Yesterday we announced new imp Cloud options to further support commercial customers, and today Electric Imp is introducing its latest imp module, the imp005, which integrates two new features that have both been long demanded by commercial customers: 5GHz WiFi and wired Ethernet.
Support for physical connections is an important step for us. It allows manufacturers to make use of the Electric Imp platform in applications where WiFi is unsuitable: equipment located in buildings with wireless-unfriendly construction, for example, or areas where interference levels preclude a reliable connection. Over the coming months, we will be augmenting our reference design library with Power over Ethernet (PoE) reference designs too, reducing development time for customers who are making products which can then be connected and powered by a single cable.
The imp005’s new features aren’t limited to networking. The new module also packs in much more memory than previous modules provide, giving developers more than 1.2MB of storage space for applications and data – space that now goes even further thanks to this week’s launch of impOS Release 32 with its highly compact bytecode format.
This is also the first imp to use a Broadcom wireless SoC (BCM43907), combining WiFi and a Cortex R4 processor on the same die. The imp005 runs the the same impOS as every other imp, allowing you to quickly move code developed on one module to a product based on another, but the new CPU executes Squirrel code around four times faster than imp002, and network throughput is improved significantly due to deeper buffers and hardware encryption accelerators. As with all other imps, security has been designed-in from the start, with secure boot, secure firmware update, and fully encrypted storage subsystems.
As you’d expect from an Electric Imp module, the imp005 provides plenty of GPIO to connect to a host device’s other components, plus support for standard SPI, I²C and UART buses. A new addition to the peripheral family is USB 2.0 host, allowing direct connection from the imp to USB slave devices. The MAC and PHY are both on-board, and impOS provides squirrel APIs to deal with enumerating and talking with devices that offer bulk and interrupt endpoints.
The imp005 (Murata Type1GC) will be sampling in Q3 from our partner Murata, ahead of mass production in Q1 2016. More details can be found in the imp005 Product Brief.
Hugo Fiennes
Electric Imp CEO