8 comments

[ 4.9 ms ] story [ 45.3 ms ] thread
Way ahead of their time. SunSPOTs were great!
Those were fun. One of the cool thing about them is that most of the stack was written in Java.

The JVM itself was written in Java, the operating system was written in Java, and there was only a small bit of C code for initial bootstrapping and some C microcontroller code for some things (interrupt handling if I remember correctly).

Can't believe that Sun SPOTs made it to Hacker News after all this time. I run the mirror site mentioned here, and still have a few drawers full of SPOTs (as well as a couple of complete kits in the boxes.

I was just talking to someone the other day about resurrecting the Squawk VM and porting it to the Cortex Mx architecture. It really was ahead of its time.

80-100k SRAM is still a pretty steep tax for most Cortex Mx parts, though not the largest.
Given the kind of applications I was able to write in 640KB, there might be still enough space available, even after taking 100k away.

By the way here is a port to ESP8266, MICROBIT, LPC1768, NUCLEO_L476.

https://github.com/tomatsu/squawk

Lots of the Cortex M4 parts have less than 100k SRAM total. That '476 is relatively big with 128KB SRAM. The LPC1768 has 32KB, so maybe things have been really slimmed down than I remember.
> Sun Labs' ECC implementations power a small-footprint, secure Web server stack (including HTTP and SSL), nicknamed Sizzle, that can be embedded inside a wide array of small devices, so you can monitor and control them securely via a Web browser.

Interesting name.