Slashdot Mirror
The NoCat Wireless Access Point/Night Light
cascadefx writes "O'Reilly's Hacks page has a really great article about a wireless access point that was on display at the recent Emerging Technology Conference. The folks at NoCat.net rigged up a Siemens Speedstream series access point with a low power ultraviolet light to create a wireless lightbulb. Just screw it in place and combine powerline ethernet with a wireless network... and a light, to create a wireless lightbulb. Ubiquitous networking, here we come."
Ricochet nodes are very similar, except that they plug into street light photocell connectors.
I don't think powerline will take off. Here's why.
1)Price. I can get a wireless network of comperable or better speed cheaper. The powerline adapters are $80 and only do 14Mbps.
2)Late to market. Although they were promissed for years they just recently got good speeds (>1Mbps). I own an older home, I was considering this tech as an alternative to pulling wire( a huge pain in my house). But, 802.11b got to a resonable price to performance ratio first.
The only advantage I see to powerline is covering long distances in large buildings with no existing networking cabling. Does anyone else see a reason this tech would take off?
would be to design a 802.11 repeater. A Accesspoint that simply relay's all traffic it recieves to the other accesspoint and the same in reverse.. this would make setting the whole thing up easier. 1 accesspoint and then 4 repeaters spread out around the first makes a nice coverage map for a large area.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
You should check out Tesla's work. He was broadcasting electricity ages ago. You can build the same getup at home for a few hundred bucks and chemo treatments from the cancer which will most likely ensue.
I saw a news story in Time or Newsweek back in 93 or 94 that showed a guy standing beneath some high voltage lines holding a lightbulb. The bulb was glowing. It was a story on the perceived harms that allegedly resulted from EMFs near high-voltage lines.
A girlfriend of mine (an engineer) from college subsequently did an interesting project in combination with a science writing/journalism class that looked at the public's perception of dangers resulting from EMFs (aside from the obvious) compared to the actual risks disclosed in the medical literature of the time. The disparity between the proven risks and the perceived risks among those surveyed (even those from an engineering college of a major university) was stunning.
In any case, I often wondered if the photo from Time or Newsweek was faked. Even today, I still can't get the idea through my head that significant exposure to EMFs can be anything but bad for you. I'm pretty sure it isn't good for you, but I can't really say why I think that other than ignorant fear of something so powerful.
FWIW, it seems that broadcasting electric would be incredibly wasteful under almost all circumstances, though. Besides, anytime I see references to Tesla, I start to think that black helicopters and aliens can't be far behind. Not a fair bias, perhaps, but it is nevertheless one from which I suffer.
Lots of petrified grits
Why not wire it like your car stereo? When you shut your car off, power still goes to the stereo via a separate feed, so you don't lose your preset stations.
You could have a constant power line going to the network guts of the enclosure, while the power controlled by the on/off switch was wired to the light side of things. Hit the switch and the light turns off, but the network keeps on chugging.
Granted, it would require you to do some rewiring of your existing light infrastructure, but half the fun is getting there!
I live very close to the really big, high tension power lines. I don't fear them at all, but someone told me one day about holding a flourescent light up under them at night and watch it light up. I thought, yeah right! So one night, I went out with a big long tube light, and sure as hell, it lit up. It was so blowing my mind. It doesn't light up really bright, but it lights up none the less. I haven't tried it with an incandescent bulb, but I don't think they are supposed to work.
There's going to be heat pollution either way, but I have a feeling there'd be less with a mirror. Plus, the collector device on Earth could be upgraded as technologies improve.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"