2008 Innovation Awards:
SUN SPOTS AND SQUAWK TEAMS

Greg Papadopoulos. Team Members: Pete St. Pierre, Derek White, Roger Meike, Randy Smith, David G. Simmons, Ron Goldman, Arshan Poursohi, Eric Arseneau, Vipul Gupta, Bob Alkire, Leo Hirsch. Jonathan Schwartz.

July 2008 - Sun SPOTs are small wireless battery-powered sensor computers programmed entirely in Java. The team in Sun Labs designed and built the hardware and software, including a new Java ME implementation named Squawk, specifically designed for very small footprint devices.

The team put together a "SPOT kit" that is built and sold, primarily to educational institutions to inspire new applications of Java and embedded devices. The software and hardware and even the tools are all available as open source on http://spots.dev.java.net.

There's also a plugin for NetBeans. The root of all the activity is http://sunspotworld.com/.

SPOTs have given rise to hundreds of innovative projects. The team itself has launched hobby rockets and weather balloons with SPOTs aboard. (You can see a wonderful array of projects by searching for the tag "spaughts" on YouTube or Flickr.)

A prime targets of the SPOTs project are courses and research projects in educational institutions. The Sun Campus Ambassadors each have a SPOTkit to show off and loan out for projects. The team sponsors the Sun SPOT Open Grant program where applicants with interesting projects may receive Sun SPOTs to do those projects in exchange for a promise to make the project open source. There are over 250 institutions using Sun SPOTs on campus. Our message: Java can be embedded, small, and fun!

Related Links:

Project Squawk