December’s SPA Cambridge meeting saw John Daniels of Syntropy talk about Sun SPOTS. John has been working with the devices for a good part of this year so it was an ideal opportunity to learn about what they were capable of.

Sun SPOTS are small wireless sensor devices that run Java ‘on the metal’ as John put it. The devices shown had accelerometers, light & temperature sensors, LEDs, buttons, digital and analogue inputs, and digital outputs.

John showed various ‘applications’ of the device including use of the device’s LEDs to show messages (ably assisted by the glamourous Charles Looker), tracking device motion (and graphing this by send the data back to a Sun SPOT connected to John’s laptop), communication between the devices to transfer a light token, and an on-the-fly demo of light detection - bravely coded up live in the manner of the best improvisations. More practical applications include machine control, environmental monitoring, security, vibration detection & emergent behaviour.

The devices are an output from an on-going project at Sun Labs, but they will be available commercially some time soon. Two thousand packs of them (each pack has two remote sensors and one base station) are apparently sitting in a warehouse somewhere as I write. Perhaps if you have a word with Santa you could get one…