If you've ever dreamed about connecting your entire home to the Internet — so that appliances could start by themselves or you could receive text message alerts to maintain housekeeping — it looks like your dream is ready to become a reality.

Electric Imp calls itself "a complete solution to connect devices to the internet, wirelessly." The start-up, founded by former team members of the iPhone and Gmail, came out with a line of programmable, pluggable network cards that look like SD cards — except each Imp card actually contains an embedded processor and WiFi antenna. By installing these Imp cards to your devices using circuit boards (which Imp sells), you're able to connect them to an "Imp cloud," through which you can control them and program them.

Automated homes aren't exactly new — for example, a student at UC Berkeley recently automated his dorm room. But Imp promises to be much easier than other current "Internet of Things" products.

For one, Imp cards don't require you to hook up all your devices to a central controller. Rather, you can control all your gadgets and appliances individually online.

For example, as seen in the video, one theoretical application is having Christmas lights that flicker off when the water in your tree stand gets to below a certain level. Or, perhaps you could program water sprinklers to turn on when you notice that the weather is especially hot.

Users can set up commands to program their Imp cards using a drag and drop graphical interface on Imp's web-based software. We haven't tested it ourselves yet, but anything drag and drop is fairly intuitive and presumably easy.

In addition, as Gizmodo reported, connecting the Imp cards to your home or office WiFi network is not much trouble at all:

"Getting the Imps to work with a WiFi network is super easy, and ingeniously done. You input the WiFi network name and password into the Electric Imp your phone (iOS or Android) and the app flashes light at a photosensor on the Imp card, using pulses of light to transfer the login. It. Was. Slick."

The varying sizes of Imp's circuit boards makes it simple to install them in different-sized gadgets and appliances, and Imp is currently in talks with other manufacturers to make future devices Imp-ready right off the assembly line.

Developer previews for the Imp card are slated for June. The cards will initially sell for $25, and it's expected that a basic circuit board will sell for about $10.

Would you be interesting in wiring your home with Imp cards? Let us know in the comments.

Thumbnail courtesy of LodgeNet