Programming the Physical World with the SunSPOT

Lecture by Dr Randy Smith, Sun Microsystems Laboratories

5pm, Thursday 15th January 2008, Room G03, Informatics Forum, Crichton Street
Coffee will be served after the talk.

Registration required, RSVP to andy.mcfarlane@sun.com.

Abstract

The Sun SPOT (Small Programmable Object Technology) is a small, battery-powered, wireless device running Java on the bare metal (without an OS). The Sun SPOT includes a 32 bit 188 MHz processor and a "demo sensor board" that hosts a number of sensors and I/O pins for reading and/or driving external devices such as servo motors, speakers, and so forth. The Sun SPOT runs a special Java VM called Squawk, which was engineered for memory and power constrained devices. Squawk enables multiple applications to execute at once as though each has its own VM, and allows these running applications to migrate live, from one SPOT to another. The presentation will include a few demos including Solarium, a tool which can manage real and locally simulated SPOTs together on the desktop screen.  

Visit Sun SPOT web site fur further information on the project.

This event is sponsored by the Edinburgh University Sun User Group.

Dr Randy Smith

Randall B. Smith received his PhD in Theoretical Physics from UC San Diego, and has worked at Atari Corporate Research Labs, Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, Rank-Xerox EuroPARC, and Sun Microsytems Labs.  He is creator of the Alternate Reality Kit, co-designer of the programming language Self, and principal lead in developing the original "Morphic" user interface framework. Hs research tends to focus on making computer programming more tangibly present to the user, and currently centers on how to make it possible to treat  a distributed collection of embedded wireless devices as a single system.

Visit Dr Randy Smith's web page