Fun With SPOT

The

Sun Small Programmable Object Technology (SPOT) project began as an exploration
by Sun Labs
of wireless transducer technologies. During the course of the project they have been
successful at making devices smaller, smarter, and more secure. Their current
product is a bit expensive, but I am hoping that prices will drop once
production ramps up. Regardless of the price, Sun SPOTs are fun to program
and to just play with. Several interesting applications are listed
here.

We were lucky that
Angela Caicedo was available to do a presentation
and demo of Sun SPOT at the annual
Austin JUG
Christmas party.
This is the third
year in a row that Sun sponsored the
meeting and it was held at the Sun
office in Austin.
It was obvious from the type and quantity of the questions she got that
the audience enjoyed the presentation. After it was over,
Norman Richards
commented that her presentation was perhaps the best one of all the Austin
JUG presentations during 2006. This is high praise indeed, since one of the competing
presentations was done by Norman's boss,
Marc Fleury, back in
January. ;-)

Ernest Hill was the emcee and after some preliminary announcements he turned things over to Norman who did a
Java trivia contest. There were ten questions, which started out easy
and got more difficult as they went along. I then did a short presentation on integrated
profiling tools and then Angela launched into the world of SPOTs with some
quick demos, a presentation, and then more demos. One of the things that was impressive
was the ease of deployment - Angela would run a single
Ant target from within the
NetBeans IDE
and the bits would get loaded onto the device.
The final (and coolest) demo
involves a glove that she wears and can use
to control a
Looking Glass desktop.

Then Norman came back up and announced the scores for the Java trivia contest. The
top scoring teams picked from prizes (books, sweatshirts, jackets, t-shirts, etc.)
that were provided by Aaron Houston and Nichole
Scott, whose support we always appreciate!

Click for full-size version of each photo:

	Ernest Hill, emcee for the evening
	Norman Richards checks out his Java trivia quiz
	Austin JUG members eating, drinking, and taking a trivia quiz
	Angela talks about SPOT
	Trivia contest winners choosing prizes
	Me with Angela; I always seem to lean over in these photos :-) (another example here)