A USPS parcel arrived through the letterbox today, and inside it was this:
A nice little red box - nice touch 
And what was inside the box?
These two fellas. The electric Imp breakout and the electric Imp itself.
So, off I went, happy that I had something to work on - plugged it in and...
A torrent of colours exploded from the side of the card!
Eeeeh - no. Nothing happened.
I thought initially that the card/breakout was broken - however, reading the manual (like a good hobbyist) showed me that in fact there was a jumper that I needed to set on the board. Of course, the headers were not there, so I soldered some on myself. I used right-angle headers to help one of the project aims of being as small as possible.
The Imp (almost) fully populated with headers
Using a small 2-pin jumper that was in the box with my Gertboard, I connected the two headers to enable power over USB. I plan to later solder a JST connector to the board along with another header to enable power over battery.
I then installed the electric Imp app onto my mobile, which allows me to send a BlinkUp , Electric Imp's way of "teaching" the Imp how to connect to my WiFi network. It works through a series of flashing lights, which, when held against the sensor side of the imp, programs the information onto it.
Once the BlinkUp is completed, the Imp appears within the Electric Imp IDE, a web based application. I had to create a Model and give my Imp a name. In the end, the IDE looks like this:
On the left is the Agent code, and on the right is the Device. The Agent pane is for any programming to do with the server-side handler for any requests made by the device. The Device pane is for simply programming the device itself, like you would with an Arduino.
Time for me to explore a little more, just thought I'd make a new blog post to show I'm still alive 