Friday, September 20, 2013

Gotta love the electric imp

I love the electric imp! I won't talk about how great the device is, or about the processor, or how cool it is that the pins (as few as they are) are configurable to do so many things - smarter people have done it very well already. The only things I'd like to mention are how easy is to upload new code (after the imp is configured and connected to your wireless network), no wires needed, not even an upload code menu option, you just click a button in the IDE and the code is ready on your imp. The other thing that I love is the new Agents API (until recently in closed beta, now available to anyone) which basically allows your code to have 2 parts, one running on the imp and the other running in the cloud and you always see both of them side by side in the new IDE; this is great because it eliminates the need for yet another piece of code running on your own server or somewhere in the cloud, like it was the case of my previous project where the processing piece runs on Heroku.

This being said, soon I'll post my first imp project, what else than yet another version of my distance from home project; this time though there are no wires (no Ethernet or power connection) which is in itself amazing. I know there are other wifi devices out there, like the new Arduino Yún or the great Raspberry Pi with a wifi dongle but the imp is my choice for now; the community is great and the help from the electric imp guys is awesome, so I'll stick with it. Stay posted for my project notes soon.