping boards: an Electric Imp Breakout board based on the ‘April’ design, and an Electric Imp Shield to easily add powerful WiFi and Imp cloud capability to Arduino projects. SparkFun also has a number of international distributors, who may be able to supply imp cards internationally.  

If SparkFun is out of imp supplies, be sure to add yourself to their ‘Autonotify’ list on the product page. They’re releasing dev boards as they make them, so new inventory will be available frequently.

We also invite you to dive in to our developer wiki and participate in the forums if you’d like more information or to get more involved in the imp community.

The road ahead

The imp hardware is now complete and in large-scale production and we are now focusing our effort on increasing the capability of the cloud service. We’re making a development and management environment that will support the vendor managing and monitoring the health of hundreds of thousands of imp-powered devices in the field.

We’re building a powerful API to suit a wide range of device use cases and deployment scenarios. As products get closer to market, we see two primary categories of devices:

• Those that live in a vertical ecosystem, with their own apps (mobile or otherwise) and their own set of devices specifically built to work together (what we refer to as ‘m2m’ (machine-to-machine) devices)
• Those designed to work with the horizontal platform of other imp-powered devices, with the intention that end-users can use devices of different kinds from different vendors seamlessly, creating powerful behaviors and solutions on the fly (we call these ‘consumer platform’ devices).

We’re launching the tools to help m2m device makers deploy these devices to customers very early next year. These management tools will be available for testing in early December. The consumer platform experience, built on top of the m2m platform, is targeted for mid 2013.

Upcoming events

Come meet the electric imp team! We will be at the East Bay Mini Maker Faire to be held in Oakland, California, on Sunday, October 14th. Apologies to those outside of the Bay Area. We’re hoping to have more developer-run meetups and hackathons in the coming year.

Make sure to subscribe to our email list (and provide a zip code) to receive updates on events near you.  

And there is more

In the coming weeks, we’ll provide more updates including introductions to our growing team (we’ve grown by four since June!), electric imp events to add to your calendar (including another SF hackathon), more on developer kit availability and previews of awesome imp-enabled products.   

Progress Report!

It’s been a busy few months since May’s Imp unveiling! We’ve been working hard to give developers a great experience right out of the gate. We’ve redesigned the server architecture to be more scalable and flexible from the ground up, and we’re putting the finishing touches on the developer iPhone and Android apps.

Regulatory approvals

There are a ton of things that have to be done before a final quality prototype becomes a salable product. When the product is wireless, many of those things revolve around regulatory approvals. We’re happy to report that we’ve passed our FCC, IC, and CE tests and we’re certified for host-independent use, which means that imp-enabled devices don’t need to get their own wireless certification when adding an Imp.

We’ve gone further though, and have put the Imp through SAR (Specific Absorption Rate) testing which means devices with Imps in them can be worn as long as the Imp is at least 11mm away from the user’s body (think pedometers, sleep monitors, or Wi-Fi walkie-talkies). As with the other regulatory testing, this certification applies to the Imp no matter what device it’s inserted in, so most makers of Imp-enabled devices won’t have to get their own SAR certification.

Hardware

The first production batch of developer Imps is being assembled at this very moment and in our spare cycles we’re folding the boxes we’re using for developer kit shipments. Hugo and Lolo recently went to our factory and took a video of an Imp being born:

And here’s an Imp in developer preview packaging:

Developer Preview release

We’re on schedule to begin shipments of Developer Preview kits on July 31st, and we’re going to start accepting pre-orders soon. To get details on ordering, you need to be subscribed to the Electric Imp Developer mailing list, so if you’re a developer and you’re not already on the list, sign up now!

Before the kits go out, we’ll be opening our developer wiki, with API docs, example hardware designs and so on. We’ll let you know via the developer list when this is up.

Thanks so much

This is an epic undertaking, and we’re excited that so many people are excited as we are. (The grammar checked out. We checked.) In the coming weeks and months we’ll be using this space to highlight the amazing things that people are making with Imps, as well as chronicling our own journey as a company. If you’re the sort of person who uses RSS feeds, use ours. If you’re a tweeter, hear us tweet. If you’re a fan of the Facebook, you can like us there, and we promise to keep you posted.

Welcome Eric Allen!

Staffing up is hard. The first few hires are so important and sometimes even after sifting through resumes, scouring portfolios, and performing interviews both offsite and on, you have to take a leap of faith.

Then again, sometimes someone shows up on your doorstep with such a track record of doing exactly the kind of stuff you’re looking for, with a long track record of startup work, making well-engineered somethings from nothings, and with such enthusiasm that you’d be worried if not for the fact that they’re awesome.

And so we’re thrilled to welcome Eric Allen as the newest member of the Electric Imp team. A Silicon Valley native, Eric comes to us most recently from Pinwheel where he was employee #1, building their product and team from the ground up. Where most people think of a ‘full-stack’ developer as someone who can do HTML, CSS, Javascript, clear through to server-side architectures and databases, Eric extends the stack to understanding every level of software and hardware, clear through to embedded code and hardware design.

Living in a 260 square foot micro-loft, Eric is no stranger to making efficient use of scarce resources. Eric’s first tasks are making the back-end service even more scalable, and further developing the Planner, readying it for the first round of third-party developers.

The Imp is growing, and we’ve got a few more fantastic people starting in the next few weeks. As always, we’re looking for great additions to the team. If you love what we’re doing, and have chops in front-end or back-end engineering, or embedded programming, drop us a line at jobs@electricimp.com and you may get to work with Eric and the rest of us!