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."

Comments

Trust issues

[psydeshow]

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.

Re:Brake Lights

[hey]

Could be used to communicate the rate at which the brake pedal is pressed.

Stupid summary

[hcdejong]

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).

Here's a thought...

[cjhanson]

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.

Re:Oh, so YOU're the guy ...

[Bishop Rook]

As funny as that observation always is, consider that:

• Walk-up ATMs and drive-up ATMs frequently use the same interface and same keypad, so it's just cheaper to make them all Braille
• It's not just the person in the driver's seat who can use a drive-through ATM. Somebody sitting in the driver's-side rear seat can use it just as well

There are often reasons for silly things...

Re:IRDA Anyone?

[argent]

There are certainly things you can do with bluetooth that you can't do with IRDA. I wouldn't want an IRDA headset, and I wouldn't use it over a distance, but BT gets used for all kinds of things that USB (yes, real wires) Wifi, and IRDA are better for.

Printers? Stick them on a network, don't wire them to a computer. If you want wireless access to a printer, use Wifi and Zeroconf/Rendezvous/Bonjour.

Headsets? Perfect application for Bluetooth.

Sharing files, PDA to PDA? You *want* short range and directionality. IR is ideal.

Mice and keyboards? Been there, done that, got the dead batteries and incomplete mess

Re:Brake Lights

[MightyYar]

The problem for me is if I rolled up on a random car and the brake light came on, I would have no idea whether it was on full brightness or some dimmed level. I'd have no choice but to act as if they had just stomped on the brake... same as today.

You could change the number of lights that come on instead of brightness. This might work if the light size and number of lights were standardized, but even then you wouldn't really know what the breaking characteristics of that particular car were. You could mitigate THAT by tying it to an accelerometer instead of the brake pressure.

But then you'd still have to do studies to see which way was safer :)

Re:Brake Lights

[kesuki]

should have RTFA, this is about using LEDS over ambient lighting, to broadcast data via power lines, to every light in the room, which is then received by every data device.

weird, but a quite a bit different from IrDa for one, it's using visible light. i can't think of any real reason to be broadcasting large amounts of data to multiple devices in a single room for consumer markets, but for instance a usb dongle on a laptop, and everyone in a lecture hall could receive all the notes from the class all at once, while listening to the lecture.