This past Thursday night Sun sponsored the CT JUG's holiday party. We were lucky to get guest speaker Angela Caicedo all the way from Sydney Australia. Angela "stopped by" on her from the Austin JUG to JavaPolis to talk about Sun SPOTs. JUG leader Ryan Cuprak did a great job of getting the word out to the robotics community as we had attendees drive over 90 miles to attend her talk. I spoke to one dad who had hoped to bring his daughter who's fascinated by robotics, but she had a conflicting math meet (go figure). He also thought it was important for her to see a woman succeeding in this male dominated industry. Angela's talk was great. I'll let the pictures tell the rest of the story (click for full size):

Pizza, cookies and egg nog before the presentation.

JUG Leader Ryan Cuprak hands out raffle tickets before the talk.

Of course, the projector clunked out just before the talk was about to start.

Ryan welcoming the crowd (sorry for the blur)

Angela discussing "practical" applications of Sun SPOT technology.

Angela uses NetBeans to deploy her applications to the SPOTs and then demonstrates SPOT to SPOT communication.

Angela doing her Minority Report demo.

The VR glove Angela has wired into the SPOT for her Minority Report demo. The bend sensors on the glove are used to represent mouse clicks. Angela has also wired in a gyroscope, which in combination with the SPOT's built in accelerometer, drives mouse movement.

Angela picks a winner for the iPod Nano.

Attendees get an up close look at the SPOTs following the presentation.

One engineer disassembles a SPOT. Putting it back together was the tricky part.

Angela with JUG leader Ryan Cuprak.