What other projects is SunLabs working on?

Response from Roger Meike, Senior Director of SunLabs:

We’re interested in making machines much faster, stronger, better. We have a system called Proximity Communications that allow chips to connect to each other at speeds that we could only previously have by having it all on the same chip. We go from that extreme to basic physics to looking at search technology, speech recognition technology, and visualization, and created a system that goes through and listens to music and characterizes it, so based on the internal content of music, not just the metadata, and then gives you a visualization of a space developed by your music, and you can fly through this and create paths along the way. So if you’ve got 25 minutes to get home and you’re stressed, so you start out with hard rock, but by the time you get to the front door I want to be Pachelbel's Cannon, plot me a route through there, and my commute is 45 minutes long. It’s a different way to look at music.

What happens when we don’t just have computers connected to the internet, but we have more things, in traffic, weather stations, etc. What happens when everything can be on the web? You don’t just have people, you have things talking to things, and Internet of things. So we have a project called project Sunspot. It’s a wireless sensor device, and it has a bunch of sensors, a 3-D accelerometer, temperature sensor, light sensor, input and output for connecting to other things, and this thing is entirely programmed in Java, and my goal with this project is to make what used to be hardware projects essentially into software projects. So for example, this Java is running directly on the hardware. That means you have complete control of the hardware and you don't have to be an embedded systems programmer to program this device. So I’m going to try this and show you a simple Java program that I wrote, which is a sign that it’s very easy As I swing this back and forth, “This is Sunspot.” And the interesting thing about this is this is a little robot. This is a software project. This device is two servos we got from a hobby shop, we put some tires on them. They take a little bit of power so we have a battery pack. They have three wires coming out of them. The black and red to go power, the yellow goes to the sunspot. No transistors, just hook them up, and you’re controlling servos. The servos then run a little robot. They communicate wirelessly and I’m going to use the accelerometer to sense that this is a nice orientation sensor. As it tilt it it can send a radio message to the robot to make it drive around.