Gregg Sporar's Blog

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)

Comments

• Good post, I love the idea that you will be able to deploy using Netbeans (did i read that correctly?).

  I would love to get hold of a Sun Spot. I emailed Sun in the UK a while back, but I was told kits weren't avalible yet. I'll keep waiting.

  Thanks
  Rory

  Posted by: roridge on December 12, 2006 at 07:29 AM

• Rory - We're getting closer. The Sun SPOTs have just been made available in the United States (more info. here). They are working on making them available everywhere.

  Posted by: gsporar on April 02, 2007 at 12:16 PM

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