Electric Imp

www.electricimp.com

Looks like an SD card but isn't. It's a wifi enabled ARM chip that runs from 5volts (or 3.3 or 2.5).

Power it up and it attaches to your wifi*. Then it downloads it's personalised firmware from the EI servers in the USA. The Imp then communicates with an agent running on that server and now you have a fully web-enabled wireless device with UARTs, SPI, DACs, I2C and GPIO.

You have full control over both the firmware on the device and the code that runs on the server agent.

This technology is awesome for IOT applications. I'm using one to turn my 2049 game into a real-time weather forecast display.




*(you tell it your credentials by using a free smartphone app that uses an optical data transfer system called "BlinkUp").

How are you going to use your 2049 as a weather display? Different colors for different weather?

Simple 4x4 animations. You can do some primitive icons with such low res.