Sun SPOT

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Sun SPOT (Sun Small Programmable Object Technology) is a wireless sensor network (WSN) mote (an electronic communication device meant to be the size of a particle of dust) developed by Sun Microsystems. The device is built upon the IEEE 802.15.4 standard. Unlike other available mote systems, the Sun SPOT is built on the Java 2 Micro Edition Virtual Machine (JVM).

1 Hardware
2 Networking
- 2.1 Security
3 Software
4 Development Tools
5 Availability
6 External link

[edit] Hardware

The completely assembled device should be able to fit in the palm of your hand.

[edit] Processing

180 MHz 32 bit ARM920T core - 512K RAM - 4M Flash
2.4 GHz IEEE 802.15.4 radio with integrated antenna
USB interface

[edit] Sensor Board

2G/6G 3-axis accelerometer
Temperature sensor
Light sensor
8 tri-color LEDs
6 analog inputs
2 momentary switches
5 general purpose I/O pins and 4 high current output pins

[edit] Battery

3.6V rechargeable 750 mAh lithium-ion battery
48 uA deep sleep mode
Automatic battery management provided by the software

[edit] Networking

The motes communicate using the IEEE 802.15.4 standard including the base-station approach to sensor networking. The SPOT supports the IEEE 802.15.4 MAC layer, on top of which e.g Zigbee can be built.

[edit] Security

Sun Labs has reported highly optimized implementations of RSA and Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) that can be used on small embedded devices.

[edit] Software

The device's use of Java device drivers is particularly remarkable as Java is known for its ability to be hardware-independent. Sun SPOT uses a small J2ME (Squawk [1]) which runs directly on the processor without an OS.

[edit] Development Tools

Standard Java IDEs (e.g. NetBeans) can be used to create SunSPOT applications.

The management and deployment of application will be through "SPOTWorld".

[edit] Availability

The first limited-production run of Sun SPOT development kits were released April 2, 2007, after months of manufacturing delays. This introduction kit includes: 2 Sun SPOT demo sensor boards, 1 Sun SPOT base station, the software development tools, and 1 USB cable. The software is compatible with Win XP, Mac OS X 10.4, and most common Linux distributions. It is uknown if any ZigBee-compliant stack code has been made available or if any useful demo code is provided.