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Chinese Professor Builds Li-Fi System With Retail Parts
alphadogg writes "The equipment is big and expensive, with the research costs at almost $500,000. But by just using retail components, Chinese professor Chi Nan has built her own Li-Fi wireless system that can use LED lights to send and receive Internet data. "I bought the lights from Taobao," she said, referring to the Chinese e-commerce site. The professor from Fudan University showed off the technology on Tuesday at the China International Industry Fair in Shanghai. Unlike traditional Wi-Fi routers that use radio signals, Chi's system relies on light to send and receive data wirelessly. Others scientists, especially in the U.K., have also been researching the technology, and dubbed it "Li-Fi". But rather than develop specialized hardware, Chi bought off-the-shelf retail parts to create her system."
Can someone tell me what all the fuss about "LiFi" is? We've had free space optical networking for decades. It's not new and it's not a good general networking solution, especially for household use, which the LiFi buzz seems to be implying.
I just don't see a broad use case for this and I don't understand why it is getting so much press. Will they, next week, "discover" that they can make it work in the dark by using infrared TV remote controls?
P.S. As someone who is jumping through hoops and going to great lengths to eliminate flicker in household LED bulbs, the thought of intentionally flickering the light, even at high frequencies, does not sit well with me.
News just in: IrDA wants its acronym back. On a more serious note, I really did like IrDA. It was slow as crap and the range sucked, but at one point in time, pretty much EVERYTHING had IrDA support. Laptops, cell phones, PDAs, HPCs, etc. You could buy serial dongles to add to any PC for $5 or so. It was the go-to fallback to transfer a file or data between two devices that had disparate storage card types (PC-Card vs CF cards, etc), or you didn't have cables to connect them up directly. Bluetooth has sort of replaced it, but you can't just bit-bang communication with a bluetooth device using a microcontroller and two 25 cent components. Plus Bluetooth has been implemented by OEMs as more of a method to connect dumb peripherals than a method of communicating directly between devices.
Better known as 318230.
Chinese Professor Builds Li-Fi System With Retail Parts...
...which isn't as good as pro kit.
The equipment is big and expensive, with the research costs at almost $500,000.
Research costs don't tell you anything about the cost of "the equipment," whatever that refers to. A modern mobile phone might set you back $200, but you could easily make the research costs total several billion dollars depending how far you want to go back. If someone comes along with a couple of tin cans and a piece of string, I don't really see how that's automatically newsworthy.
But by just using retail components, Chinese professor Chi Nan has built her own Li-Fi wireless system that can use LED lights to send and receive Internet data.
There are plenty of things I can do with retail components that wouldn't be possible without prior billions being spent on research. That doesn't make me the King of Awesome (I am, but it's entirely unrelated).
FWIW, Chi's system works over about 3m, the hardware is large and heavy, and it achieves a speed of about 150mbps.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.