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Last week I gave a tech talk at Google about Sun SPOTs. It was fun. Thanks to my friend Will Rusch for inviting me. The venue was a little noisy and distracting, plus the Semaphorebot wasn't working for some reason, but, if you have an hour and want to learn about Sun SPOTs give it a watch.
One of the exciting parts of our work here in Sun Labs is that more and more of what we do is done in the open. It gives researchers a special thrill when they get to see people using their work and taking it beyond what they planned. The Sun SPOT community has been growing impressively recently. We have been seeing more and more work done around Sun SPOTs and it is great. Part of a healthy community is building an ecosystem. As a research group, its always difficult for us to serve both our research goals and provide a market opportunity for others.
One of our first was with Systronix who built the Trackbot. They built a complete robotic platform which can use a Sun SPOT for its brains. It's a nice experimental platform that can take advantage of some of the interesting features of the Sun SPOT like Java-based development, wireless communication for untethered development and swarm behavior. It allows you to build a variety of mobile applications that can be quite compelling. The Trackbot has been available from Systronix for some time now and has a loyal community of followers.
A more recent entry to the Sun SPOT commercial space is the recent announcement of the availability of eProtoBoards from Brilldea.com. We recently open sourced this board, but as a research group simply have not been able to build and distribute another product at this time. The net effect was that many people in the community wanted the board and our open source efforts were just teasing them. Well, the good news is that Brilldea.com stepped in to make the boards available. This is a great step forward for the community. We want Sun SPOTs to be a great platform for innovation and experimentation. The eProtoBoard is a big part of that. Now they are only selling the bare board, but for those who are designing their own circuits anyway, having to put on the few extra parts should not slow anyone down.
Of course hardware is not very exciting without software and I'm happy to say that the software innovation also appears to be going along quite well. One of the most interesting recent developments here is the announcement of a new radio stack from the folks at University of Karlesruhe in Germany. They did some experiments and found that our radio stack was not to their liking, so they wrote their own. We were hoping to encourage innovation in this area since we think it is ripe for a variety of improvements and optimizations for particular application areas. We hope to see a lot of experimental radio stacks pushing different approaches to distributed communication. Of course, one great thing about the KSN RadioStack is that it is all open source. You can go to their website today and take a look at their YouTube video below.
My son is enrolled in a summer science camp that he is enjoying quite a lot.
Last night he brought home a small trebuchet that he made in class. It was pretty nice and once we determined that he could throw an AA battery the quite a way in the back yard. He asked me the question, "I wonder how many Gs that battery gets when its thrown?" Well, dad's live for these kind of questions, especially when they have a set of Sun SPOTs in the house. So we got out the Sun SPOTs started throwing them around the yard. The telemetry application that comes with the Sun SPOT kit is ideal for this project. It provides a live feed of the accelerometer data from the Sun SPOT. That gave us live data as the SPOTs flew around the yard. Its a pretty small trebuchet, so it couldn't throw anything as heavy as a Sun SPOT very far, but it was interesting to see that the acceleration as the Sun SPOT was dragged along the platform was only about 3Gs, while once it started its real swing it was accelerated right up beyond 6 Gs. Then in the throw graphed below (displaying only y and total acceleration), you can see that it spun in the air 5 complete revolutions before landing unceremoniously with a >6G shock and bouncing in the grass several times then finally coming to rest. It was pretty fun.
We just had a short time before dinner, so we didn't try to calculate how high it went in the air or anything tricky like that, but I see no reason not to since you can tell when the trebuchet let go of the Sun SPOT and when it landed. You can calculate the acceleration involved and determine, to some approximation, how high it went.. I think this type of project could make for a fun grade school science project.
I've had ideas for other Sun SPOT related grade school projects like the SPOT-drop. Its like an egg drop contest where kids design enclosures for the eggs and then drop them from a reasonable height onto a hard surface. If the egg breaks they lose, if it doesn't, they win. Well, if you substitute a Sun SPOT for the egg, you can give the students actual data accelerometer data about how well their enclosure did rather than a binary break/no break indicator. If you have real data you can get into a lot more subtleties of what designs are best at protecting their cargo. Anybody want to give it a try and tell me how it goes?
This is pretty cool. A spider bot controlled by a Sun SPOT. Nice job marvelouskobe!
I am a avid digital photography enthusiast. I have over 100,000 pictures in my library. With my current digital SLR camera, a single raw image can be 14MB, and I can generate them at 5 images per second. I've done a few HD video editing projects, and as you can imagine, those also eat gigabytes of disk space like it's popcorn. Managing that much data causes significant issues for me as the household's resident IT manager. I have to keep it all backed up and available for my family. We have several terabytes of spinning rust in our home. Recently, as we left on a week long vacation, our neighbor asked, "if these California wildfires find our neighborhood while you are gone, is there anything that you want me to save." Given that he probably can't save the piano, it was easy for me to ask him to grab the backup storage device, with years of photos and records on it.
Of course, I also work with sensors, devices who's main purpose in life is to generate data. We are generating data at an incredible rate. All that data needs to be stored, so storage becomes more and more important. That's why Jonnathan is blogging about it and why we are announcing a slew of new storage products. Well, we at labs wouldn't want to be left out. That is why I'm happy to announce the availability of Celeste, an open source research project aimed at reliable, secure storage made of unreliable, non-secure parts, that scales beyond imagination.
Celeste is a very interesting set of technologies. It is a distributed object store. That means that when you store an object in a Celeste system, it is split up into chunks that are stored on various machines spread across a network. The system hands back a handle, which later can be used to reconstruct the object. Because these chunks of data can be replicated or encoded for redundancy, the storage can be very reliable. This also has interesting implications for security, since each participating node knows only about the chunk of data it is asked to store. It does not know who stored it or what larger object that chunk of data belongs to. The system is designed to handle unreliable or even rogue nodes in the system. In addition to checking the reliability of the data as it is retrieved, nodes can keep track of the reputation of other nodes in the system. This means that when you save an object, you can ask to save it someplace VERY reliable or someplace with a good reputation for fast access. The society of nodes in the Celeste system use the reputations that are built up over time to match with the users wishes when storing future objects.
The system is alive. When left alone it will continually monitor itself to make sure that the proper levels of redundancy are maintained as nodes come and go from the system. This has the effect of sloshing data around the system to level storage over time. This has an additional very interesting side-effect. Say you have a data center and you decide to buy one of our cool new storage boxes. If you could plug it in and tell it to start participating the the Celeste system, data would naturally start flowing into the new storage units. If you have some old storage boxes that you would like to retire, perhaps because they just draw too much power for the amount of data they hold, you can just turn them off. When you do this, the Celeste system will notice that some data has disappeared and perhaps the redundancy levels have fallen below the required threshold, so Celeste will start creating redundancy coded chucks of data, most probably in your new storage system. This means that your data will automatically migrate to the new storage hardware just by connecting the new storage and turning off an old one.
The heart of the system is the Distributed Object Locator (DOLR). This is based on a Distributed Hash Table (DHT), which is a very slick piece of technology. It allows a completely masterless set of nodes to work together to find any piece of data in linear time. This system as implemented in Celeste can scale incredibly. It can address yottabytes of information. Yes yottabytes - now you can tell your friends that you learned a new word. kilo, mega, giga, terra, peta, exa, zetta, yotta. A yottabyte is 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (1000^8) bytes. That should be able to store all my photos with no problems.
Another interesting aspect of the system is that it is designed to be able to handle drastic failures. For example, suppose that you have a Celeste system that consists of 1000s of nodes spread across the United States. If someone digging a trench in St Louis, severs your main OC-193 cable between the east and west sides of the country, the system will continue to operate as two separate Celeste systems. Stores and retrieves can go ahead as normal. Eventually, when the damage is repaired, the system will stitch itself back together including flagging potential conflicts where two independent writes have been carried out on a single object. Additionally, a side effect of the way that the data is looked up in the DOLR is that data naturally migrates closer to where it is being used. This means that if you are accessing a lot of data and then travel half way around the world, the data can follow you to ensure speedy access from anywhere. In interesting side effect of these two behaviors is that one can imagine a scenario where your laptop is participating in a Celeste system. As you use data, it finds its way to your laptop. At the end of the day, you take your laptop home and work disconnected from the network. You read and write data locally on your hard drive. The next day you come in and re connect to the Celeste system and your data is seamlessly reintegrated.
A key differentiator between our system and other distributed storage systems is that Celeste is mutable. These distributed storage systems go to great length to never forget anything, so often they are designed to NEVER forget anything. In many cases this is not appropriate for real world use. Nothing is ever deleted and storage is never recovered, so these systems just grow and grow. We have many customers who wrestle with regulations that require them to keep customer records for a certain length of time and then guarantee that they will get rid of them. Celeste includes some secret sauce that allows it to really forget data. You can delete data, change it, etc. just as you would on a standard file system.
There are many other aspects like interesting security modes and possible modes of disconnected operation. This system is a research tool and not yet part of any product, so don't expect to just plug it in and replace you existing file system, however, if you are interested in this type of research I encourage you to check it out. The project is entirely open source.
You can learn more about the Celeste project here: http://www.opensolaris.org/os/project/celeste/
Congratulations to Glenn and Glenn for getting this great technology out to the world!
A fellow in Spain has put some Sun SPOTs on his guitar in order to make a more expressive instrument. This is a great idea! Now you're rock star gestures can be captured by the accelerometer on the Sun SPOT and used to change your audio effects. Of course, you might want to combine this with the spots-midi project to convert your gestures into MIDI commands.
You just have to love this one. Sun SPOTs help to make a flying bike. Nice!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k3QK1eu3q3E&fmt=18
So we launched our SPOT controlled weather balloon, EDGAR1, yesterday. It was really a lot of fun. Here is my account of the day.
This project was started about two weeks ago by our extraordinary intern, Tennessee Carmel-Veilleux. Working in the evening and on weekends he and other Sun Labs researchers designed and executed a plan to put a Sun SPOT in near space. A weather balloon would carry aloft a payload including radios, GPSs, various sensors and of course a Sun SPOT for control. It should rise into the air some 10 - 15 miles and then gently parachute to safety where we would gather up our gadgets and analyze the data. Sounds like fun!
Well, after a couple weeks of hard work, we had a plan. We purchased a helium balloon and fashioned a payload for it. We used the MicroTrak 8000FA for tracking.
Finally, we gathered yesterday morning (April 5) at 7am for our preflight briefing. We checked the weather conditions and chose our final launch location. We picked a deserted looking cul de sac near Hwy 101 and 156 close to San Juan Bautisa, CA. We ran our simulations (using cool tools like W3BalTrak from Near Space Ventrues or the U Wyoming Balloon Trajectory Simulator) and predicted a roughly two hour flight and about a 90 mile trajectory to the south and east. The launch team headed to the launch site while a chase team headed downwind to California's central valley some 200 miles away. A third team headed to a nearby airstrip to be the eyes in the sky.
I was part of the launch team. We headed south to set up. At about 9:15 we discovered that the launch site that we were hoping for was in a gated community, so we found a nice grassy field just off the road about a quarter mile from the planned location and decided to launch there. We packed the electronics in the payload, conducted final tests and started to fill the balloon. We checked in with the chase teams and all was going well. We had to wait a bit for the clouds to burn off to the 50%-or-less that is required for a safe balloon release. Just as the skies cleared enough for the launch, the plane showed up on site and EDGAR1 was launched. It was really a great feeling seeing it head up into the sky. After a few tense moments watching it head a bit to the west toward the ocean, the winds kicked in just as predicted and it headed for the south east and out of site.
At this point all we could do we track its amateur radio transponder that was giving us continuous GPS data via a system called APRS. Some of us had ham radios, but for those who didn't, there is a nice website called http://www.findu.com where you can track these signals. We tracked the balloon as long as we could and the tracking airplane was actually able to see it go passed them which is pretty much a miracle when you see how small a spec the balloon is in the big sky.
Some of the launch crew went off to join the chase. I and my family had a social obligation that we had to go to, so we drove back up to the SFBay area. Thank goodness for iPhones that let us continually update the position from the web as we travelled. The chase crew had location information via the ham radio, but they had no course or speed information. We acted as a communication point relaying this predictive information to the chase team. We watched as the balloon climbed through 60,000ft, then 70,000ft. It was working!!!
The flight parameters had been set so that the Sun SPOT would cut the flight at 1h 55min or if it went far enough that it was going to drift into the Sierra mountains. At around 80,000ft, we lost altitude information. Apparently GPS has problems at these high altitudes, although I suspect in this case the GPS has a software imposed reality check... if the altitude says you are over 80,000ft, there must be something wrong! It was rather nerve racking not knowing what was wrong with our data feed. We did however, know that we were reaching the timed conclusion of the flight. At this point the Sun SPOT was supposed to trigger a heated wire that would melt the rope and release the balloon from the payload. The payload would them parachute down.
We waited, but there was no sign that it was descending. It was just chugging along at an unknown altitude. hmmm. Now what? It continued along for a very long 10 minutes at least. There were some pretty tense moments and then... suddenly.... we started to get altitude data agian. It was falling. And just a few miles farther than our predicted location. After a few sighs of relief we concentrated on figuring out where it was to land. It looked like it would be down in another 10+ minutes. The chase crew was able to situate themselves to the area where they thought it would land ahead of its arrival. They never did see it and neither did the chase plane although they had it in had within ten minutes of it touching down. It had a minor bump in the bottom, but was otherwise unharmed.
Post Mortem:
The flight was over 100 miles and reached over 80,000ft. I judge any flight that goes that high and ends in recovery of all the equipment is a very successful flight. However, you'll notice that I haven't posted any of the pictures from the onboard camera. That is because there weren't any. In fact the reason the flight went longer than the programmed length is because the balloon was never cut free. Instead it eventually popped because of the low air pressure. We understand that the balloon that was 6 ft in diameter when we launched it was probably about three times that, 18ft, and it must have been close to 90,000ft, when it exploded. We'll be analyzing what caused the failures tomorrow.
In the mean time, I must say this was a LOT of fun and we will do it again.
For more information about how this project went stay tuned to http://groups.google.com/group/spotballoon. We'll be posting more technical details and information there.
There are some interesting opportunities now available for those of you interested in playing with Sun SPOTs.
1) The eBalloon is a quick project to get Sun SPOTs to near space using a weather balloon. We expect to launch the weekend of April 5. If you are interested in helping out, or just following along, read more here:
http://blogs.sun.com/spotee/entry/spot_high_altitude_balloon_project
https://www.SunSpotWorld.com/forums/viewtopic.php?p=4659#4659
2) If you are interested in Sun SPOTs and robotics, you should check out the RoboSim contest where contestants program using the Greenfoot environment and a simulated Sun SPOT and Trackbot to navigate a maze. At JavaOne in May, you get to try out your code on a real Sun SPOT and Trackbot.
https://trackbots-greenfoot-contest-2008.dev.java.net/
3) If that isn't enough, you might want to check out the International Autonomous Robot Contest where entrants work with Sun SPOTs and iRobot Creates (Roomba's without vacuums) to handle some fancy tasks navigating a maze or racing other robots to a marker. The contest will be held June 21-22 in Del Mar California. With your paid entrance you get a Sun SPOT development kit AND an iRobot Create for an amazingly low price, but you do have to show up and compete.
We've been very busy making our Sun SPOT Project open source. Today we announce the final major piece of the project. The main Sun SPOT hardware itself is now available on Java.net. Kudos to the whole team for reaching this milestone!
You can find it at https://spot-espot.dev.java.net/ . At this point all major parts of the Sun SPOT project are open source - hardware, operating system/virtual machine, drivers and libraries, applications, documentation... its all there. It's all part of the project's open source which you can find at https://spots.dev.java.net/. There's a lot of work represented on that web site and we're really pleased that we're able to bring it all to you. Enjoy!
Open Source hardware is a slightly more complex concept than open source hardware. It still takes more resources to develop hardware than software, but generally open source hardware can significantly reduce the barrier to entry. The subtly comes into play in the varying degrees of openness in hardware. You can release schematics which add to the understanding of a design and encourage new designs. You can also release layouts and bill of materials which enables others to more easily build exactly the same board as well as encourage new designs. With Project Sun SPOT, we have already released eBones, an open source project to encourage new application boards for the Sun SPOT. Now we are releasing several new boards which significantly add to the functionality of the Sun SPOT. There are a grand total of 6 boards included here, and we are including everything - schematics, layout and bill of materials; it's everything you need to build these boards.
The Sun SPOT is designed for flexibility. One of the ways we achieve this is by dividing the system into physical components. The battery provides power. The Processor Board does the heavy lifting. This is where basic functions like Java run and where the radio lives. The application specific hardware lives on the sensor board (which I often call the application board). It is what provides the basic sensing and effecting connections to the outside world. It is these interchangeable application boards that are providing as open source. Lets take a look at what we are making available:
eDemoBoard - We ship the Sun SPOT with the eDemoBoard which is one of the boards that we making available as open source. It includes a light sensor, temperature sensor, 3D accelerometer, 8 24-bit LEDs, two push buttons, 6 analog inputs, 5 digital I/O lines and 4 digital outputs. We consider it the kitchen sink of application boards. The eDEMO has comprehensive Java classes, preinstalled firmware and many demonstration programs that use this board. This 1.9" x 1.5" board fits inside the plastic case.
eFlash - eFlash is a stackable add-on board for the Sun SPOT project and is used for data logging. This board uses two of the industry standard MiniSD flash cards. The PC board is 1.9" x 1.5" and fits inside the plastic case. The MiniSD connector on top uses the ARM9's 4bit high speed SD/MMC interface while the bottom MiniSD connector uses the standard SPI connector. The board contains the identification serial Flash memory, 2 MiniSD card connectors, and decode logic.
eSerial - eSerial is a stackable add-on board for the Sun SPOT project providing a single RS232 connection. The PC board is 1.9" x 1.5" and fits inside the plastic case. The board requires an extension flat ribbon cable to the appropriate DB9 or DB25 connector. The level shifted RS232 connects to UART0 of the ARM9. It contains the identification serial Flash memory, RS232 level shift circuit, and activity LEDs.
eProto - eProto is a stackable add-on board for the Sun SPOT project for prototyping hardware interfaces to the SunSPOT.
eProtoMega - eProtomega is a stackable add-on board for the Sun SPOT project for prototyping hardware interfaces.
Today we launch our software only release of the Sun SPOT development kit. We have a complete version of the software development environment that we are making available for download. It's a beta. We haven't completed a few things like the version of the tutorial that uses virtual Sun SPOTs instead of real ones, but all the other tools and examples are there to get you started building your own applications.
I know, I know. The whole point of Sun SPOTs is to push computing further into the real world, so what's the point of a software only release? Here are the top 10 reasons to give it a try:
10 - There's an application I've been thinking about and I want to find out if it will work without having to buy a kit.
9 - I am affiliated with a university but NOT in one of the following countries, so I can't buy a kit yet:
Australia, Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Canada, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, India, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Netherlands, New Zealand, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Russia, Slovakia, Slovenia, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, United Kingdom, United States
8 - I am affiliated with a commercial entity but NOT in United States, the European Union, and Russia, so I can't buy a kit yet.
7 - Sun SPOT Development Kit are too expensive for me
6 - I'm brave and beta releases don't scare me
5 - I'm kind hearted and want to help you stamp out bugs in this beta release
4 - You have stuff to download and I have some free disk space. This will work out great!
3 - I want to explore one of the ten amazing Java applications
2 - I'm a discerning geek, this is a must have gadget
1 - What? Free Sun SPOT Dev Kit, where do I download?
If you are interested email David Simmons at davidgs (at) sun (dot) com. Please put "SDK Beta" in the Subject: line so that he knows what your request is about. You will then be sent a link for the Java WebStart page from where you can start the install. You must be able to run Java WebStart applications for this to work.
One of my colleagues here in Sun Labs, Susan Landau has just won a significant and cool award. Congratulations Susan!
_________________________________________________________________
SUSAN LANDAU
2008 Woman of Vision Award winner for Social Impact
_________________________________________________________________
Susan Landau, Distinguished Engineer, Sun Microsystems Inc., is the Anita Borg Institute 2008 Women of Vision Award winner in the Social Impact category.
Landau’s focus is on the interplay between security and public policy. She has profound impact in at least three areas of computer science: as an extensive commentator and advisor on U.S. wiretapping and encryption policy; as a world renowned expert in computational algebra and number theory (mathematics intimately related to cryptography), and in developing numerous programs to benefit women in computer science. A Sun Microsystems Distinguished Engineer, Landau is a leading scholar in all three areas and publishes widely. Her book, co-authored with Whitfield Diffie, Privacy on the Line: the Politics of Wiretapping and Encryption, attracted immediate international attention and played a significant role in the 2000 loosening of U.S. cryptographic export-control regulations, stimulating the global technology economy and offering protection to consumers in all non-embargoed countries. Her unusual blend of technical expertise, policy insight, industry connections and drive, along with her dedication to the advancement of Women in Computing, make Landau a true Woman of Vision.
More on the 200 Women of Vision Award Winners:
http://anitaborg.org/news/archive/anita-borg-institute-announces-2008-women-of-vision-award-winners/
I love seeing what users are up to with Sun SPOTs. Here are a few of the recent YouTube videos posted by users.
Sun SPOT Surveillance Camera
http://youtube.com/watch?v=yNctQMRjPJY
Sun SPOT powered RC Car
http://youtube.com/watch?v=S9GWoatB9PA
Sun SPOT SunSnakes Game
http://youtube.com/watch?v=qOoqUJmNllY
SOCRADES Project
http://youtube.com/watch?v=K8OtFD6RLMM
Sun SPOT Testing
http://youtube.com/watch?v=FXxyroJwxCU
Last week we announced that we made the Squawk VM open source. This week I'm pleased to announce that the rest of the Sun SPOT project has gone open source. It's now available at http://spots.dev.java.net. Additionally we announced widespread availability of Sun SPOTs (36 countries and counting) as well as deep discounts for education (see your Sun edu sales rep for details). The full press release is available here.
For a researcher it is really rewarding to see your work get to the point where others can use it. We had a little press briefing today and it was a lot of fun. The presentations went off without a well, but much more importantly, I'm really pleased with our story. We are open sourcing a pretty innovative set of technologies with an embedded Java as the OS (Squawk), over-the-air deployment and debugging, built-in multi-hop networking, easy-to-use security, a new class of deployment tool (Solarium), a complete emulator, automatic battery/power management (do for power management what Java already does for memory management), flexible hardware design, eBones open source to make your own HW design easy... All this AND the "Oh-my-god" features like over-the-air live isolate migration, wormholes from the emulated virtual world to the real world, robots that are basically software projects... And then the community story, from monitoring dogs to mobile data centers to saving the rainforest with dev kits available in 36 countries.
This is a Labs project right?
So how much was all that again? Free? Dude!!
http://www.sunspotworld.com
This blog copyright 2008 by roger
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