Joe Polastre: May 2008 Archives

While Sentilla employees were decompressing from a very busy week at JavaOne, customers that bought a Sentilla Perk kit were already jumping in and building applications using Sentilla's software. Our development community is alive, with a lot of great questions about how to build various applications. There's also quite a few feature requests, such as Mac OSX and Linux support. We're working on it!

Jose, over at Kodegeek, was really excited put a few videos up on YouTube of his application running and experience with Sentilla software. The application monitors temperature. All of the code to run the app is in our developer forum, and its amazingly short. His comment was "Working with the motes is very fun indeed!" Jose posted a blog entry too, complete with the code the he wrote. The blog is in spanish, so be sure to brush up on your spanish language skills. Keep the applications and feature requests coming, we love them.

Here's a video of the motes running and sensing temperature:

A look at the code, IDE, and client-side application to display the temperature alerts:

As mentioned by John Gage and James Gosling in the keynote on Tuesday, Sentilla has been monitoring the behavior of people in the Moscone Center. We know when they enter and leave each room and we know the environmental conditions in each room. Together, we have great data that is giving us a good sense of the resources we're using. For example, we can see each time the H/VAC system turns on, we can see an increase in temperature when people (where each person is the equivalent of a 100W light bulb) enter a room, and we can see when the Moscone Center forgets to turn off the lights at night. These are just a few of the interesting bits of information.

To explain this to the audience, Gosling held up a Sentilla pervasive computer in the opening remarks on Tuesday to illustrate how we're injecting intelligence into the real world. Gosling and Gage also showed data that we collected on Monday.

Rich Green followed Gage and Gosling with his keynote that featured Amazon, Sony Ericcson, and others. At the beginning, Green joked, "Jonathan Schwartz turned to me. I don't know if you saw the demo where people are counted going in and out of a room. He turned to me and said 'That's going to be your performance review for the year. I want to make sure that everybody stays throughout the session, and you'll get a pass.'"

Tomorrow, to close the conference, we're going to show the data and Green will get to see his performance review. To be specific, John Gage will show the data to the attendees when he opens Friday's keynote. But that's not all. Sentilla is going to make the audience part of a pervasive application during James Gosling's keynote, where I'll be on stage with Gosling to explain what Sentilla is doing. Be sure to show up and sit up front (or watch on the web) to see more of how we're engaging people and things around us, and how we're turning "dumb" objects into smart things.

Let's just say that the coolest thing today at JavaOne was Sentilla.

Today is just Day 1! We have tons planned for the next few days. Stay tuned.

"The coolest thing I saw today was Sentilla"

Way more updates coming...

I had the pleasure of receiving the Duke Award tonight for Sentilla. The Duke Award is given by James Gosling, the father of Java, and is the biggest award that a company can receive. The Duke Award is the only award given out at JavaOne, a conference with hundreds of exhibitors and over 15,000 attendees. The Duke Award goes to Sentilla!

Congrats to Sentilla and the Sentilla team. We have achieved something that no other company has done--putting a full Java system on 8-bit and 16-bit microcontrollers. We have opened this world up to Java programmers, a huge accomplishment. On behalf of myself and Rob and Cory, we are so proud of "achieving the impossible". I remember when, 3 years ago, our advisors told us that Java was not possible on miniature pervasive computers. 10kb memory and Java? Yes. We proved Java is possible and the way to go. Today is a proud day -- we have proved everyone wrong. We have put Java on the world's smallest computers. Java runs with no compromises -- we have not pared anything back. If your application runs on any other certified Java ME system, it will work with Sentilla.

James Gosling talking about the impact of Java while giving Sentilla the Duke Award...

JavaOne doesn't start until tomorrow, but today we saw a ton of people here at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. Sun held their annual CommunityOne open developers conference, and Sentilla was there. What attendees didn't expect was that Sentilla's pervasive computers are watching their every move. Keep an eye out for Sentilla as you walk through the Moscone Center.

I spent time today talking to John Gage, Sun's Chief Researcher, about pervasive computing. As many of you know, John opens every keynote session with facts and observations about Java and the conference. Last year he issued a call to monitor and react to our environment by gathering, analyzing, and acting on real data from "small devices". "Because we have these small devices, we have the tools in place ... that all of us realize is our fundamental duty to take these devices and apply them to human end. To make visible what is invisible, our impact on the planet," Gage said.

John is opening Tuesday's keynote session with Rich Green (where Neil Young will be making an appearance). Be sure to attend, John just might let you know how Sentilla has answered John's call to better understand the world around us.

Not going to JavaOne? No problem! JavaOne sessions are broadcast online.

Today, I'm really really really excited to announce Sentilla Perk. Sentilla brings pervasive computing to the masses with Sentilla's software, consisting of the world's smallest Java Mobile Edition (Java ME) system coupled with Sentilla's pervasive computing application framework. All of Sentilla's software is wrapped up in Sentilla Perk, our Pervasive Computing Kit. Perk enables you to try out and demo Sentilla's software on real hardware, build pervasive applications, and shape the future of pervasive computing. See the full press release from Sentilla, and the press release from Sun Microsystems.

Perk, combined with Sentilla's software, is so cool and innovative that Sun has named Sentilla Perk an official JavaOne show device. The show device is a huge honor for us; only show devices are allowed to be sold directly at the show, and Sun promotes them as being the best of the best. We are really excited and can't wait until next week to get Perk into people's hands! We've worked out a deal with Sun and JavaOne to offer Perk to conference attendees for $199 (only available at JavaOne). You have to go to the Show Device Kiosk in the South Upper Lobby at the Moscone Center to pick one up, and you must be a registered JavaOne conference attendee.

I've been dying to announce this for at least 2 months. Lots of people want to kick the tires, try it out, and see just how powerful Java technology is on wireless embedded systems. There's an even larger number of people that have some very innovative and world changing pervasive applications that they want to build. Perk is the starting point to get moving on those ideas. And that's what's even more exciting -- Perk is just the beginning; Sentilla has a ton more software, management, and services available to our customers.

Perk includes 3 pervasive computers -- 2 JCreate nodes and 1 USB Gateway. JCreate is built using Sentilla Mini, our tiny OEM hardware module bundled with Sentilla Point, our Java-based pervasive runtime environment. JCreate includes a three-axis accelerometer with configurable sensitivity, a temperature sensor, 2 ports for Phidgets (more about that in a later post), an expansion for other sensors (like GPS, analog, and digital sensors), an integrated antenna, 8 LEDs, and comes in an enclosure that holds 2 AAA batteries. In fact, Sentilla's engineers are so excited by Perk, they've been fighting over who gets the first kits!

Perk also includes Sentilla Work, our Integrated Development Environment based on Eclipse. If you're a Java programmer, you already know Eclipse, and you'll be up and running in minutes. We've also thrown in the Sentilla Host Server, which manages the interaction between Java-based clients (or any client for that manner) and the pervasive computing network. Now you can share Java objects across applications running on pervasive computers like JCreate, mobile phones running J2ME, and desktops and servers running J2SE. All these different devices are part of one unified network. Cool! Curious about how that works? That detail is part of my technical session on Thursday May 8th at 9:30am.

You also get access to Sentilla's Developer Community, with forums, code, samples, and community support. We're posting some secret cool Java applications to the developer community as an extra special bonus for those that buy Perk at JavaOne.

We've ramped up production and are prepared to distribute kits to JavaOne attendees. You can see our pile of Perk kits on the right. Even though we have a bunch of kits ready, Sun is expecting over 15,000 attendees. We've been asked by Sun to sell Perk on a first-come-first-served basis, so be sure to pick one up early before they're gone.

There's lots more Perk related news on the horizon; stay tuned for some more blog posts with juicy Perk details in the few days leading up to JavaOne. Any questions about Perk? What do you think of it? Post your thoughts in the comments.