Roger Meike's Blog: Sun Labs and Beyond

I love it when things come together.

A lot of work has been going on for some time on Project Sun SPOT and now we are starting to see it build on itself in fantastic ways. The beta version of the Sun SPOT SDK v3.0 (purple) beta has just been released. There are many technical improvements. I wont go into those here.

Instead I want to talk about the new application currently called SPOTWorld. It is a new class of program that helps you to manage a network of wireless It gives you graphical and list views of the Sun SPOTs in your radio vicinity. Using this I can see the Sun SPOTs in and near my office, or I can increase the hop count and use the mesh networking built in to the Sun SPOTs to discover about 50+ Sun SPOTs that are on in the building on the SPOTNET network right now.

The built in security only allows me to manipulate the devices that I am the "owner" of, however, I can see that the other devices are there. With this interface I can manipulate the devices I own. I can download new applications and libraries to individual Sun SPOTs, over the air, as well as run and pause individual applications. I can now get a plethora of information about each individual Sun SPOT.

Its pretty nice and definitely starting to get quite useful. We are delving into uncharted waters here. How do you manage a bunch of small wireless devices? What do you want to monitor remotely? How do you observe a large mesh network of devices?

Oh yeah, one more thing. You can now run your programs on emulated Sun SPOTs. That's right, you can now develop, build and run applications in SPOTWorld without any actual physical Sun SPOTs. The emulator is fairly primitive at this point, but it does allow you to write code and simulate changes to the sensors. It also simulates radio communication between the emulated Sun SPOTs.

The most amazing part of all is that these emulated Sun SPOTs can also communicate through a base station to real Sun SPOTs in the physical world. This means that your developer kit that includes a base station and two full Sun SPOTs can simulate a network of a dozen Sun SPOTs that all interact with each other. Its all quite cool.

If you have Sun SPOTs, use the SPOT Manager to check out the beta release. If you don't have your own Sun SPOTs, get a kit here. They are lots of fun!