Early in 2011, Hugo was having his bathroom remodeled and took the opportunity to add a strip of RGB lights under the bathroom cabinet. His plan was to hook them up to WiFi so they could show all sorts of ambient information – the hourly weather forecast, calendar for today, share prices and so on, all indicated with color changes along the strip that could be seen at a glance.
This turned out to be a rather bigger project than he’d first imagined, and after days of getting frustrated with the tools available, he decided that there really ought to be a better way to do this sort of thing.
Besides the fact that it was pretty tough for any hobbyist to make a useful networked device, the same issues were facing commercial vendors. Those vendors that had ventured into the field usually ended up reinventing the wheel at great expense, and as such the products were expensive and often communicated to nothing more than a smartphone app.
What was needed, he mused, was to take the best implementations of hardware, firmware and cloud service, build them into a single mass-produced product, and apply them to any device in the world.
Today the team is giving the first look into what we’re working on. Check it out at electricimp.com. We hope you’re as excited by it as we are!