Electric Imp

I started testing my first imp about 6 months ago. I now own almost 15. I use 1 to control my hot tub and lighting, 2 to control my children's tv lamp, baseboard electric heat and an intercom. I use 3 to control my maple sap collection pumps and warmers. I have 1 on my Cat Genie automated liter box I have 3 as thermostats and security light controls throughout my house and several others on my lab bench. I like the cloud connectivity. Some imps text my cell in case of power outage or furnace/AC failure. If my maple sap collection pump lines freeze or if my sap gets too warm. It texts me. I also log the temperature of the air and sap to prevent spoilage. These are the greatest contribution to technology in my generation. With an Arduino there is a considerable amount of building, programming and expense to get to the same point this imp is out of the box. I can't wait for the rumored 4G imp. I'm sure my boat and cars will have several.

Not much I can say other than does what it needs to do.

The software lives remotely running on Electric Imps servers, there is no method or possibility of programming or hacking into the card to directly upload software, programs or sketches like the arduino. Its useless because of this.

Gave it as a holiday gift, and my brilliant son-in-law seemed to be pleased to receive it. He expained its purpose, but my eyes glazed over about 10 seconds into the explanation. The reason, I suspect, is that he's far brighter than I.

This is an amazing little device, and the April board is really cheap and easy to use with it.You can have stuff working wirelessly in minutes.I don't know that I would invest highly in it like hundreds or thousands of units because the code is hosted on their site, but it does add easy versioning control / offsite backup which they handle.I can't wait till things like this get just a bit cheaper, and start to spread everywhere.

Good item, working excellent.

"Because most of the Imp's magic happens on the software side, the cloud service won't be totally free to users. As soon as devices hit the market and consumers start purchasing Imp cards and Imp-compatible devices, Electric Imp will start imposing a small fee for usage. Fiennes said that nothing is finalized yet, but it might cost around $10 a quarter to monitor and control up to 20 Imp cards. And for simple uses, like Imp-connected light switches and plugs, the service will likely be free." - from wired.com article. Although this is pretty neat technology, beware you may become locked into a user fee of $40/yr down the road for the cloud based service (them to have control of everything). They aren't looking to make money on the hardware. Sort of like printers and ink cartridges. "likely" to be free for simple uses isn't very comforting either.Based on the comment from imps CEO (Hugo Fiennes) there will be no fee for non-commercial uses and then it appears to be a subscription fee for using their dashboards, operations console, software, etc. So I am bumping my review to 3 stars. Will give it four stars if I find out it can easily be used on a local network without any need for internet (cloud) access.

Very easy to integrate into most home based projects.The IDE for writing the code is good with a few timeout glitches if you leave the IDE open and unattended for hours, logging off when not in use avoids that situation.The company is very responsive to requests for help and the Forum is very active.The blink-up Wifi works every time from an IOS device but not so much from Android, that is being worked on.