Electric Imp is proud to announce today that the Electric Imp platform will support the upcoming single-chip WiFi microcontroller from Marvell Technologies, the 88MW30x.
Due later this year, the chip – we call it the imp004 – is a highly integrated, cost-optimized device for manufacturers looking to get their hardware products connected to the Internet inexpensively. The 88MW30x will fit seamlessly into the full Electric Imp platform: hardware, OS, software, APIs, cloud services, security and management tools.
Imp004 looks bigger than IMP003, but more importantly it is cheaper! On the IMP datasheet page, the scale of the images does not reflect the actual size.
What I was looking for was the number of pads under the chip, with the Marvell it looks like it would be easy to put on a 2 layer pcb, where the imp003 seems to require 4 layers (read that somewhere on the forum I think)
@MikeyDK you need 4 layers; the antenna trace requires impedance control.
@302tt because there are no longer any commercial customers of this product (even the bud red light went to the imp002), hence we’ve stopped making it.
The problem isnt really who can make the boards, and for what price… The problem I have right now is the software to design the board in… So far I just had fun using the free version of Eagle for my own small projects, but it is limited to 2 layers.
I am now looking at KiCad, but so confused by it still… But it might be better to switch to, since it isnt limited like that.
A module with all that stuff taken care of sounds good too, but hopefully I will end up being able to make it all myself.
It’s going well; the pricing has now been made public ($4.00 for the module in 10k qty). We have modules on test boards here, but they’re not going to be available to sample for a little while yet… the reasons why will become clear fairly soon
Yes, and it’s common for chip vendors to talk about chips way before they ship; Broadcom announced the SoC in imp005 back last year but it’s still not available in production form.
