How To Prepare The App With Which Your End-users Will Activate Their Devices
Electric Imp’s BlinkUp™ technology provides a convenient, quick and easy way to activate and configure an imp-enabled device in the field. If your product connects over WiFi, you will need a way for your end-user to provide their network access credentials. The best way to do this is through a mobile app running on a smartphone or tablet. The app asks the end-user for local network access information and then optically transmits the data to the product using BlinkUp.
Electric Imp provides a BlinkUp SDK so that Electric Imp Customers can integrate BlinkUp into their Android and iOS mobile apps. The SDK is not made available to holders of free Electric Imp accounts. The latest versions of the BlinkUp SDK are available from the Electric Imp Dev Center. To download them, please visit the Tools section.
Please see How To Add BlinkUp To Your Mobile App for an introduction to developing BlinkUp SDK-based apps, the methods available to you and the tools you will need.
Please also see BlinkUp Guidance That Customers Should Provide To Their End-users for help understanding what documentary assistance you should provide for your own customers to guide them successfully through the BlinkUp process.
However your product connects to the Internet, it requires a token the first time it attempts to contact the Electric Imp impCloud™ in order to confirm that it is the device being activated. This token is retrieved by the BlinkUp SDK in your app, and passed to the product during BlinkUp.
BlinkUp is also used to configure development devices. You might already have experienced this if you have followed our Getting Started Guide. If not, we recommend that you do so as it provides a good introduction to the role that BlinkUp plays in the usage of imp-enabled connected products, and to the Platform as a whole. Development device BlinkUp is provided solely by the Electric Imp mobile app — your end-users cannot use it to configure their production devices.
To understand what takes place during activation, please see our guide Activating imp-Enabled Devices. It details the various activation flows that are supported by Electric Imp for different device types, eg. development and production, and should be consulted by you and your app developers before commencing work on your BlinkUp SDK-enabled app.
Activation also makes use of an identifier to differentiate end-users during BlinkUp. This identifier is called a Plan ID, and you and your app developers should read the guide Plan IDs and Successful Device Enrollment before starting work on your BlinkUp SDK-enabled app.
Testing your app during development makes use of impCentral’s factory test environment. For detailed information, please see How To Test BlinkUp SDK-based Apps.
We recommend that mobile app developers view Mobile BlinkUp App Testing: Strategies and Best Practices. This guide provides advice and assistance from Electric Imp’s QA team, and details how the Electric Imp mobile app is tested.