Boston University Working On LED Wireless Networks 179
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."
IRDA Anyone? (Score:3, Insightful)
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)?
Trust issues (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:4, Insightful)
Could be used to communicate the rate at which the brake pedal is pressed.
Re:Trust issues (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Brake Lights (Score:2, Insightful)
Not to mention that such a feature (automatic braking based on the car in front of you) already exists. It uses radar, it just has to bounce a signal off the car in front of it. As it turns out, when a car starts braking, it starts to slow down, and that can be easily detected!
In fact, networking using LEDs also already exists: it's that IR port that no one uses any more because it sucks.
So congrats, Boston, you finally discovered LEDs and technology that has existed for what, two decades now?!
It does explain why MIT agreed that a student wearing a shirt with LEDs should be treated like a terrorist, though, no one in Boston knew about LEDs.
Re:Brake Lights (Score:2, Insightful)
Stupid summary (Score:4, Insightful)
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... (Score:3, Insightful)
Go ahead and patent this, Microsoft.
LED by example. Get it? Okay I'll stop.
Re:Brake Lights (Score:3, Insightful)
I can think of two reasons:
1. A pressure sensor like that would be more complex and prone to error - probably require some kind of calibration.
2. Psychologically, you probably don't want people ignoring faint brake lights. I can already hear people complaining about how, say, Toyota uses brighter brake lights than Chevy and so so-and-so got confused about how hard the person was pressing the brake. It would also be hard to interpret the lights in varying light levels.
Re:IRDA Anyone? (Score:3, Insightful)
No- it got killed because of reliability over any kind of a distance issues. You also had to always make sure the ports were clear of obstacles, which isn't very practical in an office or mobile environment. You could "kill" a network device (like a printer) with a post-it note.
I still remember (not-so-fondly) printing from my Palm device to an HP printer with IRDA. That was almost as agonizing as waiting for a 2400-baud modem to connect, and about as fast too. I also remember creating "ad-hoc" IRDA networks with laptops. Once again- the 2400-baud modem analogy kicks in.
It's certainly possible they can ramp-up the speed, and it may be slightly more reliable using visible light- but it's still light. It's a fantastic transmission medium when contained (as in fiber optics) but sucks in the open air. A shadow or well-placed mirror could completely frell your network. Beyond that, a well-placed mirror or two could relay your network traffic almost anywhere- so much for security.
Re:Oh, so YOU're the guy ... (Score:3, Insightful)
There are often reasons for silly things...
Re:IRDA Anyone? (Score:4, Insightful)
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
Big Bro (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Re:Brake Lights (Score:4, Insightful)
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:I want to drive too! (Score:2, Insightful)
doing a search on the interwebs of famous blind people, I recognized the names of 4 people on the list, Louis Braille, Helen Keller, Ray Charles and Stevie Wonder.
Who would you choose as an example of someone who is blind?
Re:Brake Lights (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Perfect! (Score:2, Insightful)
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.