Over the last few years we had the chance (and increasingly have) to meet plenty of WoT researchers but also people who work for companies developing Web of Things software and products. This is the first in a series of posts where want to share with you a few companies and their people that we had the chance to visit and liked a lot.
A few weeks ago I had the chance to visit the Oracle Labs (Ex-Sun Labs) in Menlo Park, California. There I had the chance to meet, live, some of the actors of the Sun Spot project such as Vipul Gupta, Ron Goldman, Pete St pierre, Randy Smith. Sun Spots are wireless sensor nodes that have the particularity to be:
- Very powerful (for sensor nodes)!
- Java programmable (end to end, they run the Squawk JVM!)
- Rather Web of Things “compliant” and friendly
Getting better insights on the fact that the project was more alive than ever (it seems like Oracle, who inherited from the labs, is keen on investigating the Internet/Web of Things) was very nice. They also gave me the chance to have a first look at the latest generation of Sun Spots, that they are shipping since last week (I was even shooting a nice un-boxing video there but in the process of not properly unmounting my SD card I entirely lost it :-().
We definitely liked some of the new features such as:
- A faster CPU (now at 133 MHz)
- The 8 Mb of Flash and 1 Mb of RAM
- The tri-colors light sensor
- The onboard speaker…
This new hardware release goes alongside with a new software release named Yellow, find more info about both here.
Finally, we also were happy to be able to count on the labs support with devices for our Web of Things workshop and hackathon, more about this to come but until then, long live the Spots 🙂
