Ok I love the Wifi concept and am using it but just thought I’d toss out my vote for a strategic / future consideration of a system based upon cellular data hardware as well. This of course opens up entirely new worlds of portability. Thanks.
You’ll be glad to know we’ve been investigating this possibility…
I would be very interested in that as well
Thanks
Something like this could be super useful. Even if it was only running at some slow network. I would totally make a remote control I could have in my car, then use that to tell the imp controlling the garage door to open it so it is open when I get home.
You could always write a mobile phone app that uses the geofence APIs to send door open messages to your imp…
I already made a system similar to that, but it would be a lot better if I could just hit a button instead of having to fondle with my phone while driving.
I was suggesting it be totally automatic (the geofence APIs allow you to run app code when entering/leaving a geofence) - you’d just need your phone with you.
If you want to use an imp, and you’re within wifi range, then an imp with pin1 connected to the button (so it wakes from sleep when the button is pressed) which then sends a door open operation would work fine.
A 9v battery fits very nicely on the back of an April 
Having the phone do it by itself would be pretty awesome, I already got the system set up for it already from previous experiments… The biggest problem with it was how fast it was eating the battery in the phone, and how unreliable it was at the same time.
When I had an iphone the app required to be open (Showing on the screen) to send its position, and on android I also tried a few and after some hours of logging they just seems to silently fail.
Making my own app might be the way to go then, but right now I don’t feel like learning another language while trying to learn more about squeel too.
I am also going to make a little remote impcontrol for when I am at home I haven’t got the details for that figured out yet, but a few rooms, including my garage, will have an imp to control the light and door, it could then be handy to have a little remote that could also control them. The remote would most likely be something I designed myself, maybe with my own little breakout board for the imp with the voltage regulator and such on, and then a 3d printed box for it all.
FWIW: My original suggestion for cellular data was for some use cases like environmental data loggers where there’s no WiFi but there is cellular, limited power/solar, etc. Remotely pushing code updates to a bunch of these would be great rather than physically visiting the device. I’m sure such systems exist but probably at a higher price point and complexity for industrial customers. I’m sure there are numerous other applications as well.
the lazy solution of course is to put a 3G/4G WiFi accesspoint next to the imp, they are getting cheaper too
We’ve want to measure soil water levels in fields. So a pure 3/4G solution would be a great fit. We’ve used 3G/GPRS modems in the past. Some 3G modems are like an imp with GPIO & can be programmed in Java or Lula over the wire, a xG imp would give the cellular M2M crowd a kick up the…
This is the only data connection thread related to the imp i could find, so, for future reference, if you have managed to used the imp together with a 3G solution, please post or reference your setup so that others may use it or learn from it!
I’m personally very interested because if there is a way to combine a ‘simple’ 3G modem with the imp and it is easy to setup and get started, that would be able to revolutionize a lot of projects!
It is easy to do exactly that. I even wired up the Mifi modem so the Imp can turn it on and off. What’s the difficulty?
@sbright33 I am not talking about difficulty, i am merely stating that for others it might be nice to have some reference material of how other people approached their projects. Nice that you succeeded, care to share? i would like to know at least!
My solution is not elegant. Purchased Mifi from T-Mobile. Turned it on. Activate. Configure Imp. Done!
I’ve been running 2 imps on Mifi for about 8 months. Occasional issue that require a Mifi re-boot. The Mifi has integral battery lasts about 6hrs @sbright33 what Manf. & Model of Mifi u using? Mines a Huawei E586
ZTE Rocket. With my hardware you can reboot it any time with one wire connected to the soft switch that already exists. Those 6 hours would last months if only a small amount of data is needed! Boot time about 3 seconds.
A question to those use mifi’s, have you found mobile phone networks/packages specifically for m2m (machine to machine) available to you and usefully priced, or have you stuck with normal packages?
Stuck with consumer offering M2M Sims in the UK are too expensive.
If you use GB’s of data than choose the normal T-Mobile package. It is much less than AT&T. If your data needs are very small than perhaps M2M will last longer?