Former Apple, Google, Facebook engineers launch IoT startup

LONDON—A year-old startup called Electric Imp Inc has developed a Wi-Fi node in a memory card physical format that it hopes will become a standard technique for assigning IP addresses and linking to the Internet to establish a Wi-Fi-mediated IoT (Internet of Things).

Along with selling small cards initially priced at $25 per card, the startup will host data and offer browser-based services that will allow consumers and enterprises link and control their equipment via these IoT nodes.

Prior to cofounding Electric Imp (Sunnyvale, CA), CEO Hugo Fiennes managed Apple's hardware team for the first four iPhones, then became its iPhone architect. He left Apple in May 2011 and worked briefly at Google before resuming his career as an entrepreneur. In the 1990s, he founded Empeg Ltd to make in-car MP3 players (see Engineers drive craze for MP3 audio players). Empeg was sold to SonicBlue in November 2000.

Along with Fiennes, Electric Imp's cofounders are Kevin Fox, director of user experience, and software architect Peter Hartley. Fox designed the Gmail Web interface for Google while Hartley worked with Fiennes at Empeg. Fox worked as a designer at Yahoo and Google and was a senior product designer at Facebook and principal user experience designer at Firefox browser developer Mozilla.

In a two-hour interview with EE Times via Skype, Fiennes laid out Electric Imp's IoT product strategy.

From left to right: Electric Imp founders Peter Hartley, Hugo Fiennes, and Kevin Fox.
The starting point for Fiennes' IoT vision came when he attempted to rig bathroom lights to respond to arbitrary inputs like Google's share price. He quickly realized that many companies offered home automation systems based on a variety of radio standards, including Zigbee, but nearly all were single-vendor solutions rather than open platforms. Moreover, most were expensive.

"There is a Wi-Fi-enabled set of scales for sending your weight back to a Web site so you can track progress," said Fiennes by way of example. "It costs $180."

Electic Imp's innovation combines standardization on Wi-Fi and on a physical format based on the SD memory card socket. But it also offers a system partition that helps reduce costs for product developers. The startup hopes this approach will enable a fast ramp of available IoT-enabled objects, Fiennes said.

"We've put it in a user-installable module. The user buys the card and just plugs it into any device that has a slot," Fiennes explained." All a developer needs to do is add a socket and a 3-pin Atmel ID chip to their product. That's 75 cents: 30 cents for the ID chip and 45 cents for the socket." This assumes the availability of 3.3 V. "But given that most things you want to control from the Internet are electrical, we think that's reasonable," he said. If not, developers can include a battery.

Since the module can be installed by a user, developers won't have to worry about FCC and CE certification since Electric Imp's cards have already been certified for both, Fiennes added.

However, product developers do need to determine what aspects of their "things" they want to link to the card socket. The most obvious is an on-off relay, but Electric Imp's 6-pin interface on its card supports a variety of control and data interfaces and is configurable. It allows pull-up, PWM, I²C and SPI interfaces for sending commands along with data transmission and retrieval.

Cards and use cases

The Imp card demonstrates capabilities Fiennes perfected at Apple. It is extremely compact, based on a 0.35-mm four-layer PCB. It includes a Cortex-M3 based 32-bit microcontroller from STMicroelectronics and a Broadcom Wi-Fi chip. "It's long range too, much better than smartphones and tablets," Fiennes claimed. An edge-mounted status LED and photodetector for optical configuration are also included.

The optical sensor is included since Wi-Fi devices need an SSID and password for network security. Electric Imp uses a system in which the network name is selected on a smartphone, then a password typed in. An app then sends the digital information optically—through a series of flashes of the screen—to the card edge as it sits in the socket.

"We'll be licensing this [programming system] to other vendors with both iOS and Android code to implement into their own apps," Fiennes said in a separate e-mail.


Electric Imp cards have a familar memory card physical format but contain a Wi-Fi node inside.

When the $25 card is installed in a slot and powered up, it will find the ID number and automatically transmit the information to Electric Imp’s servers. Fiennes and his colleagues have written a virtual machine that runs under a proprietary embedded operating system on the node and looks for updates of itself on the Internet. SSL encryption is used for data security when transmitted over the link.

In sleep mode, the Electric Imp card consumes 6 microamps, Fiennes said.


An Electric Imp enabled wall power socket. With card installed it can be part of an Internet of Things.

Use cases

Fiennes demonstrated a power adaptor with an Imp socket. He installed a card and an appropriately labeled block appeared in a browser window. Fiennes plugged in a chain of decorative lights and we clicked on the box on our browser. After clicking, the box text went from "off" to "on." Over Skype, we could see the lights had come on.

Fiennes emphasized that control need not be manual and could be linked to other Internet apps such as weather reports, or to Electric Imp sensor nodes that monitor conditions such as humidity.

A second example is an Electric Imp enabled passive infrared sensor. Fiennes demonstrated how it could be programmed to report the time and date of detected motion to a client's Web pages on the Electric Imp server. In turn, those pages could be programmed to send an alarm to a mobile phone. The alarm could also be triggered if no motion was detected, allowing the sensor to serve as a monitor for the elderly in their homes, for example. If there is no activity before 9 a.m., a message is sent to a caregiver.

The final example is an Electric Imp washing machine. Machine operation can be made conditional on a number of variables, including the price of electricity. "Every washing machine has microcontroller and that microcontroller has a lot of data," said Fiennes. "That data could be sent back to a washing machine service organization that could call the client up before the washing machine breaks down."

Fiennes said Electric Imp is not in the business of making IoT objects. Instead, it wants to enable the market with simple but elegant building blocks. "We expect to be blown away by the things people will make from this," he said.

Availability and next steps

The cards will be on sale to developers by the end of June for $25 each and Electric Imp will also supply development kits that include a socket, ID chip and power connection on a small board for about $10. While these are intended for consumer electronics developers Electric Imp is happy to sell them to students and non-professional developers. "Hobbyists can play with it and tell us what they think."

"We have worked with some lead partners for feedback. We are working with partners in Asia and the United States who make consumer devices."

Fiennes said that consumer products with Electric Imp slots would appear in time for the 2012 winter holiday present season. Electric Imp has volume manufacturing for the cards lined up in China, again making use of contacts and experience Fiennes developed designing highly compact smartphones for Apple. "I used to spend quite a lot of time in China," he said.

The Basic development board for the Electric Imp with socket and 3-pin ID chip.

Electric Imp was founded in May 2011 and now as seven employees. The company has just closed a $7.9 million first round of funding with Redpoint Ventures and Lowercase Capital, whose most well-known investments are Facebook and Twitter.

www.electricimp.com

This story was originally published on EE Times.