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This web site is the work of Systronix Inc, a SPOT Beta site.
The official SPOT resource is sunspotworld

Newer entries are at the bottom of this page

2007 Jan 08:

Spot Kit #2, in need of a software upgrade. Plug in the first free-range SPOT which has Bouncing Ball demo code in it. Windows sees a new USB serial device so wants to install a driver... fine, select "no" to searching, and "install automatically" since I already have the USB serial drivers. Then ran "ant upgrade" at the root sdk folder command prompt, had to reset the SPOT to get a prompt, and in 1.5 minutes a new SPOT on COM19 was happy. Next free-range SPOT on COM20 also upgraded no sweat. Now the base station... similarly painless. This device is COM21. But this time after the upgrade, also typed "ant selectbasestation". Ran like it should. Now I want to deploy the Bouncing Ball demo on these. No sweat... Now these babies are off to Sweden in a few hours.

2007 Jan 09:

Going a little "dark" (as they say in Las Vegas) to work on some SunSPOTs projects which we don't want to publicize until they are done... so there may not be a lot more detail here. But this does NOT mean we are no longer working with SPOTs. On the contrary, we have three new SPOT-enhancement products in development, as well as two submissions for JavaOne 2007, and more.

2008 Jan 12:

Finally remembered that the base station Ectoplasmic ball demo ant command is the default or 'ant host-run'. This demo has been very popular here in Sweden at SICS (who have heard of the SPOT and really really want some) and KTH (who hadn't). Here are links related to this visit. The Bouncing Ball demo is simple but elegant and demonstrates so much of the SPOT function in a way which would be much more difficult with just words.

Having visited Denmark and now Sweden, everything I have been told about the gracious Scandinavians is, in my experience, true. Everyone has been very friendly and kind.

2008 Jan 29 Orange SPOT and multiple SDKs in Eclipse:

Updated a SPOT to release Orange 0118 using the SDKControl utility which is really very slick. "ant update" does a remarkably complex set of tasks, updating the base VM, plus sensor libraries, including the eDemo AVR, and the code on the power control AVR. Sun seems to be ahead of the curve in terms of considering the issue of complex in-field updating, and making all the controllers in a SPOT easily update-able. This will let me run a new benchmark test on the Orange release as well as use the UART on the eDemo board.

OK, so now to build the benchmark app and select which SDK version to use. This turned out to be pretty easy, just create or change the Eclipse variable SUNSPOT_HOME to point to the new SDK root folder. Then in the existing benchmark folder, execute "ant deploy" from a command line. Eclipse chokes on the build.xml file after using it once from the command line... odd.

Anyway, the benchmarks move along except for a noticeable pause for the string concats.

Credits, thanks and whom to blame:

All the photos here are courtesy of Bruce Boyes - peruse their metadata for a bit more information. SunSPOT, Java, etc are trademarks of Sun Microsystems. Thanks to the great SunSPOT team at Sun Labs (no, not Sun Laboratories) for letting us participate in the alpha and beta programs. And to Radio Paradise for great music to program and write by.

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