Robert Richardson, Editorial Director of Tech Target, extols the “magic” of Electric Imp’s BlinkUp™ technology in a recent blog post.
Robert reports how he took an initially skeptical look at our Developer Kit, but was soon won over by the sheer ease with which he was able to get the Kit online, especially when compared to oft-touted Internet of Things foundation hardware platforms like the Raspberry Pi.
Unlike computers, he says, IoT devices typically need to operate ‘headlessly’ — without a display, in other words. Configuring and coding IoT applications on systems like the Pi when you don’t have a screen attached to see what’s going is always tricky and often inefficient.
But for the imp, the simplicity of BlinkUp, coupled with an online coding environment that gives you complete access to your imp-enabled device’s software and its log, combine into a powerfull “secret weapon”, Robert reckons.
“Here’s the magic part: you can now go to a URL where you’ll find a web-based developer interface that puts the server side of your application in a window on the left and the on-device part of the code on the right. At this point, you can see the output of the system log running within the device reflected to the console running in a web server on your notebook computer. It’s so seamless that you almost don’t appreciate how much work you’ve just been spared.
“It’s a really clean take on a series of hurdles that nearly every commercial IoT product has to cross if it’s going to connect wirelessly to the wider world,” he concludes.
The Electric Imp platform was designed specifically for real-world, large-scale commmercial roll-outs, which are typically based on our impModule™ hardware rather than the Developer Kit Robert tested.
You can read all of Robert’s thoughts at Tech Target’s IoT Agenda.