The SPOTBot Team
Team Background
Here is the Our Background section of our proposal to Sun Technologies:
"We, as a collective, are a group of interested Computer Science (CS) and Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) students who happened to be in the right place at the right time and a Computer Science Instructor. What is most notable about us is that we have the drive to accomplish something great given a good opportunity.
Most of us were drawn to the idea of working with Sun SPOTs by Christine Wallace, an Instructor in the College of Engineering here at Oregon State University. Christine presented information regarding the Sun SPOT open grant program to the CS 161 class (Introduction to Computer Science I) as an opportunity for interested students to get involved. At the time it seemed like a neat idea, if nothing else. Fortunately, when we got together for our first meeting, some very interesting ideas were presented.
Since the idea of using Sun SPOTs involves both hardware manipulation as well as high level coding, we are composed of a fairly even distribution of CS and ECE students. This unison of our two fields gave perspective on some problems that we have with the current curriculum. ECE students concentrate on lower level languages and can lose sight of the usefulness of learning a language such as Java. CS students don't have much experience manipulating hardware. Sun SPOTs can bridge our software and hardware interests. Bringing the two disciplines together will be exciting for everyone!"
The SPOTBot Team first gathered around March 2008 for its first meeting. Ideas were thrown around, but the prevailing idea (provided by David, I believe) was the idea of a SunSPOT mounted onto a TekBot (becoming a SPOTBot). It was a much more viable idea than trying to create an encryption algorithm using light and/or movement sensors (I'm allowed to make fun of myself, right?). We went with it and here we are. When there are no opportunities, make them!
