I met Owen Richter, who introduced me to the hardware (the motes) and the software (TinyOS).
I set up my machine with Cygwin (a UNIX shell needed to program the motes), the TinyOS 4.3
(the OS that the motes run and understand, used to program the motes), and Sun’s Java JDK
1.3.1 (used to listen to the serial port for data coming from base station mote).