Designing an Internet-connected product requires many skillsets. Developers need to know how to write embedded software, build a circuit board, understand how to secure their device, and connect to a network to remotely update and manage their device.
Building out the expertise and the infrastructure for a single IoT product can be challenging, time consuming, and expensive. Development teams require a way to jumpstart their development and minimize what they need to do in a typical design cycle in order to meet cost and time-to-market requirements.
Many different IoT platforms to help with this are beginning to take shape, but one that is particularly interesting comes from Electric Imp, which has pulled together the hardware and software required to get a developer up and running quickly.
This article will describe the Electric Imp IoT Platform and how to go about using it.
Defining the Electric Imp IoT platform
The Electric Imp platform is an IoT platform that provides developers with a complete solution to connect and manage IoT devices. The platform contains all the building blocks that a development team needs in order to quickly get their product up and running. These building blocks include:
Fully integrated hardware
Embedded operating system
Drivers
APIs
Cloud services
Code libraries
Security solutions
To start, developers connect their sensors and proprietary hardware to an Electric Imp radio module that contains not only their custom software, but also the ImpOS which manages a secure connection to the Imp Cloud (Figure 1). Both end users and developers are able to provide their Wi-Fi settings to their product or development platform through a mobile device using an application known as BlinkUp. Once the Imp hardware has the Wi-Fi information, it can directly and securely communicate with the Imp Cloud, and from there, to the wider Internet.