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让这些电动小鬼进你的房子

There has been a ton of talk over the years about home automation, with various companies making big claims about how simple it will be to implement, including massive heavyweights light Google. We haven’t seen much evidence on any of these claims happening any time soon. A newly announced company and product may help usher in the home automation movement in a reasonable timeframe, and may even be something you want to use for your aquarium.

Electric Imp是一家新创业公司，最近才公开开展自动化方法。尽管像Google这样的Google拥有其Google Home品牌的公司正在更多地关注将设备连接到云的基础架构，但Electric Imp则更多地关注事物的硬件端，试图使公司更容易使其设备无线设备。实际设备是一张小型集成卡，尺寸和形式与标准SD存储卡相似，包装Cortex M3微控制器和802.11b/g/n Radio的802.11b/g/n Radio具有完整的安全性。硬件背后的目的是将所有开发都从无线末端淘汰，并让制造商继续开发产品本身。

While most manufacturers that will use this product will end up tying it to an external microcontroller to expand the capabilities, the card itself is more than capable of doing some heavy lifting all by its lonesome. While it has only 6 pins available to the end user/developer/tinkerer (excluding power and ground), those 6 pins have software selectable analog and digital inputs and outputs, UARTS, I2C, SPI, and GPIO functions. This means that outside of the card itself, only a few external components would be required to control simple things other than appliances. Simple things like controllable outlets, timers, simple LED controllers, water level sensors, etc… Get the picture yet?

Fortunately, Electric Imp products are going to be available to everyone, manufacturers and hobbyists alike. To make it easier for everyone, Electric imp has even tried to simplify the coding and automation portion of things. Much like the Arduino project, they have a development environment that takes a lot of the grunt work of interfacing with the hardware called Squirrel. It’s a C based language that lets you get a lot of higher level functions working quickly. On top of that, it’s browser based, and allows you to code and deploy to your device anywhere in the world, with potentially thousands of miles between you and your device. Of course, because you are able to reach the device anywhere in the world to program and update it, that also means you have a device that you can monitor and report to you (if programmed to do so) at any time.

For the aquarium world, this could mean the end of traditional aquarium controllers as we know it. Because the硬件非常便宜（该卡为25美元），并且已经通过FCC认证，这可以使创建可以独立和共同工作以控制水族馆功能的智能模块变得更加容易。随着这些卡也可以向整个公众提供，这也将导致Diyers尝试这些。礁天使不久前来自社区，因此可以肯定地说，一个社区开发的模块化无线礁控制器并不是可能性的。