Having not been keeping in touch with news about WSN for 3 weeks while I was on holiday, I’m notified by my colleague today that SunSPOTs are now finally available in the EU area. But checking on their website myself, it seems that it costs much more to get a Sun SPOT development kit in Europe than in the US after currency conversion (€627 compared to $550 excluding tax), which is probably not news anymore given the fact that it’s almost always more expensive to buy goods in Europe than in the US. However Europeans can probably take heart from the news that they are soon going to change the pricing in the US from $550 to $750 (apparently as of 27th Feb 2008) Well, perhaps not, €627 is still a lot of money. Just shows that wireless sensor motes are still very much in the prototype stage.

About a year ago we wanted to get our hands on some Sun SPOTs motes for our project because we have more people around that know how to write Java applications and use the familiar development tools (not many people heard of TinyOS’s nesC, and using the primitive word editor to write applications seems to be the norm!). But unfortunately Sun, or more precisely that particular team, was unable to deliver their products on time, not to mention shipping products outside the US, due to ROHS issues.

Now another major mote manufacturer seems to share the vision of using Java as the platform for developing applications for the wireless sensor motes. “We at Sentilla (formerly Moteiv) are extremely excited about the use of Java technology in our products”, quoted from Joe Polastre of Sentilla (see here for more details). As I said, this makes a lot of sense and it will be interesting to see if Crossbow will soon follow suit. Java may soon be the future.