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Boston University Working On LED Wireless Networks
Madas writes "This article on Absolute Gadget details how researchers at Boston University's College of Engineering are working on devloping wireless networks that use LED lights instead of normal radio waves. This research apparently has other uses in the automobile industry. Apparently the LEDs could warn you if the driver in front has put the brakes on so could avoid hitting the car in front. Personally, I'd use the vision balls that are in my thought box."
Apparently the LEDs could warn you if the driver in front has put the brakes on so could avoid hitting the car in front
Dude aren't those called brake lights?
--
Oh Well, Bad Karma and all . . .
Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.
Wasn't there just a story about this on Slashdot two days ago?
Anyone else remember the exciting world of IRDA? How is this really going to be that much different (or better)?
"Personally, I'd use the vision balls that are in my thought box."
I'm Stevie Wonder, you insensitive clod.
> Personally, I'd use the vision balls that are in my thought box."
Personally, I think the zipper gets in the way.
To remind those idiots who tail less than a car length at 70MPH how close they are to death.
"I'd use the vision balls that are in my thought box."
Uhh.. eyeballs are merely the extension of the brain, they in a sense ARE your thought box, just another aspect of your mind.
How is this any different than Infrared networking? I mean, aside from the potential for using your Christmas tree decorations as a WAP?
Light should be less susceptible for jam and interference.
But on the other hand, it would expose your position. (And they also have night goggle for IR light)
...something flies over the sensor (or worse yet lands on it) blocking reception of the data
...multple 'databulbs' in one room get out of sync, causing confusion in the device
They also brought un security in TFA
Since this white light does not penetrate opaque surfaces such as walls, there is a higher level of security, as eavesdropping is not possible.
I guess eavesdropping is technically not possible since you can't normally listen to light. But someone recording the ultra-fast flickering at a window certainly isn't. So either these systems meant to replace the existing lights in your home operate as top down spotlights (completely horrible lighting solution throughout a home), or you tinfoil all your windows (take THAT big brother). Certainly reliable. Certainly secure.
-=Bang Bang=-
But the question is, do you REALLY trust the car in front of you? What if it just randomly transmits a "braking now!" message in order to cause other cars in the vicinity to put on their brakes?
It would be cool to see what you could do with this to improve traffic flow and autopilot in a controlled environment, but out in the real world the trust issues get pretty dodgy.
They should make the LED's look like characters from Aqua Teen Hunger Force!
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
This is amazing. Maybe they can put this technology in a small box that I can point at my TV so I don't have to get off the couch to change channels. Maybe they can use IR LEDs to reduce interference from ambient light which is mostly in the visible spectrum.
Better known as 318230.
Okay I get it and I get the picture. But it looks like the ceiling lights are communicating with the computers, what about the computers communicating back? We would need bright LED lights on all our gadgets blinking all the time. Are these going to be focused? This sounds annoying.
"Balls" and "box" are terms that get me in trouble. Kind of like the circular queue discussions where the pointers where named "head" and "tail."
Why, without your clothes, you're naked, Miss Dudley!
FTFA:
Not true, as mentioned in this old Slashdot article. Light emissions, even when they are not modulated, may transmit information that can be used by your enemies, for instance in wartime
But I believe your suggestion of tinfoiling windows is good. Just use the same foil you have on your walls (you *do* use tinfoil for wallpaper, don't you?)
Cars communicating with each other is a good idea, and being worked on. Signalling that a car is braking is one obvious use, despite the stupid comment in TFS. Having the car react automatically to the car in front saves the 1+ second reaction time of the human driver, making you less likely to rearend someone. The only drawback is that you're relying on external inputs. This system won't stop for a pedestrian, or an older car (which doesn't broadcast its intentions in a machine-readable way), for instance. Radar seems a better bet for this particular application.
But there are more uses for a network between cars. Relaying congestion data is one, you could synchronize cars so they run at the same speed instead of harmonica-ing all the time (prevents traffic jams), etc.
Using LED signalling instead of radio might be a good way to avoid the problems with RF (interference, limited number of channels available).
I've had the idea for a long time that the brake light system should be an LED array, which would get progressively brighter, or fill more area, or by rapid blinking, indicate the rate at which the driver is attempting to decelerate. An inch of light indicates "I'm slowing a little" and 6 inches of light indicates "I'm stopping now".
Go ahead and patent this, Microsoft.
LED by example. Get it? Okay I'll stop.
This is a perfectly reasonable concept. It would be awesome if my car knew a few things about the car in front of it. If it was connected to it via an LED wireless network, then it could tell a few things about the next car, and the next, and the next. This would mean that minimum following distance was no longer constrained by human reaction speed, instead being limited more by the actual deceleration capabilities of the vehicle itself. A blowout in heavy traffic would no longer result in nine car pileups.
You could tell your car to maintain safe following speed, while you just concentrate on keeping yourself in the lane. That would TOTALLY blow away existing cruise control, and could theoretically be programmed to eliminate stop-and-go traffic entirely. If this were implemented across all cars, it would save hundreds of thousands of gallons of gas on a daily basis.
Wake up - the future is arriving faster than you think.
...someone turns on another light source overpowering the LEDs ...something flies over the sensor (or worse yet lands on it) blocking reception of the data ...multple 'databulbs' in one room get out of sync, causing confusion in the device
Or when you're hospitalized due to the blinking lights causing a seizure.
Give a man a fire and he'll be warm for a day. But light a man on fire and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.
Put two white leds in the rear bumper and a wiimote between the headlights of each car.
vision balls that are in my thought box.
Above line stolen shamelessly from Jon Stewart, referring to his take on CNN's "perception analyzer" graph in the Presidential/VP Debates.
:D
Not that I disapprove, or anything.
>> Standing on head makes smile of frown, but rest of face also upside down.
Apparently, the summary author apparently likes to use certain words apparently a little too much. Apparently.
What are "normal radio waves"? Are there "abnormal radio waves"?
The summary author apparently sucks.
I'm studying electronics now and my professor was telling me about this. It is actually really interesting how it would work because slight changes in voltage across a diode lead to big current swings and since you current drive leds you just need a very low drive to do this. As for security sure there has to be line of sight but then the person hacking you needs to be in the same room. just constrains the distance not really anything else.
with the braille instrument cluster.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Perhaps this will finally be the down fall of Quantas
They aren't wasting their time if they are getting closer to having a fast reaction from the receptors. Yes, it is primarily line of sight (unless strong enough to light up a room), but could get to fiber optic speeds. It's really the same thing but without the fiber. They will just have to think about different wave lengths to separate signals and allow multiple channels.
jsut athnoer menagiensls ltitle psrhae for you to dcoede. Why do we wtsae our tmie dnoig tihs?
someone turns on another light source overpowering the LEDs
Light is just another frequency of electromagnetic radiation.
When I went to SIU in the late '70s, I had a very good Kenwood FM reciever. There was a ten watt college station operating near Forest Park in St Louis, 30 miles away. I could listen to that station, and did.
That was like seeing a ten watt night light in a sea of fifty thousand watt searchlights, and that was with technology available over 30 years ago! Your fears are unfounded.
something flies over the sensor (or worse yet lands on it) blocking reception of the data
Redundancy solves this problem.
multple 'databulbs' in one room get out of sync, causing confusion in the device
Try an experiment - push the buttons on your TV remote at the same time as your VCR or DVD remote. You'll see that it is not a problem at all.
But someone recording the ultra-fast flickering at a window certainly isn't
You can eavesdrop like that now, from the flicker and EMF of your monitor.
Free Martian Whores!
Could you develop a device to "listen" to the small changes in electrical power to decode the data going back and forth?
If all cars were networked in this fashion, you could be alerted when a car TEN cars ahead suddenly jams on the brakes. That could be pretty cool.
Erm, they should take a look at this:
http://ronja.twibright.com/
instead of re-researching it from scratch.
And the project is opensource.
Woyteck
An interesting idea, stupid article, and even worse Slashdot summary. For those who couldn't read all 5 paragraphs of the article, the idea is that LEDs can be rapidly modulated, basically acting like an IR remote, only in the visible spectrum. And they can modulate so fast that it's imperceptible to the eye (AKA "vision ball")
The brake light idea that the summary innaccurately mocks would actually allow the brakes in your car to be activated when your car "sees" the brake lights on the car in front of you activate. While this is a phenomenally stupid idea, it is different from what the summary indicates. I don't know why that bothers me, should be used to that by now.
The article also states that this technology would allow devices in your home (assuming they're equipped with LEDs) to wirelessly communicate directly with you, but doesn't say how. Morse code, perhaps?
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
"LED lights also consume far less energy than RF technology, offering the opportunity to build a communication network without added energy costs and reducing carbon emissions over the long term."
I'm not expert but short range RF power is WAY below LED lights.
Can someone fact check this?
Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Albert Einstein
For those of you unsatisfied with IP Datagrams on Avian Carriers (RFC 1149), we now have IP Datagrams on Aldis Lamp!
Anyone else remember the exciting world of IRDA?
Not only that, I remember Arcnet.
Very early on in computing there was Datapoint's Arcnet. It was a token ring network that tied their early desktop machines (the SSL IC machines whose instruction set spawned the 8008) and their associated fileservers.
Options for interconnection included:
- copper cabling
- "Arclight" building-to-building infrared links. (They had separate transmitting and receiving lenses maybe a foot across each and were good for miles if it wasn't foggy or raining. If it was foggy or raining the net partitioned and rejoined automagically as the blockage moved around.)
- room-filling infrared (with repeaters about the size of smoke detectors or smaller for penetrating walls).
Nothing new here - unless you count that somebody's going to do it yet again.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
So I could turn these LEDs on and force the car behind me to brake? That would be great for tailgaters.
Imagine the possibilities of this technology: If we used infrared light we wouldn't have to be annoyed with light shining in our eyes, then we could implement them into devices to send signals to our TVs and radios so we don't have to get up to adjust the volume! Maybe even synchronize our PDAs and phones to our computers! DIBS!
Some cars have that. The brake light in the rear window will flash in patterns. The harder the press, the more lit bulbs vs dim bulbs in the pattern-- but when I was driving behind one of these cars for the first time, not knowing what it was, I thought it was some crazy sort of hazard light. I couldn't tell what the flashing meant at all. There would have to be some sort of standardization or public service announcement or people just won't understand what the hell is wrong with the car in front of them in the -5% of cases where cars would have this system incorporated.
I am the richest astronaut ever to win the superbowl.
You know, some people who use computers (and wireless networks) a lot like the DARK. FYI.
Put these on a plane with a broadband connection and you could wirelessly network without causing the plane to crash!
I knew I had seen an led-based point-to-point networking system described somewhere, and after a few minutes on hackaday, here it is, straight from 2005. Best part is, the linked to Ronja project is open, free speech-wise (and free beer for the major league scrounger).
Luke, help me take this mask off
There's a pretty good reason why wireless technology exploded from radio signals, and not from line-of-sight (e.g. infrared) transmission. Yes, RF broadcasting broadens the possibility of eavesdropping. Yes, it consumes considerable power. It is also not very prone to interference, whereas a light-based transmission can be interrupted by almost anything - such as bright ambience, or standing in the way. The idea of a network held together by strings of light is basically just making the wires invisible.
If you're concerned about power usage and security, try plugging in a cable.
At the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, in the Student Union on the main campus (not East Campus), there is still a bank of pay telephones under one of which is a large metal box with a single LED on it, still there even after the remodel since I was a student there. One day between classes I observed someone using that particular pay phone and seeing the LED on that box alternately flickering in concert with the person's lips, then again presumably in sync with the sound coming from the other end of that call. I've long thought that if I converted that brightness pattern back to sound, I could listen to both ends of the conversation at a distance.
And I also wondered what the purpose of that box truly was.
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
George Bush wet dream.
Mandatory encoding of the cars VIN & speed into modulation of the cars parking led lights.
Makes that big brother tracking just one step easier.
46137
I recall that 802.11 contains a part that specifies using infrared for 1 and 2Mbit/s multipoint operation. Apparently since its inception in 1997. Getting a bit more bandwidth out of it would be nice though. And, uh, more implementations.
The article was slashdotted, so I couldn't RTFA. Google turned up the Boston U project, where it seems they're looking to do something a bit more advanced that mere p2p networking.
Luke, help me take this mask off
It could be a real bummer on a foggy day :-)
Inevitably there will be a backlash to this technology, similar to what occurred in response to Compact Digital Audio discs. It will be spearheaded not by audiophiles but by photophiles, who will insist that persistence of vision is a myth and that any strobing effect, even measured in millionths of a second, is dangerous and will cause mental illness or cancer.
Mark my words....
Volvo discovered that the vast number of rearenders were caused by "distracted" drivers. So they've added laser rangefinders to detect cars IN FRONT OF YOU. Thus, you can pay _even_less_ attention to the road.
Shame that small children probably won't be detected effectively. Neither bicyclists nor full sized pedestrians, most likely.
This is the sort of thing Ralph Nader should have had banned long ago
-- Butlerian Jihad NOW!
Vision balls and thought boxes are ideas the daily show is made of.
Personally, I'd use the vision balls that are in my thought box.
.000000000001% chance situation where you aren't paying attention, back into a pylon, and crack your tail light. Not the worst thing, but an expense nonetheless - vs. some LEDs? Not bad, of course, the rest of the hardware...
Of course, because thats why those lights are there, so that your car can hopefully help in that
I dunno, didn't RTFA. My vision balls are dry and red.
..is obviously to have lights that flash very rapidly when the brakes are on and the ABS has triggered. This is in fact the way some cars already work such as (I think) some BMWs. The new Fiat 500 does it slightly differently and flashes the indicators when the ESP is triggered and the car is starting to slip - which is quite fun to watch on a track.
I'd just like to point out that there are several successful wireless input devices.
"Tui stadia mutandis", as they say in Armorica. I expect computers to be able to adapt to what I want to do with them, that's the whole point of having a general purpose computer instead of a gaming console. Saving a couple of cables on my desk isn't worth the hassle of keeping track of even more accessories.
The whole "wireless desktop" thing seems like the kind of faddish style-over-substance nonsense normally associated with Macbook Air and Grey Poupon.
Long story short, if you have battery issues with your wireless input devices, you aren't spending enough money on them.
My Logitech diNovo set cost more than my CPU and motherboard combined. If that's not enough, I'll leave wireless keyboards and mice for the Grey Poupon crowd.
What college is working on Pringles Can Wireless?