LOS ALTOS, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Electric Imp, a global platform provider for Internet of Things (IoT) secure connectivity and application middleware, today announced the release of impOS™ 36. The latest version of Electric Imp’s IoT operating system for edge devices and light gateways, impOS 36 includes cryptographic APIs including secure local storage, optimized power utilization, “fast start” support for new devices, and expansion of its market-leading multi-module compatibility across products lines, including support for the new imp004m wireless IoT module from Murata.
“For a startup company of our size, it would have been impossible from a cost and time standpoint to develop our product without the Electric Imp platform, and in particular without impOS,” said Randy King, chief system architect at Operant Solar. Operant Solar is currently funded through the U.S. Department of Energy’s SunShot Initiative to develop a new state-of-the-art, innovative communications monitoring solution for photovoltaic (PV) solar installations.
“Our FleetLink communication solution was designed with robust LoRa security, so we absolutely needed a partner that could deliver the same for our WiFi connectivity. Plus, once you start developing with impOS, you can tell that you’re working with something built by experts who have lived the difficulties of bringing many new, large scale, complex-yet easy-to-manage Internet-connected products to market,” adds King. “impOS 36 is a light operating system that does heavy work on a very small processor. The functionality and ease of development means we can focus on our business -- revolutionizing the way solar installations are monitored -- and do it at a small fraction of the price of Linux or other industrial-class IoT environments.”
impOS is a small, efficient, secure and developer-focused operating system that powers every Electric Imp device in the Electric Imp Platform. The imp Platform includes unique management layers for full lifecycle management, such as secure Over the Air (OTA) updates, secured communications and remote monitoring. The impOS 36 release features:
- Application security enhancements: new cryptographic APIs allow locally stored application data to be signed and verified.
- Secure device storage: a small amount of persistent, protected storage is now available to applications to hold security-critical data such as signing keys.
- Increased power efficiency: imp003 and imp004m devices benefit from scheduler optimizations that can reduce idle power to the tens of microamps level even when running application code.
- Automation & management enhancements: a variety of enhancements to better manage the vagaries of network connections (eg. WiFi vs Ethernet), auto restart, better insights for faster debugging, etc.
- Enhanced logging of connection information: fine-grained collection of connection events helps diagnose problems with sporadic or slow device connectivity.
- Expanded compatibility: supports all imp modules, including the new imp004m that was recently selected by SoftBank to market on +Style to help accelerate IoT adoption in Japan.
As with every impOS release, extensive automated testing has been performed to ensure that there have been no regressions in compatibility, performance or memory availability so that existing applications will continue to run without modification.
“Our operating system was built by a team with well over a century of experience in mobile and edge software development, which is not something commonly seen in the IoT market,” said Hugo Fiennes, CEO and co-founder of Electric Imp. “impOS 36 is a great example of putting that on-the-ground experience to work so that it’s easier to develop a nearly infinite variety of edge device applications.”
Go to the Electric Imp DevCenter for more information about impOS 36 product features, use, and availability.
About Electric Imp:
Electric Imp helps more than 100 manufacturers and enterprises transform the world through the power of connectivity. Over a million IoT devices have been built with our highly secure platform as a service, with devices deployed in 105 countries. Our unique solution - featuring fully integrated hardware, OS, security, APIs and cloud services purpose-built for the IoT - dramatically decreases cost and time to market while increasing security, scalability and flexibility. The Electric Imp platform enables innovative commercial and industrial applications and empowers manufacturers to manage and quickly scale their connected products and services to millions of users. Electric Imp, founded in 2011, is located in Los Altos, California and Cambridge, England. For more, visit https://electricimp.com.
