Sun Labs readies kits for sensor development
Sun Microsystems in May will offer a Java-based development kit for sensors that is intended to help researchers invent new uses for the devices.
The development kit for Project Sun Small Programmable Object Technology (Sun SPOT) could help pave the way for small sensors to be used in robotics, medical sensing, agriculture or package-delivery monitoring and other areas, senior director at Sun Labs, Roger Meike, said.
The company demonstrated Sun SPOT last year but wants to spread the technology to researchers now so they can exploit the potential of sensors.
Mieke compared sensors to the Internet before the invention of the Web browser. Senors can capture visual, movement, temperature and other information and communicate one-to-one or in networks.
"We have a lot more ideas for what to do with this than we can possibly follow up on," he said. Sun SPOT was powered by a J2ME (Java 2 Platform, Micro Edition) virtual machine written almost entirely in Java, and it could be used for applications that run directly on the sensor's processor, without an underlying embedded operating system as is typically used in sensors today, Mieke said.
The development platform Sun will sell to researchers has the Java virtual machine (JVM) on a battery-powered processor board with an ARM central processing unit (CPU), RAM, Flash memory, a 2.4GHz radio and a USB interface.
