Before jumping on the keyboard to write applications for the SPOTs, I’d like to show you what’s in the Development Kit box. It contains three SPOTs, Java Development Kit CDROM, USB cable, two brackets for fix a SPOT over a vertical surface, installation manual and safety information:

The SPOTs in the kit are:

• two free-range Sun SPOTs, equipped with processor broard, sensor board and battery
• one base-station, that is a Sun SPOT without battery and sensor board, designed to be connected to host PC

This is a free-range SPOT:

The base station lets the PC to connect to free-range SPOTs, configure them, remotely install and run applications. Moreover, until connected to the PC (that is: until it has power to run!) it works as other SPOTs, unless for lack of sensors. The base station is able to work as gateway between the PAN network of SPOTs and the web; in other words, it allows free-range SPOTs to open HTTP connections to the Internet using the base station as access point.

I prepared this video to show you how to disassemble a SPOT and look inside it:

A free-range SPOT consist of two double-sided boards (with radio, CPU, sensors, LEDs and switches):

If you want to take a look to SPOTs, join Frontiers of Interaction III next Thursday in Milan:

Thanks to my dear friend Fabrizio, now I have the SunSpot in my hands! 🙂

SunSpot is experimental technology developed by Sun Labs. The SPOT (Small Programmable Object Technology) provides small JavaME-enabled boxes, equipped with radio, sensors, battery… This is one of the modules:

Each SunSpot is impressively small. Look at it compared to the Palm Tungsten E2:

This is only the beginning: stay tuned for updates! 🙂