Here's one more cool application of the Sun Spot - "Who has the Strongest Punch!" (or whatever you would like as your punchline).

So you have a summer-fair, or a fete coming up, and you are bored with hosting the usual ring & ball games, then this is what you have been looking for (yeah, and you also have to be absolutely geeky to pull this off!). How does it work?

Most people think that they have a powerful punch only because of their bulky hands. However, the actual power of the punch is in the acceleration with which the user hits a target. Now all that we need to do is measure the max acceleration of a user while he/she punches. Use a spot here. Give him 3-4 tries and take the max value.

Hourly prizes can now be given to the 'strongest' people, and an All-Day strongest person award can be reserved for that 'really strong-guy'. All you need is a spot and a base-station, and some code to run them. This works wonderfully well when you have packs of high-on-testosterone youngsters flooding your stall, with each wanting to better his friend's score. Result: you close your stall with a smile, and pocket full of cash :) All in a days work.

A small demo video that i made:

In our relentless quest to apply sun spot technology to solve real-life problems, we stumbled upon the problem of ecological data gathering in the rain-forest. This gave birth to Project Canopee. This project is being developed by us at SRKNEC in collaboration with an ATREE and Sun Microsystems.

ATREE is a leading wildlife and ecology conservation organization in India. They have undertaken a long-term monitoring program at KMTR (Tamil Nadu) to monitor environmental parameters in the rain-forest Canopy. Project Canopee aims at establishing a wireless sensor network (WSN) using sun-spots to monitor the environment.

This project is also our official entry for the code for freedom contest 09. With a blend of hardware and software, I hope to win the code for freedom contest this time around (last time I simply got a T-Shirt & Certificate). Here’s a short video describing project Canopee:



For more details visit the official website for this project – https://canopee.dev.java.net/

I will shortly be posting about current status of the project!

I love Sun SPOTs (no not the ones that you get in your astronomy class). It has been over a year since I started playing around with these devices, yet this tech continues to amaze me every single day!

SPOT or Small Programmable Object Technology is a device created by the Sun Labs team at Sun Microsystems. It has a powerful processor, flash memory, battery, temperature & light sensor, accelerometer, wireless transmitter & receiver....but the best part it that it is entirely programmed in Java using our very own Netbeans IDE.

Watch this space for some interesting updates and ideas being implemented using the SPOT!

13 Loops is derived from a piece of code i had written two years back. I was an infant programmer then, coding in an overnight coding contest, and desperately seeking a solution to permute any 1 to 14 digit number. I knew that a simple recursive function would do the job; but the strain of solving other complex problems and the late night hours were playing on my mind. No matter how hard i racked my brains, i just wasn't able to come up with a recursive solution...And so, i wrote the cheapest code that i ever could - loop from 0 to 13 having a loop from 0 to 12 having a loop from 0 to 11, and so on...and i continued writing such blocks of loops for 14, 13, 12...2 digit numbers!

Well, when the results were announced, i won first prize because i was the only guy who had solved that particular problem. Since then, i have grown up; but that silly piece of code remained with me. Loops or not, what mattered was to get the program working and winning under any condition. Victory belongs to the most persevering...and looking back now, i am not ashamed!