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.

Related blog posts:

• SunSPOTs available in the EU
• ZigBee-compliant
• Wireless sensor that sits behind the ear

I remember doing a research on wireless sensor motes on offer in the market some months ago. It was incredibly difficult to find out exactly what does it mean when vendors claim that their motes are ZigBee-compliant. As usual from marketing materials, they do not tell you clearly the specs. Even datasheets mention nothing about ZigBee. It is one thing to be IEEE 802.15.4 compliant, but quite another if it is a ZigBee product. Anyway I have to look into the source code of the software that comes with these motes to figure out what exactly is implemented. To my surprise not only that there is not a ZigBee stack (well ZigBee is not supposed to be open source), the IEEE 802.15.4 MAC is not implemented. All there is is just the 802.15.4 PHY. No beacon mode for the supposedly more energy-efficient mode of operation in a star-topology, as is designed for in 802.15.4 standard. Very disappointing.

Anyway it’s good to see that some vendors stop using the term “ZigBee-compliant” to confuse people, when their products are not ZigBee, yet.

Related blog posts:

• Wireless sensor that sits behind the ear
• How ready is ZigBee?
• Open source ZigBee implementation