May 21, 2013, 10:26 am

Graduation and Update!

Several of our contributors are graduating this month! Congratulations! As far as EMP is going, here is a small list of the important changes to EMP:

• Removed Thrift compatibility in favor of ZeroMQ.
• User managers no longer keep track of plugins, instead they are monitored separately by a plugin manager.
• Removed the concept of a root or admin user.
• Interfaces have been abstracted out so that they are now Protocols.

Progress is coming along slowly, but we would rather take out time than rush and do things sloppy. If you would like to help us out, feel free to check out our Github Account, or shoot us an email.

May 24, 2012, 12:31 pm

New Direction!

You may have noticed that we have gone through a slight logo and focus change. We would like to remove the connection with the "Imp" idea and instead focus on the E.M.P. aspect of our name. We have now switched over to utilizing antenna's and radio transmission towers as our symbol for a couple reasons.

1. We want to better describe the interconnectedness that EMP provides its user-base.
2. We are catering to a certain crowd, we would like to take a more serious approach to monitoring and security. Many of our team members' ultimate goals are for either academic research or for advancing open source home security.
3. We would like to strengthen our ties to the Erlang community through telephony connotations.

We hope you like our new fresh face as much as we do. Please stay with us as we get our bearings together this summer and start to release, not only some code, but the APIs for developers to get started writing EMP plugins!

May 8, 2012, 2:40 pm

Imagine was a success!

We met the public and got their opinions on what they would like to track using Emp and the results pretty much speak for themselves. It seems like Social networking was high on the list like we knew it would be, but Home Automation and Security were just as high if not higher.

So it looks like our first round of plugins to tackle will be social networking. But some promising leads were presented that I'd like to mention. We will be looking into X10 Home automation among other hardware as we were pleased to be able to talk to a gentleman who worked for them. We will also be looking more closely at facial recognition and security related plugins soon as well.

Whats next for Emp? Well, we want to get the core cleaned and polished for release. Therefore, next on the agenda is to get the Plugin API and Interface API formalized and up on the website. (Although if you want to see our working API repo, please email dev.) Next, we will release an alpha version of the framework along with some example interfaces to hopefully spark a bit more interest. As of now, we do not have a release date as two of we are in finals crunch week and will have our heads buried in books.

We will keep everyone informed that has submitted their emails and will post on this blog as well. Please make sure you watch us on Github, as we will release the API and source code there.

Thanks again,
Emp Group

May 5, 2012, 12:00 am

Emp has launched!

Welcome to the Emp website, we plan on updating you as the day progresses to let you know how Imagine RIT is going! But please feel free to stop by if you are in the area. We will be explaining the uses and taking ideas for possible plugins. We will be keeping a running list and tally here: Plugin Tally.

Please look around our website to get more information, we will also be online during Imagine taking and answering questions on our freenode channel #emp-dev and #emp-help. You can join either channel and chat from our website on our Contact page.

While you are here, whether you are at Imagine or not, consider tweeting your ideas to @emp_dev as well. We are looking for popular online or offline services that you use often that you would like a monitoring system to supervise for you. For examples of some uses, check out our About page.

To sign up for updates, you can either watch our Github page for development updates, or enter your email address on our Sign up page for release updates.