| TrackBot research paper at ACMSE 2010 April |
George Rudolph, Assistant Professor of Computer Science, The Citadel, has published a paper to be presented at the April ACMSE 2010 conference. |
Sun Oracle SPOT future? |
The good news: the SPOT team survived the Oracle takeover and RIF almost intact. SPOT is being revised (to use more readily available components) and will again be manufactured in 2010. The unknown: well, anything about the future. Such as: will Oracle change the ridiculous Sun commercial license fee for Squawk ($100K and up - that's why you don't see Systronix squawk-based products). Will any commercial users sign up? Will a real developer community ever exist? Where will Oracle take this technology? Your guess is as good as ours (maybe better - if you work for Oracle), but for now at least, SPOT is still alive and seems to be moving forward. |
| Sun SPOT kit is available for sale |
Recently out of stock from other sources, we have a kit for sale. We are not a dealer and won't have more. |
| Firmware status 2010 March |
Due to limited resources we are not currently working on new TrackBot firmware. We have hit some implementation problems in our tachometry firmware so that upgrade is not yet available, and may not be achievable. We'll post more about that here or please post discussions in the TrackBot Google group. |
| TrackBot at JavaOne 2009 |
First week in June, San Francisco. TrackBot appeard at the Java.Net pavilion and also in the Swarm of Brian Birds of a Feather presentation: BOF-5369 |
 Upgrading SunSPOT to final Blue 080827 |
Recommended for all SPOT users especially those using the eDemo board UART (with TrackBot for example!) |
| Cool software for simulating and programming robots from Cogmation! |
Simulation and code generation. Includes early simulator support for TrackBot. We hope to get the actual code running using Virtualized Intelligence™. It's not quite there yet but we are working on it... |
| TrackBot Runtime Firmware 008 Update |
This is the most tested release yet - literally millions of messages passed between the host and TrackBot. This is a very stable release. We are working on a new release for 2Q 2009, and it isn't going smoothly... Anyway, upgrade to the current release (cheap!) now in the online store: http://www.systronix.com/store/trackbotupdates.html |
| TrackBot Technical Reference |
Free download now in the online store: http://www.systronix.com/store/trackbotupdates.html |
| TrackBot base board Schematics |
Purchase now in the online store: http://www.systronix.com/store/trackbotupdates.html |
| Video of TrackBot & SunSPOT presentations |
Given at the Mobile and Embedded Developer Days 2008 Jan. Very detailed information about SPOT and TrackBot from the designers themselves. |
| New TrackBot V2 code video at YouTube |
Check out improved sensor use as TrackBot tries to escape from a pen |
| Robotics community at java.net |
The robotics community has numerous active projects including several for TrackBot. Recent commits include demo code for RoboDev and IROS. Links to those conferences and code are at the java.net robotics project page. |
| RoboSim contest |
The RoboSim contest is technically over - but you still need this as part of the JavaOne RoboHACC "un-contest" - get all the information on the java.net RoboSim contest website. Use Java to control simulated TrackBots in the Greenfoot 2D world. Plus feel free to use this code for your own JUG or educational purposes. All of the code is free and open source. |