Sun SPOT

Sun SPOT (Small Programmable Object Technology) is a new research project at Sun Labs that promises to turn a vision into reality, the vision being, to make wireless sensors ready for mass commercial deployment by simplifying application development for them. Wireless sensors are inexpensive battery-powered, low-power communication devices composed of radios and exceptionally small mechanical structures that sense fields and forces in the physical world.

These [...] devices can be deployed throughout a physical space, providing dense sensing close to physical phenomena, processing and communicating this information, and coordinating actions with other nodes. Combining these capabilities with the system software technology that forms the Internet makes it possible to instrument the world with increasing fidelity.

With appurtenances as actuator mechanisms or tranducers, the possible applications of wireless sensors are endless. Touted as "exciting" and "highly-anticipated", the domain of application (and the consumer base) of this technology is vast and includes business communities, industries, military, scientific research etc. The Sun SPOT system essentially simplifies the development of wireless transducer applications, and in doing so it strives to solve the challenges facing the widespread adoption of this technology, such as, tight resource constraints, lack of productive development tools, lack of specific communication standards etc.

Apart from being a cool name for a project, under the hood, a Sun SPOT system has quite an impressive array of technologies in use, both hardware and software. The system is a based on a 32bit ARM-7 CPU and an 11-channel 2.4GHz radio. The platform enables development of wireless transducer applications in Java using a sensor board for I/O, 802.15.4 radio for wireless communication etc. The system features a standards-based end-to-end security architecture called "Sizzle", and the "Squawk VM" which has a small memory foot-print and enables the applications to run directly on-CPU without an underlying OS.

• Overview of Sensor Networks IEEE Computer Society.
• Sun SPOT System: Turning Vision Into Reality (Project Brief)
• Sizzle: A Standards-based end-to-end Security Architecture for the Embedded Internet
• Squawk: A Java Virtual Machine Architecture for Very Small Devices