I love the imp infrastructure and development environment. I love the blinkup technology when it works but know this could be an Achilles heel of a commercial product since it is fickle outside, consumers might not be tech savvy, etc.
Are there any plans to enable the use of an NFC tag or chip to accept wireless information?
That sounds like a great idea. I too run into problems with optical blink up…sometimes have to turn the lights off… It should be fairly straightforward to implement nfc… I was thinking about using the audio jack…
No plans, no. NFC tag or chip doesn’t give the user authentication part - it’s not just sending wifi details.
@Hugo On that note, I’d be interested in understanding more about the ATSHA chip… maybe at a future Hangout.
Sure!
So the data that the screen outputs can’t be sent via another method?
Seems like you will be able to after the first blinkup, unless I don’t understand the multiple wifi connection option that they are working on, but the app apparently needs to talk to the Electric Imp servers and sort out all the necessaries before blinkup happens. I imagine that is a process that needs to be well controlled.
@physicsnole it could in theory be sent by another method, but it’s not static data - hence it has to come from something which has a working internet connection (as the tokens come from the server via another API).
Like a smartphone? I’ve seen apps where you can output serial through the audio jack. Couldn’t you just send the blinkup info to the audio jack or a nfc on the phone instead of the screen?
Yes, though both of those things would need more expensive interfaces on the imp to receive them…
Granted…yes of course!