Campus Ambassador, Software Engineer and University Relation MiKo's Blog

I have showed my SunSPOT to many of profesors. Everyone said that it's really cool technology but still there is no support inside my campus of it. So I decided speed things up. I wrote article on the conference. I think there will be lot of preffesors and everyone will know about that at a time. I hope that it rise up enthusiasm about SunSPOT and profesor will support new projects. There is so many chalanges of application. Now I'm writing my own applications and I'm binding new sensors to my SunSPOT so I want to show them how it's easy I hope I'll be successful. 

I every priciate Solarium emulator ( pic. 1 ) . It's realy cool simulate SunSPOT environment without real device. But I think there is small issue inside windows with running processes.  

Issue rised up when you have opened New virutal SunSPOT,  java VM squawk has been stared up too. Problem is that when you want to close virtual SunSPOT or whole Solarium all your squawk processes are still running ( pic. 2 ). It can slow down you computer and also your fan is working more. It will be nice when all squawk processes could be closed when you close virtual sunspot or Solarium.

 

Solution: press <CTRL>+<ALT>+<DEL> processes manager is open and destroy this processes there.

I want to inform windows users about known issue under this operating system. It appears when you want to  try out Solarium and than you are adding new virtual SPOT device. You usually got this error state in SOLARIUM report (inside Sun SPOT Manager tool ).  

[    [java] [Emulator System.err] Uncaught exception in Thread.run():
     [java] [Emulator System.err]     on thread com.sun.squawk.imp.MIDletMainWrapper - main
     [java] Exception in thread "AWT-EventQueue-0" java.lang.ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException: 0 >= 0
     [java]     at java.util.Vector.elementAt(Vector.java:427)
     [java]     at javax.swing.tree.DefaultMutableTreeNode.getChildAt(DefaultMutableTreeNode.java:230)
] 

 

I want to mention little issue with creating SunSPOT application inside NetBeans 6.1_Beta. I suppose you have SunSPOT plugin installed. 

The issue could arise when you trying to deploy SunSpotApplication (New project -> SunSpot Applicaiton ) to your device. (Right mouse click -> Build Project and deploy to SunSpot). You may get error result with missing StartApplicaton.java. StartApplication is the default class.

To solve this issue you have to go to your project directory to dirctory resources/META-INF. Here is the file MANIFEST.MF. You have to little rewrite its source.

Problem is the line
MIDlet-1: src/org/sunspotworld/StartApplication, , org.sunspotworld.src/org/sunspotworld/StartApplication 

You should change it to
MIDlet-1: src/org/sunspotworld/StartApplication, , org.sunspotworld.StartApplication

Since the first time I saw SunSPOT I like it. Everytime I wanted to build small robot or controlled device. And now it's here! SunSPOT gives me opportunity to realize my dream Over the fact I'm learning how to program this small device I need to learn how to connect other parts to the SunSPOT. For the first time I used ServoMechanism.

I went to the shop for modellers and I bought one , model HiTec HS-311 and after I prepared my desk for realization as you can see in the picture.

Then I connected everything together I wrote small easy program inspirated by guied to test if it is working.
It works !!! and It makes me happy and here is the movie.

When you are decided for developing SunSPOT applications its very useful to configure your IDE. I'm using NetBeans, of course And way to configure it is quite easy.
Follow these steps:

1. Download UpdateCenterPlugin and install it to NetBeans
Tools->Plugins->Downloaded->Add plugins...->choose the file

2. Install plugins:
SpotRenameRefactoring, SunspotApplicationTemplate, SunspotHostApplicationTemplate, SunSpotsInfo

3. Now you have everything for create your SunSPOT application
File->New Project->Java->SunSPOT ...

 

Lot of people how are interest in this great product know about sensors inside the SunSPOT. I decide to work with it very closely. Instead the fact focused on programming experience I was really excited to find out what is inside. Real experience is more that have seen it still on same images   There are my pictures. 

 

 

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I took it with me on session about Distributed Intelligence. I wanted to show it  to my professor how cool it is.  When she saw it she was excited in the same way like me at the first time. We spent about 15 minutes talking about its possibilities. I did demos with Air Text and Balls.  I promised to learn more about it for the next time

 

I think people will like SunSPOT because it’s very easy to use and it’s also very nice way to play with JAVA and NetBeans.

I have tried all first few demos. Everything worked