I made a gift for my gf including some Imps instead of buying a piece of jewlery. I had a lot of fun making it, and I think she liked it :-? At least its unique, even if it doesn’t have much function. The concept was to have a doorbell type / tamagotchi type device to connect us to each other.
In any case, I made two devices. Each has an arduino (so it does something offline), imp, OLED display, and some switches and buttons and LEDs. The system displays if the other person is online, and allows you to beep the other person. When you beep the other person LEDs change on your device and on their device. The output (screens / LEDs) also tell you elapsed times since various events.
I use a standard UART connection on the arduinos, and the imps are used to make that UART connection transparent. Even when the devices are in distant locales, they seem to work fine together. And I have them pinging each other every 30 seconds so the imp has been pretty reliable. I also have it so you can use a website to post a message to the other person’s display.
For now, here are some pictures of my build process (there are comments on each picture). I’m working on a more detailed technical write up (including schematics, code, BOM) that I’ll post in the near future.
