There's a new "Where" in "Anywhere"
One of the things I've been having fun with lately is the "mote"
software from
Sentilla
(formerly MoteIV). As MoteIV, they've been doing these "mote"
devices for several years. But they were really painful to program
- so much so that the pain was a real obstacle. Now they have a
tiny CLDC VM for these machines (that's one at the right, vaguely
life size) and really nice tools as IDE plugins (Eclipse today,
NetBeans support is in the works). They're renaming their company
because they're changing the nature of their business: instead of
building physical mote hardware, they do software used in motes
made by others. These devices are usually used to make sensor
meshes. The developer kit I have came with 4 motes that have
temperature and humidity sensors - but they can use other sensors
and control things: you just have to be handy with a soldering iron
:-) If you look at the picture, you'll see a wide trace around the
edge of the board and a circular structure in the lower right
corner: this is the antenna for the RF network. These beasts have a
slick mesh networking stack so that they can all talk to each
other, routing packets through auto-discovered/configured paths.
When you click the "run" button in the IDE, it deploys to the
mesh... Totally easy. These are very much like SunSpots, but much
smaller and oriented for the volume industrial market.
