Yesterday evening Hugo Fiennes, CEO and Co-founder of Electric Imp gave a talk at the Mountain View Hacker Dojo.
Hugo did a great job explaining the Electric Imp platform to a packed room. Besides a M&M candy dispenser that he controlled over the internet he also brought a board with the next generation Electric Imp on it.
The Electric Imp is the silver module on the left. The tiny size gives an idea of how small of a form factor internet connectivity will be available. Hugo also shared his excitement about the reduction in power consumption and the ability to power IoT devices from batteries.
Wearable Electronics
Is Edison competing with Galileo
Last summer at the Maker Fair in Rome Intel announced the Galileo single board computer . This week at CES 2014 in Las Vegas Intel followed up with another initiative that carries an inventors name. This time it is Edison. The Edison board is more advanced take on the Quark System on a Chip (SoC) based single board. The board is only the size of an industry standard SD card. So don’t expect to solder it yourself.
However the card is a full featured single board computer that will offer support for multiple operating systems (OS). The integrated WiFi will turn any device equipped with an Edison into an IoT solution.
Intel also promised to release design files that will make it easy to integrate Edison into your own project. Among the tool vendors that will support Edison is Autodesk. The company just announced the acquisition of circuit.io. This online PCB design tool is now a part of Autodesk’s 123D design suite.
For those that cannot wait and want something today the Electric Imp Wireless SD-CARD is an interesting alternative. This card is clearly not as powerful as an Edison. However given the creativity that innovators have displayed around the meager Arduino 8-bit AVR CPU it may still be plenty.