SunSpots are cute little devices. They contain several sensors for e.g brightness, temperature and orientation in space. To communicate the have a tiny little antenna with which they speak in some sort-of Bluetooth likish dialect.

They can be programmed in Java. A good usage would be to “create a mesh and observe a forest”. Let's see if one can come up witz something better.

More information here: www.sunspotworld.com

A 32bit OS is needed, as the SunSpot SDK is not available for 64bit. Save the hours of work, neither the original Sun Java 5 JRE 32bit (ia32-sun-java5-bin) nor anything else seems to work, although the SpotManager will eventually start up.

Ant 1.7.x or later should be installed. If not, the installer will download a local version stored in

~/apache-ant-1.7.x/

If installed (sudo apt-get install ant) make sure to set the path: sudo vim /etc/environment → add following line:

ANT_HOME="/usr/bin"

This is the variable the installer will check to see if Ant is installed. You may have to logout and login again, to have the changes take effect.

Now the Spotmanager spotmanager can be started via Java Webstart. It will download everything needed, which by now should be theSpotManager itself, Netbeans 6.5 and some plugins for the later.