Philips Hue Company Announces Lights That Beam Data At 250 Mbps (theverge.com) 41
"Signify, the company formerly known as Philips Lighting that produces Hue-branded smart lights, has announced a new range of internet-transmitting Li-Fi lights called Truelifi," reports The Verge. The lights are capable of transmitting data to devices at speeds of up to 150 Mbps using light waves, rather than the radio signals used by 4G or Wi-Fi. The technology, which can be retrofitted into existing lighting, "can also be used to wirelessly connect two fixed points with data speeds of up to 250 Mbps." From the report: Li-Fi technology has been around for years but so far it's failed to take off. Most internet-connected devices like laptops and smartphones need an external adapter to receive data over Li-Fi, and even then the signal can be blocked when the receiver is in shadow. Signify says you'll need to plug a USB access key into a laptop to receive a Li-Fi signal from its Truelifi products. In the right circumstances, however, Li-Fi's use of light rather than radio signals to transmit data has its advantages. For example, it can be used in areas where there might be a lot of radio frequency interference, or in places like hospitals where RF could interfere with sensitive machines. While Li-Fi signals can be easily blocked, this disadvantage can be a boon to security applications since you have a lot more control over where the network spreads.
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"Will posses your soul."
He got your spelling capacity already as we see.
Well, yeah, but s/he has a GREAT personality! (Score:2)
'nuff said.
Did they just stick an IR port onto a lightbulb? (Score:2)
Re:Did they just stick an IR port onto a lightbulb (Score:5, Insightful)
Tossing Ethernet over Power into it too would solve that, but I bet they have their own "smart" something-or-other they want to sell instead of supporting an industry standard.
But what's the upload rate? (Score:5, Interesting)
If it's unidirectional then you still need a wifi. And you're back to Radio waves. And their spread. It seems like it might be hard to send signals to the light bulb when it's emitting a lot of light. And if they need to go to blanking intervals then that puts some hard constraints of the LEDs to fully turn off at the right time. THat might be fine. Some LEDs prefer pulse drivers anyhow but it's a constraint that might affect how one does the power. Do all the bulbs near each other need to blank at the same moment?
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perhaps. 240nm seems like a bad choice: UV not good from a materials stand point. The emitter on the computer might not have the same power as the emitter on the bulb. To the extent that it's not really a white light source then there might be some available spectral bands but a lot of bulbs are broad band emitters so a strong background. Spectral filtering is possible but remember this has to receive from every possible angle which is harder to do in using narrow band filters.
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Last I checked light sockets don't include ethernet.
Actually, a lot of new building lighting (and despite the really misleading headline, this is a commercial product, not a Hue product and not a consumer product) actually is being networked for lighting control systems. Signify, Lutron, Siemens, and Honeywell are all big players in that market.
Seems like a bad candidate for an add-on... (Score:3)
Unless I've missed one, currently 0 client devices come with this built in. People don't like dongles much; and the fact that a dongle is confined to a fairly small footprint is more of an issue when dealing with fairly strict line of sight. RF dongles have few friends; but they don't just stop working if you put your wrist or a few pieces of paper on top of them.
If integrated this will still presumably have nastier cut-outs than RF; but it's much more plausible to build light-gathering structures large enough that they won't be accidentally shaded all the time into something like a laptop(lightpipe of some sort on a lip of the lid/multiple receiver points spaced around the device/potentially even use the screen's backlight optics if the backlight LEDs can be filtered out) without being obtrusive.
As for the security and the point-to-point functions; those will be a hard sell: anyone betting their security on their wifi being short range is nuts; and light bleeds well enough that if the secured wifi options aren't good enough for you you should really be considering hardwiring. The point-to-point potential seems painfully slow if you want to use it for meshing your lights together so that most of them don't need data connections to their sockets; and if you need wired runs to all your light fixtures anyway you end up doing more pulls than you'd need for wifi APs in exchance for less speed. Not useless; but it will be a rather niche case where they don't decide to either save on wiring by using fewer APs or markedly improve reliability and speed by making some of the wire or fiber pulls between points you want to connect and getting a nice solid physical link.
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PoE is making inroads to lighting and pretty much all office electrical/SCADA needs. This just seems like a natural extension of that.
https://www.cablinginstall.com... [cablinginstall.com]
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build light-gathering structures large enough that they won't be accidentally shaded all the time
Or you could jury-rig a fiberoptic cable, connect one end to the dongle, and the other end to the lightbulb. No more occlusion problems. It's the ultimate in wireless technology!
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These are light bulbs, so "line of sight" is basically anywhere within their sphere of illumination. A little dongle that barely sticks out of the port should be adequate.
It's actually a fairly old technique, just improved to the point where it can handle 250Mb/sec. Take a high speed, high sensitivity photodiode and record a bitstream of high frequency low magnitude fluctuations in light level. Actual data rate will be considerably lower than 250Mb due to encoding and error correction overhead, similar to w
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that they won't be accidentally shaded all the time
What I've read about this technology in the past, diffuse and even multiple reflections work as well, 'though maybe not at the same throughput. It's very hard to find a 'hard' shadow in the office, unless it's inside a drawer, closed box or 'where the sun won't shine' ;)
Also, it's mesh-capable, so if one light may not 'reach', another will. If you use such a system for all overhead office lighting, you won't have connection problems due to the signal being obscured, unless you go out of your way to
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Old Concept (Score:3)
Old school spies used to feed audio into a lightbulb that would modulate light output ( imperceptible to the human eye ) as a bugging device.
Simply point a decent optic at the light source, demodulate and presto. . . surveillance device.
Line of sight being an obvious requirement of course.
The newer models are obviously doing this at a higher data rate, but the concept is an old one.
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Except I believe Li-Fi works on the IR band. IR has a nice property - glass is not IR transparent. This is why IR cameras can b
TEMPEST (Score:2)
I suspect the bulbs still radiate some RF leakage when generating the light pulses. Still, malicious association should be limited and data leakage minimized if everything is set up to encrypt securely.
MIght not win, but worth trying. (Score:2)
There is nothing new about modulating data on light, but like any technology that has both merit and problems, it is always fun to see the next iteration that is about to come about. Who knows, sooner or later somebody might get the secret sauce just right. It reminds me mostly of power line communications. That too has been around a long time, and every now and then the modest industry takes a new stab at making it more useful for home users. It has a market and manufacturers, not a trivial industry it
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Well, for companies that wants to protect its data or disconnect from the web maybe someone could invent a way of doing it with wires. They can go around corners and still not be picked up by someone outside the window, these theoretical wires would only connect to the specific device you plugged them into. If you used small gauge conductors you could put enough of them in the cable to allow multiple channels to be used in a sort of parallel multiplexing, and using multiple voltage levels you could increa
Pynchon called it (Score:2)
Byron the Bulb is a little jealous, though.
Will the bulb need to be turned on? (Score:2)
A light bulb that transfers data by modulating its output. Good idea...
But will it work if the light is off? You don't always want to turn on the lights. Maybe you are using a projector, maybe someone is trying to sleep in the same room, maybe you don't want to turn on the lights because there is already plenty of sunlight, etc...