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The Lamps Are The Network
An anonymous reader sent us an interesting story that talks about using the flickers in flourescent lamps to do something beside's give me headaches. They actually are using them as a network to send things like audio. There are numerous possible applications of this, but I'd tend to think some sort of other standard that would let us eliminate those cursed lights would be better. Regardless, it's a damn cool hack.
That would be called "talking". Someone tried it and it's supposed to work but we evolved to use slashdot instead nowadays.
What about those poor blind people when the bulbs are burned out?
I dunno, I just thought this was funny for some reason.
Mr. Wizards World on Nickelodeon told of this a long time ago.
In that story, it was grocery stores that were using them automatically update the price of items on the shelf. Instead of the normal tags on shelves, each item had a small LCD device in front of it that could "read" the flucuations in the flourescent lights.
I saw this program somewhere between 12 and 15 years ago.
That, in a nutshell, is what hacking is all about.
All I can think of is Tom Hanks escaping that awful flourescent lighting in Joe versus the Volcano. If only Meg Ryan could somehow be attached to the application of this technology...
<peering about> "Wow! Why do all the chicks suddenly look like Meg Ryan?!"
-l
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I remember this being one of the experiments you could do in the 1970s with one of those $30 children's 200-in-One electronics project kits. You'd use an incandescent bulb, if I recall, to transmit input from a microphone, and you'd receive it through a photocell, convert it back to audio and pass it to the earphone.
I think it was one of the Israeli kits with the pinholes for sticking wires in, rather than one of the spring-connector Radio Shack kits. In the end, it's the same process as AM radio, but using visible light as the carrier instead of waves in the radio and microwave parts of the spectrum.
Not everything electronic came about in the post-microprocessor era.
Um, dude, you are so completely wrong. Grocery store 'smart' price tags use the same RF network that their handheld inventory scanners and bar-code readers use. Ever notice that the "Scan your stuff here to see the price" box has an antenna sticking out the top?
There is an article about these systems in the current 2600: "Secrets of Electronic Shelf Labels".
-- Spring: Forces, coiled again!
I hae to say, pretty cool.... but anyone who has messed with this knows that I.R. works great, uses less power and will be far cheaper to impliment. Plus works when the lights are off. What about those poor blind people when the bulbs are burned out, or during a power outage? I.R. transmitters can run off of a battery for hours. plus installing them takes moments and doesn't require an electrical refit of the entire building.
Neat, but not really useable. I give kudos for trying.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Well if you bothered to read the article you'd find tha answer. The idea came from him working with the new Ballast which increase the HZ rating (to reduce eye-strain) seperating it from the natural HZ of the electricity. Realizing this seperation was possible, he figured he could produce signals by flucuating this HZ.
The ILID Partnership (or what they are doing) may be what you were thinking of. They have their Indoor Light Interactive Display system, which uses the Fluorescent lighting already present in a building to transmit data to electronic shelf labels, keeping their prices accurate. They did a lot of R&D proir to the systems being made available to consumers/businesses in 1999.
For more information, see http://www.ilid.com.au/
Now they no longer only know what you're buying, but exactly where you are, to the nearest light-fitting...
Does that mean the slimy sales people will start showing up in person?
I don't get it. Why would you give a warning of a warning?
I have seen the future, and it is inconvenient.
..but I don't know where. When I heard about this a year or so ago, the application was in retail stores - grocery, clothing, etc. The application was to put price tags (solar powered with a cheap, efficient LCD readout, somewhat like calculator display) next to all the items and send out price updates to merchandice through the lighting system. Transmit a new price with the item's barcode and wherever the item(s) was(were) in the store, the prices would adjust accordingly. Since the e-tags (catchy name) were solar powered, they could be encased in plastic so if they were hit by a shopping cart or dropped, they wouldn't need to be replaced.
At the time, I thought this was a great idea since it would save a stock person from having to lug around a printer and try to get the prices right. Instead, you program the barcode of the item into the electronic price tag, then put it with the merchandice, and all your stock people have to do now is go around looking at inventory.
Anyone have some venture capital to spare?
LOAD "SIG",8,1
LOADING...
READY.
RUN
I am sure many of you have heard the conspiracy theories surrounding flourescent lights....
;)
Many have suggested that The Man (tm) is controlling our thoughts with flourescent lights.
On a serious note though, it might be interesting to see what one could do with this technology in a covert fashion. I.e. fashion an audio/video bug self contained in a balast and install them after hours. Attach a receiver to a telescope, and you have very hard to detect surveilence.
More Caffeine. NOW
I'm currently working on a system to make my wearable PC location aware inside the building here at work by placing small IR transmitters around the place. The wearable senses the signal, looks at the modulation, and launches appropriate apps for the context (ie a notetaking app comes up when I walk into the conference room). With this, it could be much easier to implement, just replace a ballast in a light in the appropriate area instead of worrying about getting power to your IR transmitter. Cool.
Clearly, the solution is to bolt the receiver to the top of their skulls.
Anyway for a lark a friend of mine built this humungo tone generator and connected it to his house mains .... then in the wee hours of the morning used it to send morse across town .... by turning on and off all the street lights in his neighborhood ....
We already do this.
Your backside emits a controlled burst of a carbon compound called methane through a shutter called the anus. It quickly spreads around the area, where it is (hopefully) picked up by other humans with a device called a 'nose'. This nose sends signals along nerves to your brain, where the intended message is quickly decoded and the recipient yells, "d00d, wh0 f4rt3d?!?!"
.sig: Now legally binding!
The design meeting:
So what will people use this thing for?
hmmm how about another delivery system for Bluetooth?
...nah.
How about a communication alternative for the navy?
....mmmm no that's no good
hmm
How about a way to alert blind patients with Heart Diease of impending transplants availability as they walk along the mall escalator?
BINGO!
Someone you trust is one of us.
Data sent via small carbon atoms in the air? :)
In a bold move, Mr Lite brite, representing Incadescent bulbs everywhere has filed suit in federal court today. "We are asking for a complete cease of data transmission through Fluorescent lights" said Mr Lite brite at a news conference this morning.
He went on to say that "This is a new form of aparthied!, If this is allowed to continue, Incadescent lights everywhere will be swapped out prematurely from there life spans and replaced with Fluorescent lights that can transmit data as well as provide well balanced illumination for billions of people around the world. Us Incadecent bulbs will be quickly replaced and stop manufactured and we shall die out, I simply can not allow this type of genocide to continue."
Lighting Analyst B. Franklin worries that this law suit if it prevails could set back new data services 15-20 years, GE's stock tumbled 20 points on the news as well... developing....
We did this when I was a wee 'un with flashlights and the neighbour's kid, after dark.
"...your...mo...ther...is...stan...ding...right. .. be...hind...you...you...mor...on..."
The next step, you realise, will be coded message to international intelligence spies sent through disco lighting.
Zaphod B
Zaphod B
When duplication is outlawed, only outlaws will have
Not that I'm paranoid, or anything...
This could be used as a covert method of distributing "Secret", or "Top Secret" information. (OR even "Company Classified" data.)
Just buy a new ballast for your desk lamp, wire it (covertly) to your PC, and then make sure your light points towards a little bit to your window. Then aim a telescope at the window from another building/hill, and then hook up a PC to the telescope.
Of course, I'm sure the government has been doing stuff like this for years for foreign agents. But if you can't bring your briefcase out of the building, then this would be an ideal way to get the data out!
CSG_Surferdude
LongTail SSH Brute Force analysis tool is here!
Somehow I don't see airports or hospitals installing special flourescent lamp networks when they could just throw together a simple radio or infrared system.
Got Rhinos?
Because flourescent lighting is annoying in terms of flicker and color temperature, it would be a brilliant notion to replace them with superior alternatives.
However, to supplant flourescent lights, any solution must be superior in terms of the benefits building owners perceive: lower energy costs, and longer bulb life. Note that while pricey sockets is a damper to adoption, flourescent lighting costs a packet to install already, so over time a better solution is possible. The ideal is a matching form factor.
So, that in mind, possible solutions include
IP is just rude.
Is there any torture so subl
One nice application for this would be in transit systems, which often already have LonWorks/Echelon networking over the power line for sign control and such. Ballasts equipped for LonWorks could retransmit to mobile units to provide destination info and such for the handicapped, retarded, or merely lost.
Realistically, though, this sort of stuff will be done using the cell phone network and GPS. It's not worth the infrastructure investment.
Once the (read: any useful) technology is available to help the handicapped it'd be politically incorrect to not have it installed in all public buildings.
Eh, I dunno. How many intersections near you are equipped with beeping crosswalk signals? There's also a system similar to this that "reads" street signs for blind people (provided that the sign is equiped with a transmitter) though I don't think it's too common except in major metropolitan areas.
The simple problem is that there just aren't enough blind or otherwise disabled people to justify the cost of installing these sorts things everywhere. Handicapped parking and ramp access are more feasible because they're less specific to any one disability. On the other hand, areas that tend to deal with lots and lots of people (and therefore more disabled people), like airports, are more likely to adopt such a system.
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not necessarily ...
Take Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon, it has several great examples of instances when you need to transfer data and normal methods either aren't available, or can't be used (ie. sending messages via a deck of cards).
Using lamps might seem a little McGuyverish, but it certainly has it's uses.
_f
IP over electrical lamps is boring.
No, really. Just today the IESG has approved for publication a new Informational RFC: MPLampS: Electricity over IP (with an MPLS control plane).
From the document:
-- Stanislav Shalunov
But it's still cool.
John
John
This was shown on an episode of "Beyond 2000" years ago, where it was used in a supermarket to change prices on little LCD pricetags on the shelves. If it got hot outside, while a few keystrokes, a grocery manager in the back could up the price of soda $.10 or whatever. And all of this was done by manipulating the fluctuation of frequency of the fluorescents in the building. Pretty cool.
thelocust[dot]org
I would fully support any effort by the RIAA to eliminate fluorescent lights to prevent file-sharing. It would save me the effort of looking for a ladder to remove the tubes from my office ceiling.
air and light and time and space
1/120 second is just a bit over 8 milliseconds. "Speed[ing] up the flicker rate to milliseconds" just doesn't seem like a huge breakthrough, somehow...
--
When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a skull.
Kid? Are you still online? Don't lie! I can see the light's still on!
You just program the ballast and replace the old one with it. From then on this light continuously broadcasts its short data sequence, over and over again. No network attached, no power supply, no batteries. Just a slightly more expensive electronic ballast.
The idea is to "tag" areas and have receivers which can use the location information to give advice to the handicapped (like "you're supposed to be in the kitchen and you're not"). The technology could be used to distribute more data, but for this application it's just used as "low-res indoor GPS".
It's data encoding/hiding of the neatest sort :)
It's fundamentally different than IR; imagine, for example, if street lamps using this technology had localization data encoded into them?
Of course this would only register at night, but imagine if you your car could tell what streets you were approaching? Consideing how difficult it is to read street signs at night? Or if the lamps had more intelligence, if the lamps could relay traffic conditions to the cars below? Accidents, etc?
Or if this were hooked up to traffic lights?
Geek dating!
GPL Deconstructed
-- .sig are belong to us!
All your
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Gee, and I though they were already being used by Space Aliens to broadcast voices into my head.
Guess now I'll be stuck with..
"our plans for world domination zzzz any users out there got p3rn zzzz me too zzzz jello and mayonnaise."
Oh well, there's always aspirin.
Beware typoes.
Also I have seen an example of something similar involving analog info via light. My physics teacher rigged a LED to a variable resistor attached to a radio. A solar panel picked up the LED's invisibly varying light and played it on a speaker. Not as useful as straight-up RF but it was pretty cool at the time.
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--hongpong.com
This isn't very practical, all of his scenarios could more easily and reliably handled with any type of transmitor. Why use a bulb? Nifty? Yes. Useful? No.
This is great, now hookers in the red light district will have a better uptime than I.
Strippers and Uptime. heh
My company just bought 60 high dollar cubicles for a new customer support office we just built. Each and every one of those cubes has built in data/phone/electric, which kinda negates the idea I'm about to espouse, but each and every one of them also has a 3' flourescent lamp and accompanying ballast.
I've 'retrofitted' my signifcantly older cube with a $10 flourescent tube. I'm certain it wouldn't be that difficult to replace the ballast with one of those mentioned in the article.
Can anyone say 'Lan Party'?
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
Not necessarily. You just need intelligent omni-directional receivers.
For example, I have a network of 5 lights, each with a flourescent tube and 360degree receiver. Each tube broadcasts a packet on a tokenring like schedule. One part of the packet is instructions for passing the token, the next part of the packet is data. Wash, rinse, repeat, around the ring.
While the article talked about broadcast applications, this style of communication would be ideal for small general purpose lans.
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
Modern electronic flourescent ballasts operate in the low kHz range already. In fact, the article even mentions that the older magnetic ballasts technically do flicker at 120Hz, since the current is alternating and they are lit during the + and - and dimmed during the zero crossing. At any rate, if you're seriously bothered by flicker, get new fixtures with electronic ballasts. They'll save even more energy, too.
Hey kids, there's only 5 days left 'til Yak Shaving Day!
Just FYI... the urban legends web site seems to say that this never really happened.. at least not in great quanitities.... http://www.snopes2.com/radiotv/tv/seizure.htm
You crazy man? You piss off supahfly!
Instead of paper pricetags on the front of the shelves, each item had a small, solar-powered (plus battery backup) LCD pricetag. The tags each had a unique ID, and a receiver on the top. Price updates could be propogated through the flourescents, and the prices would automatically match what the item would scan for. They estimated the cost savings would pay for the system in less than a year.
Nope, no sig
Somehow I don't see airports or hospitals installing special flourescent lamp networks when they could just throw together a simple radio or infrared system.
The point of the system, as outlined in the article, is that it's cheaper, and easier to retrofit to a building than bluetooth (or some other wireless system.) For "incrementally more" than the 20 dollar cost per lamp of upgrading to nonflicker regulators, the network can be installed. Infrared isn't terribly efficient, because it's fairly focused line of site, slow, and expensive. Overall, this sounds like a VERY good option for retrofitting older facilities with networks. The only drawback is that they're one way...
My Karma is so good, I'm the Dalai Lama...or something.
Great, but could these micro-bursts of light send someone into an epileptic fit, like those Japanese cartoons used to do?
"What are we going to do tonight, Bill?"
www.lucernesys.comHorizon: Calendar-based personal finance
Wireless applications already exist, that wouldn't be crippled by line-of-light problems. If someone really wanted to provide the disabled a service, they shouldn't make it depend on having the recieving device exposed, or pointed at a light source...
Great... now when my company gets around to installing the microchip in the back of my neck, they'll be able to use the lighting to track how much time I spend in the can...
Well, I hate to point out the obvious, but there's almost no infraestructure in place. You still have to carry the data there. There is, IMHO, absolutely nothing that you can do with this idea, that you could not do better with a little infrared coded light source. I mean, what's the point? You save nothing, you have still to lie the cabling and the data infraestructure.
Only in the case of locating devices, like in an airport, could be argued that no data is neccesary, and the info could be hard coded in the emitting bulbs. But even there the savings are not too big, and are outweighted by the problems of maintenance that you find when using a device for two completely unrelated functions. Another type of locating device could be arguably better.
The technology to help handicapped persons to find their way around is here from a long time. The only thing needed is a common standard and a clear will, or rather the other way around. No amount of new gadgetry is going to change that basics needs.
--
Rome taught me patience and assiduous application to detail. Virtues which temper the boldness of great, general views.
Why not use infrared? When you've already got many times the emitter power in the ceiling for room lighting, a separate IR emitter system looks like a waste of money (and electricity).
--
Scientists restrict study to entire physical universe; creationist
- You get a lot of transmitter power (several WATTS per tube), and you already owned the transmitters.
- You can arrange them in itty-bitty "cells"; each lamp can be transmitting something different, such as location codes. The limited range gives you better resolution.
- For applications like translations or transcriptions, you don't need two-way service; it's overkill.
- A receiver that can pick the signal out of the fluorescent emissions can be ultra-low power (the multi-watt transmitter does the work) and dirt cheap.
Maybe Tommy B. needs to exercise the parts of his brain that are still working, and that exercise is part of his recovery program. Reminding him that he's supposed to be someplace soon and telling him how to get there gives him more exercise than a chaperone. If he goes out of the rehab unit, you can always have an el-cheapo car-alarm transmitter alert the staff to go pick him up (runs on two button cells and costs a few bucks, already has the spectrum allocated by the FCC).And who cares if it's not a commercial success? It's fun and thought-provoking.
--
Scientists restrict study to entire physical universe; creationist
Now the lights are talking! I can see the music, man. . .
I think I'll stop here.
Here in brazil it's obrigatory to keep prices updated in the shelves in the supermakets. We have two choices, or we keep it updated, or we come back to ye-old-price-label on each product.
Of course supermarkets won't come back to price-labels. So, they tryied many different solutions. One of the solution is use fluorescent lamp flicker to send data to digital price-informers in the shelves.
I have never seen any kind of thing like this working before. But it's really a nice idea.
Imagine, you pick the product from the shelf thinking that it costs $1.00, and by the time you pay it, it's $1.20!!!
Don't worry, I'm to bored [to|every]day
-=-=-=-=
I know life isn't fair, but why can't it ever be un-fair in MY favor!?
The vibration of a string, long a symbol associated with guitars, violins, and other stringed instruments, may give new freedom to the handicapped, thanks to a low-tech startup that sees the strings as the perfect transmitters.
Talking Strings, a Cambridge-based MIT spinoff, is developing a local area network that uses fluctuations in thin strands of thread to transmit data. Inventor, company founder and MIT professor Steven Dweeb predicts the technology will be a boon for the disabled.
For example, he says, shoe strings could direct a blind person carrying a special receiver-worn as a badge or held like a PDA-to the correct gate. Thick metal "round wound" bass strings attached to a person's eardrum could broadcast enhanced audio to the hearing disabled, or transcriptions to the deaf. And research published this month suggests that the technology could greatly improve the rehabilitation of persons with traumatic brain injury.
Hallelujah
In his MIT laboratory, Dweeb recently demonstrated his invention. First, he pulled out a 2 foot strand of waxed mint dental floss. "See?" he asked. "A normal piece of floss. You probably have some in your bathroom."
Next, he picked up his receiver--a black coffee can with a small hole poked in the end. From a few feet away, he tightened the string and plucked it. Twangy music blared from the can. Tinny, but clear, came the familiar chorus from Handel's Messiah.
--
But Mom, I can only do this work at night - no, I'm not doing an caffeine-fueled all-nighter for the hell of it - DON'T TURN THAT LIGHT OFF I'M IN THE MIDDLE OF A SAVNo route to host - connection closed.
Still fun as an idea, though =)
43rd Law of Computing:
...It would be easy to have a master computer doing everything. Even alerting emergency prodedures to individuals.
.NET? =)
What, you mean like
Now they no longer only know what you're buying, but exactly where you are, to the nearest light-fitting...
43rd Law of Computing: