back to article Sun open sources doohickeys

A brainchild of Sun Microsystems' research wing, the Small Programmable Object Technology (Sun SPOT) platform code is now open to Java developers at large. Sun SPOTs are palm-sized battery powered devices that can wirelessly relay data about movement, temperature and sound. They run on a virtual machine written almost entirely …

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  1. Anonymous Coward
    Linux

    As usual Sun prices it out of the market

    4Meg of flash, 3D accelerometer and 6 analog ports? That would be cool to play with on my motorcycle as sort of a poor man's data logger.

    $300-$550? Oh never mind, then... there are purpose-built ruggedized off-the-shelf units for cheaper, and my Nokia N800 didn't set me back that much!

  2. Rob
    Thumb Up

    for robotics

    i think this could be pretty neat for hobby robotics, depending on size and power consumption etc.. not sure how it's going to measure up against the gumstix boards though.

    http://gumstix.com/

  3. Seán

    Lets see how much the spurious units are

    Once our chums in Taiwan get cracking on these the unit cost should plummet after all its just a jazzed up game controller.

  4. Michael
    Thumb Down

    battery power

    you're having a laugh. Java for a battery powered device to flash a LED?

    I'll stick to 8-bit uC's for now and C/assembler

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Black Helicopters

    Platform for a network camera

    So could I plug in a 640x480 60fps USB camera into the port, and have it stream video over an internal web server? Probably not, but if so, it might make a good platform for network web cameras.

    Currently a decent wireless network web cam is over $300 USD (Axis 207W)

  6. Nexox Enigma

    Re: Platform for a network camera

    This radio on this thing isn't wifi, that is to say 802.11, but 802.15.4 "ZigBee," which forms a low bandwidth (~250kbit) mesh network. So not terribly useful for wireless cameras.

    Definitely neat stuff though. The value isn't in the hardware so much, but the development tools. Plus you know that the hardware works, so you don't find yourself debugging hardware and software simultaneously.

    Probably not quite worth that price for anything that I'd want to do though...

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