Tao's Sun Blog

Today, 28th Feb 2008, I made my first Campus Ambassador tech demo in the University of Melbourne. 

35 people, mainly faculty members and research students in Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering (CSSE) , attended this demo. Several of them are from other universities and research institutions. It's amazing to see how many people are eager to see Sun SPOT in live.

Deng Peng, a research student from Sensing, Ubiquity and Mobility (SUM) Lab in CSSE, joined me in this talk. He has developed a few applications with Sun SPOT. (I was surprised to learn that they have been using Sun SPOT in mobile computing class for quite a while.)

We used a modified version of Sun SPOT presentation material. We spent about 1/4 time on technical slides, 2/4 time on demos and 1/4 time on discussion. This proved to be a very successful arrangement. Few people asked questions while we are talking about Sun SPOT tech specs and Squawk VM. But, after demos, they are harmed up and start to ask all kinds of questions.

We had four demos:

1. Bouncing ball.

Not only did we demonstrate the standard bouncing ball on one standalone Sun SPOT and between two Sun SPOTs, we also demonstrate that the "ball" can actually bounce between real Sun SPOT and Sun SPOT simulator.

2. Air Text

We turned down the light and shook really hard in order to show text.

3. Sun SPOT Game Panel

This demo was developed by Peng. We use SUN SPOT to simulate a Game Panel and use it to play Neverball. This demo was the most eye-catching one. Many audience asked Peng some detail questions about implementation. Peng is very kind to make this demo code available to everyone.

4. Sun SPOT Sensing

This demo was developed by Peng too. We demonstrate how to use Sun SPOT as sensor to monitor movement, light and temperature and direct the collected data to a Java graph program, Live Graph, so that we can get the real time illustration.

Many audience was interested in knowing how to get Sun SPOT for their research. Some of them mentioned that they were having many problems with application development on other type of wireless sensors and they really wanted to try out Sun SPOT. Some of them asked what exactly the educational discount of Sun SPOT will be. We have forward these questions to Sun local sales managers.

Lessons learned:

Although I asked a friend to help with taking photo, however, he was not able to make it for an urgent reason. So next time I will at least ask to photographers. It's a pity not to take photos for such a great event.

Demo Slides can be found here.